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US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

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Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#101

Post by tamcap »

HaoZeke wrote: post #90
rayiner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law doesn't operate by going back to first principles ("will it really help humanity?") in every case. We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept, and we evaluate each case by reference to the rules of copyright, without creating special exceptions all over the place. Nor are any special exceptions necessary. Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals. Sci…

You know. Open access just means paid for by the researcher. Not everyone has that kind of money..

There is a non-insignificant amount of work to take a paper from submission to publication. It's hard to determine the exact value / cost of that work, but article publication fees (and subscription fees!) is one way that work is paid for. So while I am sympathetic to your argument, one could then say that "rich" researchers should (based on an arbitrarily chosen morality) pay for open access, and the "poor" ones should go to low APC, subscription journals... I am not sure I like this argument either.

Now, researchers are slowly getting new tools where that cost is accounted for in other ways. I.e. The Winnower, biorxiv, etc. Whether one day one of those, or a future invention will replace academic journals, only time will tell.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#102

Post by rayiner »

mattmanser wrote: post #40
rayiner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law doesn't operate by going back to first principles ("will it really help humanity?") in every case. We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept, and we evaluate each case by reference to the rules of copyright, without creating special exceptions all over the place. Nor are any special exceptions necessary. Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals. Sci…

This presents some pretty extreme view points as if they're perfectly reasonable. I doubt you could find any member of the public who would say "Yes" if asked "Should research you paid for cost you money to read?". No reasonable person would agree with the rules as they are if they were introduced today, we got here because it's not an election issue and special interests and lobbyists have distorted rules written ce…

There is no rule (lobbied-for or otherwise) that says that publishers can put publicly-funded research behind a paywall. That they can is simply a result of the fact that all creative works are copyrightable, and people are free to publish copyrighted work on freely-negotiated terms.

If you asked the public "should there be a special law excluding scientific articles from copyright protection," I suspect most people would say "no." Sometimes the public agrees with the general principles of a law, but disagrees with specific applications. In those cases, we give precedence to the legal principles, not the public's opinion on a specific situation.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#103

Post by Idontknowmyuser »

I wonder what are the challenges against implementing an open "near-full-automated" journal?

- anyone can submit a paper. which is stored in the yet to be reviewed section.

- only users with confirmed university affilation / users that published more than X papers can opt in to become a reviewer.

- a reviewer is randomly selected to receive a review offer [in his indicated field] which he can accept or decline.

- the user and the reviewer are than linked together anonymously and their correspondance is stored to be published with the paper under review section.

- after that the reviewer makes a decision.

- when enough reviewers have made their decision, the paper is marked as rejected, or moved to the published section according to a majority rule.

- if the paper failed,the user then can choose to either:

   * (modify the paper = optional) and resubmit

   * keep the paper public but indicate it failed the 
     review process

   * delete the paper
- if the paper gets published,trusted users of the site can then leave feedback (through the UI) to indicate:

  * whether they could reproduce the results or not:
  this might help alert the author if there are unclear 
  parts in thier methodology description.

  *  if the paper was helpful/intresting to them.

  *  add community questions under the paper, which can 
      be answered by the author / or a trusted user.
- authors can edit their work to correct in anytime they want [ allowing a faster correction of mistakes] , change history is kept to prevent abuse.

from a programming point of view it doesn't seem that hard to do. so what are the relevant obstacles?

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#104

Post by aw3c2 »

KGIII wrote: post #52
aw3c2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do your part and start mirroring parts of it! http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/

Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space. What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this? I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.

Be aware that this is huge: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Library_Genesis

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#105

Post by rayiner »

travmatt wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law doesn't operate by going back to first principles ("will it really help humanity?") in every case. We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept, and we evaluate each case by reference to the rules of copyright, without creating special exceptions all over the place. Nor are any special exceptions necessary. Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals. Sci…

Because most of the research is funded by tax dollars?

So? If the government funds contractors to e.g. clean government buildings, should the contractor automatically be subject to all sorts of considerations "in the public interest" just because it is being paid with tax dollars?

