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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#351

Post by crocowhile »

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?

You are absolutely right. Scientists are the only ones to blame for this. It's true, as someone else replied to you, that scientists tend to chose journals based on their reputations but it's also true that nothing prevents a scientist from publishing their unedited manuscript on their personal websites. It's absolutely legal and absolutely uncommon.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#352

Post by nightcracker »

ryanlol wrote: post #108
ryanlol wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He might have been in prison now For hypothetical crimes he could've committed had he lived? Because he certainly wouldn't be in prison for things he actually did.

For whatever reason lots of people here seem to disagree. Could any of the 4 downvoters clarify in what conceivable scenario would Aaron still be in prison if he was alive? Had he pled guilty, he would undoubtedly be out by now. And going to trial obviously wasn't a realistic option considering the plea deals he was offered (BTW If someone here disagrees about that, I'd really like to know why.). Read: http://volokh.…

> going to trial obviously wasn't a realistic option considering the plea deals he was offered

And that's why plea deals are an injustice. The honest are intimidated into felons, and the criminals never face a judge.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#353

Post by onetimePete »

The economy of disrupting ruptured by it shear forces - aka by itself? AIs crawling over the knowledge base? Good thing they cant publish papers with meaningful recombined results yet. Or can they. The irony is that the church of singularity is not relevant to the process - its like declaring evolution some godlike principle or cataclysmic event- while it just is a glider gun going forth, not knowing, not wanting to know. Still interesting times. I guess in the end, the science journals just where roadblocks in Alphabets way. So they have to go- so they will die, the usual way- with there resource supply systems stripped from them by a not "attackable" third party, condemned by those who benefit, as a barbaric, lawless act.

If they would have foresight, they would release all the papers they have into the public domain, and have there true opponents wrestle with the GPL and thus the allmende that produced the wealth. Instead they are having a nap at the ste ering wheel moment. In the end it will help mankind. So can we drop the charade and get on with it?

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#354

Post by drewm1980 »

comicjk wrote: post #213
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…

I'd like to point out that a journal is not purely a proxy or even an aggregator - I've gotten more detailed peer review with the bigger journals, because the reviewers are more critical and the editors more selective. I didn't start out as a fan of peer review, but now I say the more the better; it has markedly increased the quality of all of my papers which have undergone it.

I think reviews tend to be overly critical primarily because reviewers are forced to find excuses to reject 9/10 of the papers that landed on their desk, most of which they weren't even interested in reading.

I strongly believe that review could be almost exclusively through positive feedback, with crowd-sourced minimal annotations in the margins, i.e. "the idea in this paragraph came from ", and "this idea is novel; wish I thought of it", and "there is a strong analogy between this paragraph and "

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#355

Post by [deleted] »

chris_wot wrote: post #349
dalke wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright, according to the US Constitution, exists for the public good: > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. You may disagree with that conclusion, but there's 200+ years of belief that it's possible to be "for the public good" and be covered under copyright which restricts redist…

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and even the Act before it (the Copyright Act of 1976) seems to rather violate the constitution then: 1. It doesn't promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts 2. 120 years since creation or 95 years since publication for corporations, or the life of the author plus 70 years is not what I would call particularly "limited Times". There may be 200+ years of belief in cop…

[deleted]

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#356

Post by dalke »

richard_mcp wrote: post #263
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 work for free for a few reasons reasons. First, it's prestigious to be a reviewer for a top journal and very beneficial for getting tenure. Second, it allows you to create connections with other top researchers. Third, it's giving back to the community by doing a service that needs to be done.

How do people know that I have (or haven't) been a reviewer for a top journal? Do they have a public list of reviewers?

Of the people I meet at a conference, how do I figure out who has been a reviewer for Nature, and how do I verify that claim?

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#357

Post by dalke »

chris_wot wrote: post #349
dalke wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright, according to the US Constitution, exists for the public good: > To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. You may disagree with that conclusion, but there's 200+ years of belief that it's possible to be "for the public good" and be covered under copyright which restricts redist…

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and even the Act before it (the Copyright Act of 1976) seems to rather violate the constitution then: 1. It doesn't promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts 2. 120 years since creation or 95 years since publication for corporations, or the life of the author plus 70 years is not what I would call particularly "limited Times". There may be 200+ years of belief in cop…

Your objections were presented to the Supreme Court, who decided they were not actually un-Constitutional in Eldred v. Ashcroft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft . You won't be the first to disagree with a Supreme Court decision. But the only recourse you have is get the courts change their mind in the future, or amend the Constitution.

I have a hard time empathizing with an argument which, with the change of a few ephemeral names, Mad Libs style, could have been said at any time in the last 200 years.

The statement "thing have significantly changed in the last several thirty years" has been true for centuries. People in the the 1950s, or 1910s, or 1870s, could and likely did say the same thing.

Nor is your rhetoric about "openness and transparency" unique to these last two decades. Look to the populists and muckrakers from around 1900s as effective proponents of that. Look to the newspapers of the late 1800s, when the Linotype made it possible to have cheap newspapers, and look to the growth of wire services and the telephone, radio, and television, as recent examples of other technologies which have "radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and ideas."

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#358

Post by drewm1980 »

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…

I think a lot of ratings/reputation/moderation problems can be engineered around if you make all of the moderation metadata publicly available in a form that enables competition in the search functionality. Make articles, users, links, and comments up and down-votable in a way that is public and immutable forever, and de-couple the problem of mining the data.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#359

Post by dalke »

dredmorbius wrote: post #311
sghi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I'm not sure there's any one tool that fits my needs, and I've looked at a few, Zotero among them. My understanding is that it's more a _bibliographic management_ tool. There's also Calibre, which seems like it's a close solution, though that too is problematic, particularly at scale. Another problem is that my laptop (as opposed to tablet) isn't particularly useful for reading formatted documents -- PDFs can't reall…

I use Zotero to store the PDFs, movies, text files, and other things related to my research. It has an option to either link to an existing file or to copy the file into its own archive.

It can also extract text from those files, for use in a text search.

I use it on a laptop, not a tablet. I see there are Zotero apps for a tablet. I have no experience with them.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#360

Post by vixen99 »

mattkrause wrote: post #343
HelloNurse wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation? If you publish in an Elsevier journal you are an asshole by association, and it's a safe assumption that you don't care about your article being read: a clear indicator of its real value.

Seriously? Among other things, they publish Cell , The Lancet , the various Trends in XYZ , and some of the Current Opinion journals. These are all widely read and well-respected journals. There are tons problems with the current publication system, but as I wrote up-thread, I think it's unfair to put tons of blame on individual scientists, many of whom are trapped between "playing the game" and making a somewhat ine…

The system works smoothly for them. Not much incentive to change it unless they are prepared to think a bit more widely. One great exception is Timothy Gowers.

"it should in principle be possible to run a journal for almost nothing. The legacy publishers (as they are sometimes called) frequently call people naive for suggesting this, so it is important to have actual examples to prove it, and Discrete Analysis is set up to be one such example."

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

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