Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#131

Post by majewsky » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 8:54 AM UTC

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 you can just enter "31.184.194.81 sci-hub.io" into your /etc/hosts, so the certificate will match up with the domain name.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#132

Post by majewsky » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 8:56 AM UTC

kqr wrote: post #106

chris_wot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very helpful for Wikipedia researchers. Or people who are outside the walled garden of academia!

To be fair, I haven't set a foot in my university for 3 years (planning to return soon!) but since I still send them the occasional email asking to be registered for a course I'm considered active there and get access to a lot of publications as long as I'm logged in to their systems.

Do any universities offer something like "passive studentship"? i.e. you pay only a small fraction of the tuition, it does not include any courses, but you may attend the facilities and specifically the library and get access to the university network. If that existed, hobby researchers and the like could get access to all these journals for a probably smaller amount of money.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#133

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 8:57 AM UTC

blaze33 wrote: post #126

So one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the root issue that we need an open and standard way to review, sort and rate all those academics papers ? Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit…

well there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#134

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 8:59 AM UTC

ryanlol wrote: post #107

philjohn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He likely would be in Prison, because he'd be forced to plead out to lesser crimes, or face the prospect of a cripplingly expensive trial with the threat of higher sanctions.

No, that's complete bullshit. Had Aaron pleaded guilty, he'd be out by now as both of the plea agreements he was offered would have meant 6 months or less . And trial? Why would he have gone to trial? There was no question of his guilt.

Going to jail at all would have been an injustice. What would it have achieved?

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#135

Post by cant_kant » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:05 AM UTC

If the paper is retracted, do the publishers give a refund ? See http://retractionwatch.com/ to see the massive number of retractions that happen.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#136

Post by kowdermeister » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:06 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #120

dalke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science". Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement. Researchers can publish…

If we were to work out what makes a journal so prestigious, what are the objective measures that should be considered?

100 years of track record publishing the least amount of junk.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#137

Post by Vespasian » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:07 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #130

Vespasian wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the venue. In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website. Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.

How... generous?

I did not imply that I'm happy with the situation, but sadly it is a fact scientists have to deal with right now.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#138

Post by sashazykov » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:10 AM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #70

s4chin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://bit.namecoin.info/

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#139

Post by VMG » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:12 AM UTC

secfirstmd wrote: post #93

Blahah wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of work on tools that interface with the academic publishing infrastructure. Elsevier not only make a huge profit margin, but they operate at a staggering level of inefficiency. They are haemorrhaging money and producing precisely nothing of value, and still making profit for their investors hand over fist. Quite incredible.

Hmmm...it seems like the space is ready to be disrupted. How might that look? I mean purely publishing isnt just ideal as it lacks the so-called quality control and prestige of established publications. What might be a middle ground for disrupting this crappy monopoly on the world's knowledge?

As long as you have government power (public funding) in academia, you'll have rent-seeking.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#140

Post by fsloth » Fri, Apr 29, 2016, 9:12 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #133

blaze33 wrote: post #126

So one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the root issue that we need an open and standard way to review, sort and rate all those academics papers ? Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate papers like reddit…

well there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality.

"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality."

As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount of time on a single paper.

That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones.

This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.