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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

#101

Post by vintermann »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #69
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 jour…

Talk about vanity fair.

But I guess it's not only researchers who are to blame, but the people who need to be evaluating researchers without being researchers themselves.

I was disappointed in Hassabis/DeepMind's decision to publish the AlphaGo paper in Nature, though. Unlike most, they didn't have to.

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

#102

Post by Symbiote »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #5

The one thing I've not seen mentioned yet in the Sci-Hub discussions is that the national level academic ISPs seem to have put a very effective domain and IP address block on SciHub. I've tested this both from UK and Scandinavian university networks I have access to, and none of the SciHub domains nor the direct IPs are accessible. Can anyone in the US or rest of Europe with university access test this? It's certainl…

Can you submit a support ticket and find out why?

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

#104

Post by justincormack »

kchoudhu wrote: post #41
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is from Cambridge? Eduroam or uni ethernet?

3 Mobile, UK here -- it's accessible. It's shocking to me that your university administrator has put a block in place on a website that isn't obviously malicious. VPNs are cheap. In this case, I think it's worth it to invest in one.

Virgin media is blocking some addresses but not that one so I presume they are on the UK blacklist.

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

#105

Post by ricksplat »

chris_wot wrote: post #93
wernercd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if they have a (eg trade) agreement with the other country then they may do it as a favour.

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

#106

Post by kgwgk »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #85
refurb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If these publishers weren't offering anything of value, then why would authors continue to use them when open source alternatives are available? No one is holding a gun to their head saying "you must publish your paper in Science!"

Actually there's incredible pressure on academics to publish as much as they can, in journals with as much prestige as possible. There may not be actual guns involved, but funding and research opportunities are very much on the line. Which raises the question: who are the pirates here? In what sense is a corporation holding an entire professional community to ransom while adding no real value not being piratical? In…

> But academic publishing seems straightforward extortion of value from universities and governments

It seems universities and governments find value in the service provided by publishers. If they wanted, they could stop making funding and research opportunities dependent on how the results are published, right? I don't see how publishers have much leverage here, let alone a position where they can exert extorsion.

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

#107

Post by nitin_flanker »

the8472 wrote: post #52
kanzure wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right now those huge torrents have as few as 4 seeders Any ideas on fixing this? I've tried offering her storage, bandwidth, or physical delivery of hard drives, but so far no bites (specifically, outright refusal).

Install a torrent client, download the torrents, keep seeding?

Is it safe to do? I mean on the legal side.

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

#108

Post by guico »

The problem with knowledge not being free is that it blocks the very engine of humanity’s progress: building on top of previous knowledge. That effectively slows us down and means we will take longer to solve the big issues of our time.

To me, the only reason why private (some might say evil) corporations like Elsevier still have a place in the world is because they somehow still have a monopoly for quality/prestige. That's basically for historical reasons and it can be solved by creating an open alternative for assuring quality of papers.

We're building just that, a platform for open peer reviews, meant as a layer over all scientific publications used to surface the valuable content. You can check it's current (early) state at http://peer2paper.org and are very very welcome to get involved in the development.

Feel free to shoot me an email (me @ iamguico -d0t- com) as well, in case you want to discuss anything related to making the highest quality scientific knowledge available to everyone.

Cheers!

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

#109

Post by wongarsu »

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…

>for the most part, they can compete on cost and free of the trappings of business deals.

Pirate sites are usually also run by small teams, don't have dedicated user interface experts, can't easily offer apps, etc. Users are willing to pay for convienience, there's lots of room for big companies to be competitive with pirates.

And yet, according to the article about 15% of SciHub users use SciHub because it's more convienient to use than the alternatives. If the pirates are cheaper and have the better user experience, why would anybody not use the pirate platform?

Of course building a product that's competitive with pirate offers doesn't prevent you from legally challenging them. A war can be fought on multiple fronts at once.

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

#110

Post by ikeboy »

UniZero wrote: post #103
ikeboy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

archive.is

Sorry, but that doesn't work. It loops indefinitely on submission.

Try again.

For Forbes you could use incognito and click twice (find article in Google, click, close tab, click again) usually works for me.

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