There's an easy way for Elsevier to find compromised accounts used to download articles. I wonder if they will pursue account owners some day.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
161–170 of 398 posts
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#162This isn't just about the academia. As soon as you want to write about any technical subject, even if it's only for your own personal use, you need to study the relevant literature. Often this means reading dozens of papers. There's no way a normal person who isn't working at a university or research institution can afford that.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we were to work out what makes a journal so prestigious, what are the objective measures that should be considered?
Mainly it's a chicken and egg situation. A journal is prestigious because the papers it publishes have an allusion of quality, because they are published by a prestigious journal. A prestigious journal publishes high-quality papers because it can attract high-quality authors and reviewers, because it is a prestigious journal. A journal is prestigious because researchers choose to (try to) be published in it, because…
> If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality.
You could (should?) start by going through freely published (open access) papers, collecting the most quality ones, then publishing them in your journal. That's most of the value of journals, as well - informing the subscribers of noteworthy research.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#164Have any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yet? They really should...
Yeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my left foot.
They should categorize papers into specific fields (and sub-fields). Each party would torrent what interests them.
Also, this might make a great use case for IPFS as apposed to torrents. Torrents are not designed to be mutable.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm not advocating for anonymous instant votes like we can do it here. Researcher already do peer-review for free, allow them to do it on an open platform with free publication afterwards, I don't see why it couldn't work.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#166Earlier 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…
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…
I will comment on it from my point of view (theoretical CS PhD student):
> What's wrong with giving other researchers the ability to rate and comment on a paper.
I do not see nothing inherently bad with this (provided very good moderation tools are in place). However...
* > I would argue it works just as well a this journal reputation system *
As a journal reputation system, possibly; although I find that experts have often very different taste compared to say general Hacker News public -- for instance, machine learning has a very high "coolness factor" these days compared to other areas of computer science, but it would be unwise to make a system where a weaker paper on machine learning gets vastly more credit than a better paper on say approximation algorithms.
However, an important part of the journal submission process is the fact that the editors ask the members of the academic community for spending several days on the paper, noting major and minor details and checking the validity of the proof.
Since the reviewers do their work for free, there is no reason why there cannot be an open system that replicates the same process; still, just "adding a comment system to arXiv" will probably not be enough, as people spend rarely that much time on comments (15 minutes tops, not entire days).
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yep, this is my bête noire too. It gets even worse. I am working on software that confirms to guidelines set by the Dutch government for handling healthcare data. These Dutch national standards were actually (and justly!) made free instead of available at a fee because they became requirements instead of just guidelines. But these standards are (naturally) based on international standards. This is fine for the RFC's…
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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#168I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way? As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - fro…
The problem is that that you want to publish in prestigious journals and conferences and the ACM, the IEEE, and everyone else has made deals with publishers to publish the proceedings because the ACM et al aren't publishers. The deals made more sense in the pre digital age, when your only option to read the papers was to get a phone book sized book once a year, but now it's just stupid. Even at universities you can h…
Actually Lingua and Cognition are both Elsevier journals. The open access competitor to Lingua is Glossa.
Serves me right for not actually reading the article I only remembered enough of to successfully google it.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mainly it's a chicken and egg situation. A journal is prestigious because the papers it publishes have an allusion of quality, because they are published by a prestigious journal. A prestigious journal publishes high-quality papers because it can attract high-quality authors and reviewers, because it is a prestigious journal. A journal is prestigious because researchers choose to (try to) be published in it, because…
> If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality. You could (should?) start by going through freely published (open access) papers, collecting the most quality ones, then publishing them in your journal. That's most of the value of journals, as well - informing the subscribers of noteworthy research.
But how do I do that? I can interpret a paper and apply it to my problems, but I'm not qualified to tell if it's a good paper[1]. In my field -- computing -- research papers are often written in a language that only just makes sense to me. I'm sure it'd be easier if I was a computer scientist that regularly published, but that's why I suggest you'd need a team of actual scientists who are used to reading, writing, and reviewing papers.
As Kernighan almost wrote:
Reviewing the paper is twice as hard as reading the paper in the first place. Therefore, if you have to be as clever as possible to read the paper, you are, by definition, not smart enough to review it.
[1] Although I can tell whether the code works, the quality of a paper is also about how well-written it is, whether the arguments are valid and supported by the data, and whether it provides something future research can be built on. A terrible paper that happens to contain code that works is useful for me, not so much for science in general.
Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
#170The system is broken.
Rich universities are ready to pay money, so publishers can raise price, basically making papers unavailable for poor universities who can't handle subscriptions or individuals.
At the same time publishers hardly spend any money - most of people access publications online, not printed, and tons of journals don't have minimal review. So publisher does nothing and wants much money for that.
Scientist at the same time are stuck - if you want people to read your paper, you need good journal or conference, else you might be not heard. Leave alone prestige and fame.
So, something has to be done. Maybe Sci-Hub is that something.