Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 398 posts

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#171

Post by notahacker »

Fuxy wrote: post #141
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…

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…

A rating system would generally become an indicator of other academics' level of agreement with a paper, rather than an indication that it passed a quality and significance threshold. Citation ranking schemes already exist, but the citation counts are heavily influenced by academics being unable to NOT mention a dissenting view because it was recently published in a prominent journal. And I'm not sure examples like Amazon book ratings, HN karma or professionally-optimized PageRank can really be claimed with a straight face to be superior for curating quality content than good old fashioned peer review.

I do think open commenting systems would be a boon to academic discourse though.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#172

Post by dalke »

Fuxy wrote: post #141
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…

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…

"by giving users the ability to rate a scientific paper."

LOL! No. Ratings are nearly useless. By which I mean I don't know how I would incorporate ratings into my own research.

How do you keep a ratings system from being a proxy for popularity, rather than a measure of novelty or utility? How do you keep it from being easily gamed? Does a "5.2" for a 1995 paper have the same meaning as a "5.2" for a 2010 paper?

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

Do tell me how. Post on my blog and hope people come across it?

Journals outsource marketing. Get rid of journals and something must replace that service, or I have to become a marketer.

"This system is a product of a bygone era .. relying on copyright"

You are mistaken. The system does not rely on copyright. The scientific publication system dates from the 1600s, dated from Oldenburg's 'Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'. Copyright dates from the 1700s, dated from the Statute of Anne.

The scientific publication system depends on reliable selection and curation. Its current form is dominated by large publishing companies which use copyright law for revenue generation, but that's only been true for the last few decades. Scientific publication also existed in the USSR even without copyright protection. (article 103(2) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Soviet_Un... gave "permission to reproduce published scientific, artistic, or literary works as excerpts (or even entirely) in scientific, critical, or educational publications").

"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."

I understand and sympathize with your argument. But in practice things aren't so clear cut. Rarely does the money come 100% from public sources. Is your argument that even 1 cent of public funding means the entire work product must be in the public domain?

Are you making the moral argument that copyright should to the funding source? Or is it limited only to public funding sources? For example, if 100% of the money for a project comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, then do you want the foundation to control the copyright the work product? What if it's 80% Gates and 20% public funded? Is it public domain then?

If 3 years of research was publicly funded, and resulted in paper, and 2 more years was privately funded by BigCorp., to analyze the data further, then must that additional two years also be in the public domain?

And on and on. Unless "1 cent => public domain always", then there's no clear line. Is that your argument?

(BTW, there is another clear line - work by a US government employee is in the public domain. A small percentage of the scientific papers are in the public domain because of that.)

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#173

Post by Hondor »

If the business model of Elsevier/etc somehow collapses, I wonder how universities will make hiring decisions? They high fees of their journals are effectively a recruitment or candidate selection service paid by university libraries and serving departments when they hire faculty. Perhaps they'll have to revert to assessing applicants on their merits instead of such arbitrary metrics as the impact factor of a journal that they published their work in.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#174

Post by sghi »

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…

Just as an aside, you could try Zotero - I use it on my laptop and phone and it works pretty well for me. There is a dedicated app as well. https://www.zotero.org/

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#176

Post by eggy »

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, it has become less useful. I also read that they only server as a distributor, and that the review process was scaled down, or is nothing from their end. It really is a shame, since most of the research I do is for self-teaching, and sometimes whimsical, so I would never pay to start with. However, I have gone on from the whimsical to the serious, because I did read a free paper.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#177

Post by alco »

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…

Have there been attempts at dispersing the whole collection of papers through torrents or IPFS? The goal here is not to have a central location with a pretty web page but to make the content freely accessibly everywhere by anyone. Distributing it over thousands of nodes would achieve that goal.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#178

Post by return0 »

nailer wrote: post #89
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"…

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?

The problem is nobody is going to read them. That's because the people who these scientists are targeting (other established academics, funding sources) choose to ignore the rest of the internet and only read the well known journals. This is almost exclusive to life sciences though. In CS, physics and other disciplines people just upload their preprints on arxiv and don't really bother about impact factors and such.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#179

Post by return0 »

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…

They charge $5000 if you want to make your article public access (i.e. they won't put it behind paywall). So that's a ballpark value of how much it costs +their profits.

Whatever they may claim their costs are, the money does not add meaningful contribution. The meaningful contribution (writing and reviewing) is done by scientists themselves, almost 100% independently of elsevier. Elsevier employs some senior editors who decide which reviewer gets to review which paper, and that's about their entire contribution to scientific process. The rest is their website costs, PR and fluff which is not relevant to the science itself.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#180

Post by pencilcode »

SXX wrote: post #156
musha68k wrote: post #91

Wow http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-fo...

This doesn't really affect the project, but keep in mind she is very controversion person. For instance she support government censorship of political opposition and generally don't support freedom of speech. And likely half of people commented there would be banned on any sci-hub related resource since she usually ban anyone who don't fully agree with what project doing.

She's the one who's putting herself at risk. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. And every time you slander someone you really should link to independent sources so others can at least verify and judge for themselves.
Post reply on HN