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> “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.
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.
.org was their original domain which was pulled a while ago.
They are still posting updates there. Hopefully they don't get that pulled too.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe tomp's suggestion is that you can bootstrap as an overlay journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal ) to build up that expertise. You don't need to have experienced people from the start, because they can learn while doing. At the start, no one is going to pay attention to the journal. Then as it gets known for being a good curator, people will start requesting to be reviewed for inclusion.…
Distancing yourself from early failures is never a good strategy. Too often we flee from our past failures. For me, I don't shy from them but admit they occurred, and that I have learned from them since.
In my field, the main journal used to be "Journal of Computer Documentation". It spun off from "American Documentation" in the early 1960s. The JCD title changed in the 1970s to "Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences" because "documentation" - a 1920s term - was considered already old-fashioned by the 1960s, and the title didn't capture the new focus on computers, and the underlying principles of information science.
It then became "Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling" in 2005 because the 1990s showed how to apply those information techniques to make predictive models.
Each name change is a form of distancing itself from its previous focus as part of a shift to a new focus.
Or is "distance oneself" not applicable for that situation?
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.
I don't know that the sci-hub underlying database is available outside of the site. I expect with growth they will need to move to torrents or similar to minimize their bandwidth requirements.
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?
Usually I don't have any difficulties finding contemporary papers. It is papers from, say, thirty years ago, that are usually stuck behind paywalls.
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Your career is based on how "good" the journals are that you publish in. If I publish a paper in Nature, Nature Genetics, Science, etc. then I can hand-pick my next position. The more glam-journals I publish in, the better my chances for tenure.
Can you cross-publish / self-publish as well?
Further, we academics are incentivized, in terms of career, to publish in prestigious venues managed by official publishers. We aren't incentivized to publish in open access repositories as well. So, even though most of us want our articles to be disseminated widely, not all of us can find the time to make sure that the paper is also available on an open repository. This is a factor that explains why many articles are not available for free online even in cases where it would be legal for researchers to upload them.
While pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep down it feels wrong. This doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.
If it does not feel wrong, it must be right? We should strive for a logical explanation that transcends emotional response.
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…
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
So why exactly are publications locking these papers behind massively expensive paywalls when writing them and reviewing them are being done for free?