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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#271

Post by chris_wot »

dalke wrote: post #214
chris_wot wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps I used the term incorrectly. I don't mean "distance" to require someone to "flee" nor not admit its connection, nor do I regard naïvety as a failure. 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…

I think I probably got my wires crossed. By "distancing" I did indeed think you meant "pretend as best as possible previous work never happened in an attempt to protect your reputation", but that's not at all what you meant! Sorry about that.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#272

Post by hyperion2010 »

majewsky wrote: post #132
kqr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My other comment covers this. There is actually an upside to spatio-temporal control, which is that anyone who walks into a university library can access the licensed material for that library. Of course in this day and age such physical restrictions on access seem absurd.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#273

Post by rspeer »

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…

I have found recently that reviewers in natural language processing, in aggregate, place negative value on reproducibility.

Perhaps 1 out of 3 reviewers gets it, another is bored by the fiddly and detailed methods section, and the third was subconsciously hoping for a "brilliant", mystifying secret sauce. Oh, that's all you did? he asks. I could have done that.

Of course you could have done it, I just told you how and pointed you to the data. I also compiled that data, and you won't even let me tell you that because of blind review.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#275

Post by pahool »

sghi wrote: post #174
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/

Zotero (and Mendeley) addresses the problem of storing and organizing the content that you have access to, much like paid products such as refworks and Endnote. But, unless I am misunderstanding, it doesn't solve the problem of access to content. It's an excellent research tool though.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#276

Post by matwood »

chimprich wrote: post #267
codedokode wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do reviewers work for free? And why scientists agree to give away their work for free?

Reviewers don't really work for free; it's generally accepted that reviewing is part of their salaried job.

For free in the sense that the journals pay them nothing. So lets recap; the public/university pays for the researcher and the research, the public/university pays for the reviewing and submission process, and finally the public university pays to access the work they already paid to create and review. And people wonder why everyone but the journals think the journal process is broken.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#277

Post by ufo »

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…

In my experience, the problem is less about papers being low quality (wrong, incomplete, etc) and more about the papers not being precisely about what you are looking for (which is hard to tell looking just at the title).

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#278

Post by dalke »

dikaiosune wrote: post #258
dalke wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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? To respond to this particular point, I'm not familiar with any characteristics of the academic journal system which prevent these problems either. Name recognition is often key to getting into competitive journals, which is just another way of calling it an eas…

Certainly the current system can be gamed, and is, and the complaints about problems with bibliometrics about 10 seconds after the first one was published.

But the argument is that "giving other researchers the ability to rate ... [would work] just as well as this journal reputation system".

My question is, simply, why should I believe this?

Bibliometrics often look at citations. Citations are, yes, a marker of popularity and social connections, but also have certain scholastic requirements. Editors and reviewers can and do point out missing references or highlight too many irrelevant self-citations. This is a type of moderation system. Imperfect certainly, but it does provide some grounding.

Also, it's not like the scientific publication system only contains original research papers. Review papers fill a curational role, with the advantage of a single voice (even if from co-authors) making the comparisons, so I at least have a relatively constant baseline.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#279

Post by TheCoelacanth »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #204

"The numbers for Ashburn, Virginia, the top U.S. city with nearly 100,000 Sci-Hub requests, are harder to interpret." Am I the only one who thinks this is just the location of AWS us-east-1? People might be using proxies located there or have bulk download jobs.

Undoubtedly. Ashburn has a population of less than 50,000 people. There's no way it could have almost 50% more use than New York City with millions of people.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#280

Post by Armisael16 »

chris_wot wrote: post #203
ryanlol wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I imply otherwise? I don't personally believe it would've achieved anything, but that's how the world works.

Yes. You said "He'd be out by now". To get out means you must have been in, and jailtime is what you were responding to.

Nothing ryanlol has said even remotely indicates that Scwartz going to jail would've been a good thing.
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