Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name • Hacker News Board

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#111

Post by SeanLuke » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #92

SeanLuke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them: - Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board. - Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX. - Copy-editing…

Thinking in terms of for-profit sounds like the wrong way to do it. You need to setup a 503c Foundation, much like the WMF. Edit: it occurs to me that the Wikimedia Foundation is actually in the best position to do this! If you tried this before and still have the old infrastructure or business plan, have you considered approaching the WMF Board?

By "venture" I don't mean for-profit: absolutely nothing we were building was going to be for-profit. It'd be all open content.

I abandoned the project well before the infrastructure was ready for prime time: the tenure clock beckoned.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#112

Post by JadeNB » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

ldehaan wrote: post #11

copperx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does using Tor puts you on some kind of list? It would be tragic if someone used Tor to read a scientific article but then got charged with aiding terrorism or looking for child pornography.

nope. tor is anonymizing software used by many thousands of people. if you're really concerned use a VPN first, and download the tor browser using VPN. unnecessary IMO, but if you're concerned then this will give you an extra layer of protection.

> tor is anonymizing software used by many thousands of people.

Many thousands of people out of several billion (I assume …) Internet users is a small enough percentage that it's probably worth someone's while to make a list out of it. A sibling comment has claimed that the NSA specifically notes Tor use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637635).

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#113

Post by nxzero » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:34 PM UTC

dougmccune wrote: post #101

nxzero wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad i…

Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#114

Post by krapp » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #108

krapp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a pirated book is often a illegal copy of a legal original. But every copy in a library is legally paid for - and they expect you to return the copies you borrow when you're done with them, because they would have to buy more otherwise. Libraries don't undermine copyright law, they depend on it for their survival.

But the damages are still done. By having a library where people can get a book for free instead of buying it, even though there is some throughput limits, they still make it so that the media is no longer consumed. Imagine a pirating service which ensures that a given file is only being consumed by one machine at a time. So if I want to watch the newest blockbuster, I have to wait my turn, and once watched, I cannot…

The real damage from piracy comes from distribution, rather than consumption. Lending might do a small amount of damage, but as long as the inventory publishers have has been paid for somehow, they don't really care. They would care if libraries started running printing presses in the back and gave away extra copies for free, which were indistinguishable from the original, which is essentially the piracy model.

IANAL but I'm honestly not even certain that the piracy service you describe would actually be illegal, or at least that it couldn't be done legally.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#115

Post by enraged_camel » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #102

jfaucett wrote: post #4

"As a result of the legal battle the site (sci-hub.io) just lost one of its latest domain names. However, the site has no intentions of backing down, and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open." Does this not enrage people? Elsevier and closed-access journals like them, are doing all they can to impede human progress while leaching off of tax-payer dollars to do so. Something sho…

"Does this not enrage people?" I think I have rage-fatigue, with all the swindles, con-jobs and injustices I've seen. But I do recognize this as utter bullshit. Though unfortunately every other effort to take from the commons, charge money for it, and build a private fortune, throughout history, has also been bullshit; hence the rage-fatigue. This and things like it, do enrage people, and that's why in the US they gr…

Rage-fatigue is a fantastic way to describe it. People have so many things to worry about already. Their jobs, their families, their college loans, their retirement... Frankly, some publisher charging for access to scientific papers paid for by taxpayers is going to be pretty low on their list of priorities.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#116

Post by JadeNB » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

Luc wrote: post #77

atemerev wrote: post #5

While I support open science and Sci-Hub is great, I also can see publisher's side. Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There are some, but in darker corners of the Internet). Would open access to these books be advantageous for humanity? Most definitely. Will publishers get mad about it? Even more definitely. Should publisher's work be free? I think not. However, you can't get both sid…

Billions, man. They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question. Their service is so far from free it's indecent.

> They're making billions per year in profit. 'Should publisher's work be free?' is not the right question.

I don't understand the logic. We shouldn't ask if the work of people making billions should be free? That seems like exactly the sort of people of whom we should be asking it.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#117

Post by chris_wot » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

SeanLuke wrote: post #111

chris_wot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking in terms of for-profit sounds like the wrong way to do it. You need to setup a 503c Foundation, much like the WMF. Edit: it occurs to me that the Wikimedia Foundation is actually in the best position to do this! If you tried this before and still have the old infrastructure or business plan, have you considered approaching the WMF Board?

By "venture" I don't mean for-profit: absolutely nothing we were building was going to be for-profit. It'd be all open content. I abandoned the project well before the infrastructure was ready for prime time: the tenure clock beckoned.

I totally understand :-)

What do you think of Wikiversity's Journal of Medicine? It's a decent stab at a reputable open journal:

http://www.wijoumed.org/

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#118

Post by JadeNB » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:39 PM UTC

dceddia wrote: post #85

ptaipale wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typesetting by publisher is not valuable at this age. Elsevier seems keen to not have third parties review the publications. And visibility, same thing. They try to prevent it. Yes, scientists should publish elsewhere; the contracts currently prevent them as Elsevier has power to stop them through their entrenched legacy position.

What prevents a group of scientists from setting up doingscience.io or whatever, and publishing their results to a big shared blog? Do the contracts stipulate that their findings can only be published in specific paid journals?

Usually one must assign to the journal a more or less restrictive copyright to one's paper before being able to publish it. For math, this usually includes a stipulation that it be published nowhere else (except that many specifically allow posting to the arXiv, because—hurrah for the big guy being in the right!—it seems that no journal is big enough to fight the community consensus behind the arXiv).

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#119

Post by chrismonsanto » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #25

tmptmp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work? These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.

What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.

My experience in publishing (in CS) is that the publisher does not offer assistance in typesetting. Additionally reviewers are not paid for their effort, and are not affiliated with the publisher--they do it out of a sense of duty / professional advancement.

The journals offer something of value because they provide high-quality taxpayer-funded research. The publisher is nothing more than a middleman, who should be cut out of the equation.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#120

Post by oneloop » Thu, May 05, 2016, 6:45 PM UTC

chejazi wrote: post #110

oneloop wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guys, I have a question. If it's this simple to put a server into the onion, why are people not doing this with torrent trackers? I'm thinking specifically about thepiratebay.org which is still banned in the UK (at the ISP level, I believe). Then mirrors appear and then the mirrors get banned? Why not just put it into the onion? Put it there once, problem solved.

Perhaps the primary reason is accessibility. Onion addresses are not easily memorized. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle I believe this inconvenience is minor, however.

Incidentally, is there any fundamental reason why onion addresses are always so cryptic?