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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

sciencemag.org

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#141

Post by Fuxy »

dalke wrote: post #92
nailer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand academia (genuinely): Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?

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…

Haven't we solved the quality issue in other situations by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper.

What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.

It's a not a perfect filter but I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system and it prevents issues like people having to publish with them to get recognized not to mention it encourages discussion between academics which could lead to some breakthroughs as well.

You want peer recognition so why not go to your peers directly instead of a proxy like these publications.

This system is a product of a bygone era and as all other systems like it it is resisting change by relying on copyright.

I see copyright as the root of most of our current societies issues it is just not compatible with how we work not to mention most of these papers were made with public funding so there shouldn’t be any copyright on it to begin with the copyright belongs to the public domain they payed for it.

A publication just publishing it on their website and slapping a price on it is pure theft and they should be treated like the pirates they are pursuing.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#142

Post by [deleted] »

chris_wot wrote: post #104
donlzx wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds like an increasingly commented on issue: there are now hundreds and hundreds of specialty journals, but quality is patchy. In fact, I think we may be seeing inherent problems coming to the fore now that journals are more focussed on profits: often there is publication bias towards certain topics; in other cases the bias is towards positive results and breakthroughs, with a lack of enthusiasm for publishin…

[deleted]

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#143

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #142
chris_wot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like an increasingly commented on issue: there are now hundreds and hundreds of specialty journals, but quality is patchy. In fact, I think we may be seeing inherent problems coming to the fore now that journals are more focussed on profits: often there is publication bias towards certain topics; in other cases the bias is towards positive results and breakthroughs, with a lack of enthusiasm for publishin…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#144

Post by nailer »

dalke wrote: post #92
nailer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand academia (genuinely): Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?

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…

> A publication in "Science" or "Nature"

What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#145

Post by dzdt »

dredmorbius wrote: post #84

I was interviewed for this article though not mentioned in it. My use case isn't mentioned: unaffiliated researchers with limited access to journals doing our own exploration of areas. I've compiled a library of several thousand articles (and via other sources, books) which for both access and portability I prefer electronic versions. My 10" tablet is almost perfect for reading printed material, and functions as a sm…

I was disappointed the article didn't mention individuals unaffiliated with institutions. What fraction of PhD's have a university job? 20%? These are people who devoted years of their life to reading others' research and doing their own. But if you aren't any more at a university you don't count.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#146

Post by nxzero »

Access to pubs is just a symptom of a huge issue, calling science science; science as it is at best a "soft" science and at worst, in many cases, whack quackery that preys on the weak.

As an example of what I mean, as of 2010, 91% of published pubs for the field of psychology supported their original hypothesis; if this isn't an obvious red flag, not sure what would be.

Intellectual fraud needs to be criminalized and claims based on science must require not only reproducibility, but solid means of denying the authors of any form of plausible deniability from escaping responsibility for what in many cases is fraud, or worse, blindly seeding their own bias as reality.

_______

[1] Quackery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery

[2] Positive Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[3] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#147

Post by cameldrv »

One of the reasons the deep learning field is moving so fast is that everything is open access. Generally, it's considered prestigious to present at a conference, and not much gets published in journals. The major conferences have been adopting a model of posting first on arxiv and then submitting to the conference, so the reviewers see the paper at the same time as the general public.

The amazing thing is that weeks after the paper hits arxiv, new papers are coming out, improving on the previous one. By the time the paper is accepted and the conference rolls around, it's actually almost old-hat.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#148

Post by jwr »

taneq wrote: post #4

> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia Wise You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free. Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.

Actually, the material wasn't given for free. In many cases you have to pay to get your articles published. There are fees for color figures, for example. All in all, you end up paying significant money to get published. And later people pay to access your articles.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#149

Post by dschiptsov »

Knowledge shall be free and unbiased by authority. Free access for everyone to knowledge and healthy scepticism produces miracles. In India, for example, lack of restrictions and tolerance to every opinion produced, besides thousands of sects and cults, the best philosophy this world have seen so far.

The site, it seems, is a part of natural social movement, similar to FOSS, rather than paid content piracy. It is against restrictions.

When some parasites are trying to construct a paywall then society sooner or later would find the way around it, be it knowledge or any other form of digital content - selling an output of the sendfile syscall by those who haven't produced anything would never been tolerated, it violates the hardwired notion of fairness. Especially when one assumes that these papers has been written to spread knowledge and contribute to scientific community (a-la contrubution to open source), not to make money by selling copies - it isn't a paperback.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#150

Post by gonehome »

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?

Need to figure out how to align the incentives and fix the prestige problem of academia in order for this to work.

Open Access exists, but you don't get the status you need from it (and weirdly it often costs a couple hundred dollars for the graduate student to publish their paper open access in addition to the Journal).

It'd be nice if there was a way to make the community more like open source software where you get status from sharing and collaborating instead of from hoarding information in fear of being 'scooped'.

As it stands the incentives are directly opposite collaborating and sharing information and really the best parts about science and research.

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