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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

sciencemag.org

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#61

Post by youngbullind »

chris_wot wrote: post #59
leot wrote: post #18

Elsevier and others can go something themselves. Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap... It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy"…

Has anyone got a breakdown of actual costs incurred by Elsevier? Note I don't include marketing their journals, I mean a breakdown labour costs, rent for buildings (where the building are located) and other production costs. I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish. I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they…

Completely without source and no breakdown, but I read recently that their margins are in the 20-30% range.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#62

Post by mirimir »

gh02t wrote: post #24
eggy wrote: post #11

They may have started servicing a need in the beginning as simply setting up some servers, and serving as a central repository, which I do not understand why this wasn't just setup by some other part like a university or research foundation for public use, but Elsevier have turned that into holding publicly-funded research hostage. You know when you are debating with somebody, and their logic runs out, they start flo…

The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about p…

Yes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books, and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about profiteering.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#63

Post by chris_wot »

raverbashing wrote: post #46
userbinator wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source" distinction.

Oh this is a huge pet peeve of mine, it's unbelievable. Granted, a lot of work goes into these standards, and they don't come out of nowere, still

Who pays for the standards committees? I note that the IEEE has a charitable foundation with over $45 million in assets...

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#65

Post by mirimir »

jmcgough wrote: post #10

Researchers have been (illegally) helping each other out with paper access for years. I used to hang out in the neuroscience group on livejournal years ago, and about half the posts were people asking "Does anyone have access to Foo et al 2012?" and then having it passed along to them by email.

Many years ago, when there was lots more slack, we would request reprints by snail mail. Authors would typically get a few hundred free reprints, and either buy more or have them printed privately.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#66

Post by digler999 »

kriro wrote: post #42

I'm ideologically primed to favor free access to information (especially if any tax money was involved which is true for pretty much all research) but I think a middle ground of moving scientific publishing to a nextflix/itunes/kindle model would solve a lot of issues. Access a paper -> (micro) payment to the journal (who could in return set up another (micro) payment to the actual author). The biggest issue is the p…

> would solve a lot of issues

like making sure the 1% get their rent-seeking royalties. The cost of distributing information is 0. Whatever negligible cost to keep the servers running can come from the "technology fees" universities charge their students.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#67

Post by chris_wot »

sachkris wrote: post #43

The first three paragraphs of the article clearly tells what is wrong with the system - "Publishers are overcharging for content". Basically, they just continued their business model from the printed-book era to the e-book era without much change. The publishers should think of allowing individuals to subscribe to the content and charge them (nominally) for what they use, rather than putting the load on the Universit…

The median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year. Currently the exchange rate for USD to AHD is about 68.3 AHD to 1 USD. So basically, for one article it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of someone with s median income.

That's for one midrange article.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#68

Post by donlzx »

finfet1 wrote: post #49
leot wrote: post #18

Elsevier and others can go something themselves. Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits. See, e.g., one of many such figures: http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap... It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy"…

Totally agree. I have gone through academia and am now in industry; the other day I wanted to read and browse basic papers in IEEE Explore for basic knowledge on new topics. Since I am no longer a student, I am willing to pay money - as much as hundreds to get unlimited access. Instead, for hundreds, IEEE explore offers a measly ("generous") 25 downloads a month or some such non-sense It just seemed so miserly of the…

After the IEEE $25 monthly service came out, I subscribed for three years until finally canceled it. Honestly most of the papers I downloaded were junks, the only reason I download them was to verify the available references.

The paper quality declination plus publication quantity inflation are the main reasons in this "Sci-Hub" crisis.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#70

Post by chris_wot »

s4chin wrote: post #27
daveguy wrote: post #26

If anyone is having trouble accessing https://scihub.io (the site providing the papers) you can find the site directly at the ip address: https://31.184.194.81/ ... Apparently the domain name was seized. The certificate is for sci-hub.io (safe to accept). Or you can just connect to http://31.184.194.81/ if you don't want to bother with the warnings (and are ok with DOIs and papers being transmitted without encryption…

Or even http://sci-hub.bz/ and http://sci-hub.cc/

Eventually they'll just setup their own DNS system, or replace it with something else entirely. something like a BitTorrent for nameservers.
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