The government, as an economic actor, is entitled to attach whatever conditions it wants on its grants. The reason it doesn't attach conditions such as "you can't publish your results in " is because that would drive away the best and brightest applicants for the grants.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#106

Post by rayiner »

Knufen wrote: post #39
rayiner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law doesn't operate by going back to first principles ("will it really help humanity?") in every case. We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept, and we evaluate each case by reference to the rules of copyright, without creating special exceptions all over the place. Nor are any special exceptions necessary. Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals. Sci…

I completely agree with you, in principle. Though sometimes we have to reevaluate the system and a good way to do this is civil disobedience, which I consider what SciHub is doing. >We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept I disagree here, I think copyright is a great idea, but more and more often, executed poorly. >Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals…

You're basically arguing for the government nationalize the brand and goodwill of prestigious publications, presumably without compensating those journals for the taking.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#107

Post by cobookman »

anigbrowl wrote: post #49
cobookman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the peer review and vetting process. As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive. I've never heard of a research University unable to afford it. And if not for the fees we'd have no journals. Maybe when we are post scarcity then it'd be free. But until then people's time is not unlimited and is worth something.

I happen to live near a research university and while I'm not a student nobody seems to object to me wandering in and using the libraries there from time to time. But for most people the cost of accessing a journal article for casual interest is prohibitive, and not everyone has the funds or time to attend a university. The point of the web is to make knowledge available to everyone. Be realistic, it costs more to re…

> But for most people the cost of accessing a journal article for casual interest is prohibitive

And most people don't have access to the facilities to run proper research. R&D is not cheap.

As mentioned we live in a capitalistic society. Time is a scare resource, and the current journal editors are putting a price to their time.

If you have a passion for cheaper research papers, go ahead and compile papers & start your own free journal. That or help another free journal out.

> Be realistic, it costs more to read a single article on Nature or Science than it does to buy a book on the topic. That's bullshit.

Its total bullshit. I dont disagree. This might even be a great YC Startup opportunity :D. Until someone competes it'll continue being bullshit.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#108

Post by KGIII »

aw3c2 wrote: post #104
KGIII wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space. What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this? I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.

Be aware that this is huge : http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Library_Genesis

I will have to spin up some spare drives and it's going to take a while. I'll do the SciMag, though it will take a few months to synch it all. I've got spare driver and will actually end up needing to set them in a new box. I've been meaning to do this project for a while but lacked a good reason.

Thanks.

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#109

Post by solomatov »

rayiner wrote: post #105
travmatt wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most of the research is funded by tax dollars?

So? If the government funds contractors to e.g. clean government buildings, should the contractor automatically be subject to all sorts of considerations "in the public interest" just because it is being paid with tax dollars? The government, as an economic actor, is entitled to attach whatever conditions it wants on its grants. The reason it doesn't attach conditions such as "you can't publish your results in " is b…

> If the government funds contractors to e.g. clean government buildings, should the contractor automatically be subject to all sorts of considerations "in the public interest" just because it is being paid with tax dollars?

IANAL, but that's actually true. For example, government contractors are required to have affirmative action programs. See, for example here: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

Re: US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

#110

Post by diffeomorphism »

Bromskloss wrote: post #53
Knufen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The publisher, essentially the researcher gives the rights to his paper in exchange for publishing. Then the publisher put the research behind a paywall and even the researcher who wrote it will have to pay.

> even the researcher who wrote it will have to pay. Eh, pay for what? The author already has the article. Often-times, the agreement furthermore permits limited dissemination of the article by the author, possibly even on the author's web page.

Pay for color figures in print, for example (a few hundred per figure if I recall correctly).

Furthermore, you get an author's copy with watermarks with very limited dissemination rights. You don't get a copy of the journal issue unless you pay.

Also, this varies very much by discipline. Math research is pretty universally available on the arXiv, but chemistry or biology is not nearly as pervasive.

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