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Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

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101–110 of 166 posts

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#101

Post by chii »

azangru wrote: post #93
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #13

Sci-Hub represents everything that is good about the internet.

Well, not really. Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And…

> To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal.

despite the fact that blocking people is "wrong", the good thing about the internet is that it's _allowed_! The internet isn't built on some moral/ethics - it shouldn't have one. It should remain something that anyone can get on, anyone can do anything on, and noone has the power to dictate behaviour.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#102

Post by userbinator »

3131s wrote: post #76
dmingod wrote: post #56

Is there a way to download the whole archive? People can do cool stuff like visualization etc. on it.

Yes, but it's huge. At one time you could torrent it piece by piece but now the link appears broken... http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/ Anyone have the current link? Good luck extracting much of anything useful out of older PDFs though.

This? http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/

I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but the last-modified dates on those torrents span a range of 3 years ago to this month.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#103

Post by matt4077 »

beloch wrote: post #28
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!

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…

You are incorrect, at least for my branch (biology), and the traditional publishers like Elsevier, and well-known journals like Science, Nature, or PNAS:

Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors.

Only the readers pay for the journal subscription.

Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public.

In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year).

Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing.

That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#104

Post by foo101 »

azangru wrote: post #93
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #13

Sci-Hub represents everything that is good about the internet.

Well, not really. Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And…

Can someone briefly describe how decentralization is achieved in archive.org?

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#105

Post by gituliar »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #19
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!

The researchers will not lose anything, only the publishers. Researchers are paid by (usually) universities, and often post preprints i.e. the paper without the publishers formatting, since wider dissemination is usually better.

That is right, researchers are paid by the universities. BUT, to be hired researchers need a strong list of publications in peer-reviewed journals. This is usually the most influential factor for ranking. For this reasons some journals charge fees for publishing your paper, not saying about being paid.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#106

Post by Typhon »

azangru wrote: post #93
xwvvvvwx wrote: post #13

Sci-Hub represents everything that is good about the internet.

Well, not really. Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And…

All websites have founders and personality. Since you mention the PirateBay, they were a team with a rather snarky sense of humour. Archive.org is run by a foundation. There are always people and there's always legal responsibility.

In any case, Sci-Hub is really "everything that is good about the internet" because it's a way to make scientific knowledge accessible anywhere to anyone, in a way that was never possible before. The benefit to scholars and students in poor countries is enormous.

And considering just how disgustingly parasitic the scientific publishers have become, Elbakyan is probably the closest to a XXIst century Robin Hood, much more so than the Piratebay founders, actually.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#107

Post by crispinb »

erikbye wrote: post #40
crispinb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be some minuscule royalties, but by and large academic publishers are reviled for predatory practices. They get close to free content. They get free services from peer reviewers (the essential basis of what they're selling). They charge vast sums to educational libraries for access. They charge ludicrous per-article fees for any member of the public who has the temerity to wish to read about any of the rese…

Supposedly the Journal of Co-ordination Chemistry costs $11,367 per year, 24 issues [1]. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why... https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commerci...

Hah - keeping some parasite's wine cellar very well-stocked no doubt. Not only does this rip off universities (which in most countries also means the taxpayer), it seriously limits access to information for citizens. Many more ordinary people access academic journal articles than I suspect research institutions fully realise. This is particularly true for legal and medical journals, access to which does have real (sometimes life-saving) effects.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#108

Post by throw2016 »

beloch wrote: post #28
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!

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…

If academics cannot get together to fix a model so absurdly broken their problem solving capabilities come into question.

They had access to the Internet before the general public, they would have realized the ridiculousness of the journal model decades ago. You can't always be a victim.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#109

Post by lorenzhs »

superasn wrote: post #67
Athas wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all fields suffer from this to the same degree. For example, I am a fledgling computing scientist. I mostly publish in ACM-related conferences and workshops, where ACM is an organisation run by and for academics and professionals in the computing field, not a for-profit publisher. My submission experience is: 1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best conference or workshop you think…

So does the piracy affect you? Are you in favor of sites like sci-hub?

I'm in a very similar position as the OP (Computer Science PhD student). Piracy doesn't affect me at all. I'm very happy if someone wants to read my papers, however, you don't have to use sci-hub etc to access them - I've published preprints of all of them on arxiv.org. Usually I do this right after I submit to a conference and update it later to reflect any changes made before publication.

This also allows me to timestamp my results - say my paper gets rejected because the reviewers think it's a bad fit for the conference, or they didn't understand my point because my writing was bad, etc. Now I have to improve it and submit it to another conference. If someone else publishes similar results in the meantime, then I can always point to the preprint and say that I did it first ;)

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#110

Post by Confiks »

dogruck wrote: post #44

I'm surprised that this isn't old news for every HN reader. Did something change that I'm overlooking?

It's not so rare for older but well-written articles to show up multiple times on the HN frontpage.

It's somewhat rarer for a 'product' such as Sci-hub to show up multiple times, but considering that the HN crowd is pretty proud about Sci-hub's existence and will readily strike up a conversation about the Evil Publisher Empire, it's not so strange to see it on top.

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