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Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

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Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#51

Post by IanCal »

roystonvassey wrote: post #25
roystonvassey wrote: post #18

ELI5: I'm not from academia so please help me understand. Are researchers who publish these [firewalled/copyrighted] papers likely to lose out on their earnings if this is 'open-sourced'? I'm honestly asking as I try to think through the whole 'open-source' paradigm and how it fits in a (mostly) capitalist, libertarian world. Thanks!

Wow! This is ridiculous. How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?

Two major sides:

1. Reputation. Journals are a provider, mainly, of a note saying "this paper is worth reading". This reputation is calculated largely by how much the papers they publish get cited later on. Due to the speed of iterations of science (how long it takes for a published paper to be used in more work, and then that new work to be published) it takes a long time to get past this.

2. Organised peer review. Despite the reviewers working for free, it's still not a free process. There's a great twitter thread about this from someone at peerJ (founder?) but I can't find a link now.

Getting more and more common is to pay the publisher and have the work made openly available, or at least to deposit the work in an institutional repository.

[disclaimer, I work in the science & publishing area for Digital Science, but on analysis of data not the publishing itself]

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#52

Post by Vinnl »

erikbye wrote: post #31

This reminds me of Aaron Swartz's fight. People have made great sacrifices for this. Information that can lead to or enhance knowledge and learning shouldn't be behind closed doors.

I've little doubt that he'd applaud the effort, considering his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#53

Post by Pica_soO »

comprev wrote: post #38
beloch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best journal you think will publish it. 3. The editor (the only person involved actually paid by the journal) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research. 4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to filibuster (this happens), your paper passes pe…

Thanks, that makes it clearer for me (non-academic) to understand. It does astound me how much control the 'journals' have over the academic research world!

They basically work as a "neutral" refree and communication medium between competing groups and meta groups (universitys) and create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce.

The reason they are not replaced is for the same reason, stocktrading places can not simply be "replaced"- aka you cant open up a competing wall-street.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#55

Post by dingoonline »

dotdi wrote: post #3
mlu wrote: post #2

Sci-hub is great! I'm a researcher and use it multiple times a week. I wonder how it works - any insights?

In my understanding, some people have donated their academic login credentials, effectively giving Sci-hub access to their institution's subscriptions. When somebody requests an article, Sci-hub will try and see if it already has it. If not, it will attempt to use some of the donated credentials to gain access, download it and store it for further download requests.

I'm still curious as to how this system works. Don't institutions have logs that would show someone researching topics wildly outside of their field of study?

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#58

Post by john_minsk »

vertex-four wrote: post #12
ColanR wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I searched "particle" (as in physics etc...) and got "article not found". What's up with that?

The point of sci-hub is that it fetches specific articles for you, not to be a search engine. Find an article you want - for example, the PolderCast paper[0] - then enter a link or the DOI for that article, and it'll find the paper most of the time. [0] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2442644

Could you advise any good resource to discover interesting articles?

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#59

Post by dotdi »

dingoonline wrote: post #55
dotdi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my understanding, some people have donated their academic login credentials, effectively giving Sci-hub access to their institution's subscriptions. When somebody requests an article, Sci-hub will try and see if it already has it. If not, it will attempt to use some of the donated credentials to gain access, download it and store it for further download requests.

I'm still curious as to how this system works. Don't institutions have logs that would show someone researching topics wildly outside of their field of study?

Usually, institutions don't subscribe to everything a publisher has on offer, but rather a subset that is interesting for them. Therefore, if a download works with a set of credentials, it should not look suspicious.

Storing the documents on Sci-hub controlled machines also makes sure that repeated requests don't actually hit the publishers, which significantly lowers what would otherwise be suspiciously high traffic.

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