Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#371

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 3:18 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #370

chris_wot wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment seemed a bit... personal. Whilst you had some decent points, it seemed like you were more arguing against my character.

I had no intention to argue against your character, nor upon rereading do I see myself doing that. I do argue against the meaningfulness of your comments, given the judgement in Eldred, and given the last 250 years of incessant technological change. I also think you, like many, see the near history with a much better focus than the further past. But that is not a character flaw.

Well, I'm glad to see I was wrong :-) thank you. It's just you seemed to compare my, uh, rhetoric to what the "populists and muckrackers" of the 1900s were saying. Though in certain company I guess that could be considered high praise, I'm not sure I was too fond of the comparison...

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#372

Post by joshvm » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

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?

More and more universities are paying for 'gold' (open) access publication. They're beginning to realise that you get more citations if people can actually read your papers without needing to go through the paywall.

One of the advantages of publication is peer review. When you cite someone's work, if it's in a reputable journal then you can assume that someone reviewed it and would vouch for the quality of the research. You have to take it with a pinch of salt (reviewers are never totally unbiased and they make mistakes), but in fields where research is easy to verify like computer science, a publication in somewhere like Pattern Recognition holds a lot of weight.

If you just cite a random paper that someone's self published on arXiv, you have no real idea whether what's being presented is true. Again, this isn't so much of a problem for CS papers where you can implement and test the work yourself, but for fields like physics where you're relying on other people's data, you want to be sure that someone smarter than you checked the numbers.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#373

Post by joshvm » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC

alphydan wrote: post #327

dikaiosune wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Popularity plays a role. Here's a real life example: One of my quantum physics mentors submitted a paper to PRL (a high prestige physics journal) and it was rejected. Why? Because it came from a small, rather unknown university in Spain. He was later admitted to Cambridge for a PhD and sent the exact same paper (same formatting, content, layout but different department/uni). It was immediately accepted. Does it neces…

Phys Rev Lett isn't double blind?

Double blind doesn't always work, sometimes it's painfully obvious who the PI is, but it should stop stuff like this from happening.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#374

Post by alco » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #243

alco wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Torrents are pretty bad at the archiving problem , i.e. maintaining copies of things with no readership over a long time. Not a great fit for this stuff.

I agree. Setting up mirrors would probably be a better fit for this kind of content, but mirrors would be susceptible to the same dangers that the primary website may face: forced take-down by the hosting provider, domain blocking, etc.

The fundamental difference of content-addressed networks is their resiliency in the face a single authority trying to track down all of the sources that have copies of the content.

Even though IPFS is still in its infancy, one of its primary goals is to solve the problem of content suddenly disappearing from the Internet.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#375

Post by alexqgb » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

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'v got a hard time calling this piracy when the "owners" have next to nothing invested in the material's production, and provide even less in return to those who do. What Elsevier is doing is more like kidnapping.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#376

Post by otempomores » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #172

Fuxy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rate by successfull driven back attacks and citation times time out..review only the attacks quality..

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#377

Post by otempomores » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #172

Fuxy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rate by successfull driven back attacks and citation times time out..review only the attacks quality..

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#378

Post by mbrundle » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:13 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #356

richard_mcp wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My thoughts exactly. I've never known a journal to do anything to promote the fact that someone has reviewed for them (eg produce a letter on request that states which articles someone has reviewed for them). It'd be a nice and free way of creating value to reviewers who generally work for free, but I don't know any journal who's ever done this.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#379

Post by bigfudge » Sat, Apr 30, 2016, 8:54 PM UTC

maaku wrote: post #316

kefka wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using google speaking keyboard. I was at a stoplight and spoke it and submitted. I'm all for scientific method, be it showing positive, negative, or no results. I also know what isn't currently scientific, although I do have curiosity if some of those 'things' can indeed be proved.

Everything is "scientific" so long as it is subjected to unbiased skeptical experimental evaluation. That's all it means to be "scientific."

Science needn't mean experiments. Just ask astronomers.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#380

Post by dredmorbius » Sun, May 01, 2016, 4:51 AM UTC

dzdt wrote: post #145

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…

I was disappointed the article didn't mention individuals unaffiliated with institutions. What fraction of PhD's have a university job? 20%? These are people who devoted years of their life to reading others' research and doing their own. But if you aren't any more at a university you don't count.

Likewise. I suppose you can't include it all, but that leaves an opportunity for another journalist I suppose.