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Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

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Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#61

Post by gherkin0 »

petra wrote: post #26
aw3c2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

I don't think that would accomplish much. People would just delete the 9 papers that they don't care about rather than maintain them as clutter. And even if everyone did keep the extra files, would use would they be? It would be impossibly difficult to reconstruct the archive from them.

It would probably be better to break down the torrents into smaller, more coherent, and organized collections that contain all associated metadata (e.g. a collection of biology papers from a certain time-span or set of publications). That way you might incentivize people to maintain smaller personal-use archives that could be recombined back into the whole, if the need arises.

You could perhaps even build a system that could automatically generate, publish, and consume torrents with a particular (metadata + content) layout, but that's not restricted to a particular set of torrents. Then it could just consume certain topics from a feed of new torrents, from various sources, on the Pirate Bay.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#62

Post by Jerry2 »

jostmey wrote: post #60

I wonder how many people have book marked sci-hub under its IP address http://31.184.194.81/ so that every time the domain name changes the bookmark still works.

There's no need to bookmark the IP. Sci-hub actually runs a DNS server and you can simply specify 31.184.194.81 as one of your DNS servers in your computer network settings. Under OS X you can just add it in Sys Prefs. It's probably similar under other OSes.

If you do that, sci-hub.org, sci-hub.io, sci-hub.club still work just fine.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#63

Post by skybrian »

Jerry2 wrote: post #62
jostmey wrote: post #60

I wonder how many people have book marked sci-hub under its IP address http://31.184.194.81/ so that every time the domain name changes the bookmark still works.

There's no need to bookmark the IP. Sci-hub actually runs a DNS server and you can simply specify 31.184.194.81 as one of your DNS servers in your computer network settings. Under OS X you can just add it in Sys Prefs. It's probably similar under other OSes. If you do that, sci-hub.org, sci-hub.io, sci-hub.club still work just fine.

That's putting a lot more trust in them than bookmarking the IP address. (Well, not for https, but for everything else.)

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#64

Post by wernercd »

csydas wrote: post #46
wernercd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know... competition. Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office? Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s) doesn't... If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, t…

The problem with this is that currently, as best as anyone knows, Sci-hub works via proxying using legitimate logins. At a University level, usually there is some server running that acts as a proxy so that students and instructors on the campus can access (all calls get proxied), or students can access off campus using their federated student logins, which then creates a quick web-proxy. Since it's just a login/acce…

While I agree on some of the major points - the business will try to maintain status quo especially and reacting to pirates is different than reacting to businesses - I think that, as someone on the outside without a big care either way, this can't help be have the same issues as IAA vs Pirates.

At the end of the days, now that the IAA has moved towards models that meet the needs that were unmet years ago (streaming, large catalogs at high fidelity, etc) they are able to gasp make money again. They were afraid to leave the "old media" but once forced (kicking and screaming every step of the way) they were able to realize new ways that met demands. People pay for music again.

Not all things are the same between the two (Academic papers and Music/MP3s) obviously, but the fact is Elsevier can only stick to the "old way" at it's own peril. Closing "Napster" didn't solve it - in fact it just created a whack-a-mole game. Attacking Sci-Hub won't solve the problem that Elsavier obviously isn't meeting market needs in an ever changing technology landscape.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#65

Post by gallerytungsten »

It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

If academics got organized to the point of establishing new journals, with legit peer review, they could make all of the information free. Which it wants to be, right?

Obviously, there is the problem of establishing the credibility of these new "free journals," which is a serious obstacle for the reputation-based "publish or perish" pecking order of academia.

But once such a movement is established, it could eventually crush the paid journals and their rent-seeking profits. The captive journals would also eventually emancipate themselves and come around to this free information model.

Since such free journal articles would also be available on sites like Sci-Hub, the transition to (almost) totally free academic publishing could be unstoppable.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#66

Post by redsymbol »

> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in revenue...

How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1], for example, while Elsevier only has 7,200 [2].

It just seems that if their revenue is really $2.9 billion, then even if we weren't in an age of nearly expense-free digital distribution, Elsevier's profit margin should be far higher than it is.

What do they spend all that money on?

[0] http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Apple_(AAPL)/Data/Total_Opera...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

Edit: My employee-count example is a bad one, since the ratio of employees for each is about the same as the ratio of operating expenses. But Apple has huge R&D, manufacturing, and retail expenses. Elsevier's equivalents must be minute in comparison.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#67

Post by tmalsburg2 »

I doubt that Sci-Hub is doing serious harm to the big publishers. Elseview doesn't lose any money when someone downloads an articles from SciHub. They actually save money that they would otherwise spend for bandwidth. The key here is that hardly anyone is buying individual articles. What happens instead is that universities subscribe for journals and this is not going to change because a university can hardly tell their their staff and students: "Hey everyone, we canceled our Elsevier subscriptions. Please use SciHub from now on." This is also the reason why the comparison to the music industry and Napster does not really work. In sum, I doubt that Sci-Hub is such a big deal and much less a game changer. There have always been ways to find pirated PDFs of research articles. Sci-Hub just made it a little bit more convenient.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#68

Post by detaro »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #67

I doubt that Sci-Hub is doing serious harm to the big publishers. Elseview doesn't lose any money when someone downloads an articles from SciHub. They actually save money that they would otherwise spend for bandwidth. The key here is that hardly anyone is buying individual articles. What happens instead is that universities subscribe for journals and this is not going to change because a university can hardly tell th…

More people getting their papers from SciHub means less people using their universities subscriptions, and even less people complaining when the university wants to cancel the subscription to save money.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#69

Post by tmalsburg2 »

lottin wrote: post #59

Academic publishers are parasitic industry. They profit from somebody else's work without contributing anything of value themselves. If they go away, everybody wins.

What the big publishers offer is prestige and most academics are addicted to that prestige. Getting into Science or Nature is like a heroin. No academic-run open access web journal offers this high. Apart from that, journal prestige also plays a key role in the distribution of funding, for example in the UK. Many researchers feel they just cannot afford to publish in more ethically correct journals because these journals have less prestige which will make it harder for them to compete for funding. Of course all this doesn't change the fact that this industry is completely parasitic.
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