Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

jasonshen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 123 posts

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

#91

Post by uxp »

gallerytungsten wrote: post #65

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…

> 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.

Isn't the reputation of those journals somewhat derived from the work that Elsevier puts into editing the papers that are submitted to them? I don't have enough knowledge to claim that it's a lot of work, nor that it costs them a lot to edit and review the submissions, but it's starting to sound like most of the arguments against Elsevier are completely ignoring the actual work they do.

"If we could find some way to do the work that makes the Science and Nature Journals desirable we could really change the world here. We already have the distribution portion figured out, so it shouldn't be hard!" I've got some really great ideas for an app, I just need a developer to implement it... etc.

Edit: I feel weird arguing for Elsevier. I personally would love to see all the paywalls and weird academic gateways that hide these fascinating nuggets of knowledge go away, but I have to play devil's advocate on this. Elsevier does do work, and that work is represented in the prestige that journals like Science exhibit.

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

#92

Post by detaro »

uxp wrote: post #91
gallerytungsten wrote: post #65

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…

> 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. Isn't the reputation of those journals somewhat derived from the work that Elsevier puts into editing the papers that are submitted to them? I don't have enough knowledge to claim that it's a lot of work, nor that it costs them a lot to edit and review the submissions,…

Most of the review and editing isn't done by employees of the publisher, but by other scientists in the field. Sure, the main editors do important work coordinating the process and providing a point of contact, but they get a lot of value from unpaid work in the community. Which they then charge for access.

+ the status of a journal or conference is somewhat self-sustaining, since people want their papers in the best venues they'll submit more/better papers to the venues known as the good ones, which means those venues have a large pool of high-quality submissions to select from, which means they a) can boast high rejection rates and b) have great content, which means they are seen as high-quality, which ...

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

#93

Post by chris_wot »

wernercd wrote: post #88
chris_wot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue of geographically dividing markets doesn't make any sense for products that are essentially information products that are distributed by the Internet. Measures like geoblocking just drive people in markets who are blocked from accessing content, or who are charged higher prices, to just pirate the material. Or alternatively they bypass the geoblocks. Even now people are starting to ignore the various mecha…

Geoblocking goes beyond simple greed... different countries have different laws, supply, demand, etc. Some countries may outlaw certain things. Others may have a much lower amount of money per person/family/gdp. While I agree on the base level (Why should county a pay more than country b... like Australia routinely pays more for software), just saying "it's not fair" or "its unethical" is too simplistic.

If certain countries outlaw certain things then it is not up to the country who allows that same material to block supply.

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

#94

Post by marcus_holmes »

Startup theory 101: your customer is the person who pays you. What they buy is the story about how you're solving their problem.

What the universities are buying is not access to the papers. No-one in this whole system gives a monkey about papers.

The universities are buying a solution to their filtering problem. Allowing anyone to produce "proper science" with no filtering mechanism will kill the universities' business model.

There needs to be a filtering mechanism that stops "crackpot" science from getting in. The journal system works well for this. If all "proper" science is in the peer-reviewed journals then everything else can be ignored as crackpottery.

So the universities sell qualifications that are a prerequisite to being published in journals. People without qualifications do not get published. Papers not published in journals are ignored.

Universities pay Elsevier for journals so that they in turn can sell qualifications to students and farm research grants from governments.

None of this has anything to do with science or access to papers.

If SciHub develops an effective filtering mechanism (like ArXiv has apparently done) then that's the existential threat to both Elsevier and the Universities that support it.

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

#95

Post by nhaliday »

gallerytungsten wrote: post #65

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…

There have been some efforts along these lines in computer science and math:

http://theoryofcomputing.org/ (has some nice surveys if you're into theoretical computer science)

http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ (the arXiv overlay model is interesting)

This is a bit apples to oranges—journals are not as central in CS as in biology or other older fields, and the norms about authorship and preprints tend to be more relaxed—but hopefully the trend will spread to more old-world sciences over time.

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

#96

Post by T-A »

gallerytungsten wrote: post #65

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…

It's been tried. JHEP [1] started like that, as a journal by high energy physicists, for high energy physicists, online only, with infrastructure provided by SISSA. But after a few years, they turned it over to Springer.

[1] http://jhep.sissa.it/jhep/help/helpLoader.jsp?pgType=about

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

#97

Post by gherkin0 »

userbinator wrote: post #83
gherkin0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that? Pretty sure no-one gets "immunity from copyright," at list not to the point where they could mirror Sci-hub with impunity (at least no on in the US). I'd very surprised if archive.org did not respond to DMCA take-down requests, etc.

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

> presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

Then what's the point? The whole point of Sci-hub is to distribute copyrighted papers, "archive" would be inaccessible until it is useless.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

gherkin0 wrote: post #97
userbinator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

> presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change. Then what's the point? The whole point of Sci-hub is to distribute copyrighted papers, "archive" would be inaccessible until it is useless.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by detaro »

uxp wrote: post #90
userbinator wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

> I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted This is a violation of the takedown request, and can result in harsher penalties for the host. It's not a great example, but MegaUpload was faulted for doing just that: Removing the link between a url and the content that url pointed to. Granted they did deduplication so there could be other links from o…

Looking at the text of the law, it always uses "remove, or disable access to" or similar language: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

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

#100

Post by jasonshen »

rmchugh wrote: post #29

Comparing sci hub to napster is a bit misleading. Elseviers customers are not individual scientists, they're university libraries who pay huge sums to get massive bundles of journal licenses. I have an extremely hard time imagining university libraries cancelling their deals with Elsevier and instead telling their users to check SciHub. What it might result in is slowed growth as new customers feel less pressure from…

OP here. Like most analogies, this one isn't perfect. Napster and Sci-Hub are similar in that they are underground yet widely used platforms for acquiring digital content that would otherwise cost money to purchase, but unlike CD's or actual printed journals, cost nothing to replicate. Many academics are specifically downloading papers they otherwise wouldn't have access to via their institution because it is too expensive. And libraries will eventually look for ways to cut expenses and if people aren't clamoring for more subscriptions (because they know they can already get them for free) over time, Elsevier's revenues will decline. There is no need for a death knell. Record companies aren't extinct, but they had to reshape dramatically in part because of the prevalence of pirated music via platforms like Napster.
Post reply on HN