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

Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 144 posts

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#61

Post by jonathanstrange »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #25
dredmorbius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth . If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals. Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not cha…

> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate. This only works if a…

It's a classic collective decision problem. If almost all postdocs at the same time decided to boycott closed journals, then this would work. However, in practice solutions are always failing whenever they are based on the idea that a majority has to voluntarily make the right move within a short time period, if that means smaller wins for people who do not make the move.

To give another example of such a problem: If in urban areas everyone switched his WIFI router to some open mesh network software at the same time, the gains from this ad hoc network would be tremendous. But if only few switch, the gains are almost nonexistent and the losses can be high. So it's never going to happen.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#63

Post by onikolas »

mirimir wrote: post #41
onikolas wrote: post #40

Worth noting: Many authors will be happy to email you a copy of their paper. People understand that not everyone's library can pay the hundreds of thousands needed for subscription fees. Research Gate has this functionality built in. Also, everyone likes to be cited :) Being easy to circumvent is a big reason why these for profit journals still exist.

True, but I doubt that would scale, for popular papers that got press coverage. Authors could automate, of course. But do for-profit journals limit reprint distribution?

In my field (computer graphics) most conferences have put clauses allowing authors to host the submitted version of the paper in their websites. Far from ideal, but some compromises from the part of the publishers have been made.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#64

Post by SamUK96 »

quickben wrote: post #37

This round is going to be fun. See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended. But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization. "Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.

I think it's a right-of-passage now for every technology-orientated person to realise that Stallman isn't crazy after all this time about Intel, social media and the general degenerating human race he always bangs on about...

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#65

Post by zzo38computer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #33
aaron-lebo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year. My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything a…

I'm not asking how students (and in particular undergrads), or the public are to get access to materials published in journals, but how academics or professionals gain access to publication venues. These are two entirely different matters. You'll also find that the question of who controls the mafia itself is of utmost significance to those who control the mafia. Your comment is rather wide the point.

O, good point. For universities they probably have a system in place, but otherwise you could put on open access, on arXiv, on viXra, whatever. Is important to have anything even independent might sent too if needing.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#66

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

SamUK96 wrote: post #64
quickben wrote: post #37

This round is going to be fun. See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended. But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization. "Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.

I think it's a right-of-passage now for every technology-orientated person to realise that Stallman isn't crazy after all this time about Intel, social media and the general degenerating human race he always bangs on about...

Rite of passage, instead of right. :)

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#68

Post by KGIII »

_lm_ wrote: post #34

I wonder if closed-access publishing is part of why academia seems so insluated from the "real world". People write for their audience, and if the general public can't read academic papers, then academics are going to write as if only other academics are reading. Likewise, if research output is difficult to access, the feedback loop between ideas and implementation is broken; folks outside academia can't easily comme…

I need to say this carefully.

Some things can't be written for a general audience. It can not be distilled that much.

That isn't to suggest that citizen scientists should be discouraged, just that some things are actually pretty difficult to explain and to grasp.

To be very clear, I support open publishing. I just feel obligated to point out that most of the general public isn't going to understand and it isn't ever going to be written with them in mind.

I'm a mathematician. I don't understand some of it.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#69

Post by m1el »

pawadu wrote: post #67

Slightly off-topic: I downloaded the same file both directly from IEEE and sci-hub and the checksum did not match. I am a bit worried that sci-hub is/will be used to spread malware.

Please provide a link to the article so we can see what's the difference in files.
Post reply on HN