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Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

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Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#111

Post by rwnspace »

ksk wrote: post #92
rwnspace wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people often do approach researchers. It's just nigh-on impossible to expect researchers not to try and get published in Nature, for example. The effect on credentials (and career) is too great. And of course the department they work for will be pushing for it too. Besides being the main source of academic esteem, there is a serious structural issue where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet…

The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) of "journals provide little to no value and therefore publications should be free" and "researchers value the curation of top journals because (seemingly) only high quality papers get accepted" are quite at odds with each other I think. >where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. But they are given the 'knowledge'. Sur…

> The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) [...] are quite at odds with each other I think.

Yeah, I can see your point, but I think both can reasonably appear true: credentials are very 'sticky' concepts which seem reliable and are hard to dismiss unless everyone else is doing it too...

> Maybe government grants should come with a clause for open-access..

Hard agree.

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#112

Post by sleavey »

tetrazine wrote: post #107
Jedi72 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanatio…

Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed. While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsource…

Agreed. Academia is gradually doing a better job of explaining research to the public, but this is (rightfully) separate from explaining it to other experts in the field. A good example is the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, who among other actions write publicly accessible summaries [1] and infographics [2] of most of their big detections.

Some groups have a (never large enough) budget to fund flyers, posters, videos, websites, etc. for public outreach and visits to public events. It's also usually possible to ask for this kind of fund when applying for research grants - like adding an extra 3% on top of what you ask for in order to publicise the work.

[1] https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php

[2] http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#113

Post by tim-- »

syedkarim wrote: post #41
nneonneo wrote: post #14

The total collection is 54.54 TiB, with 690 torrents as of writing. For preservation purposes, I put magnet links to all the torrents here: https://pastebin.com/zTAqS7wz So, even if the torrents go away, the magnet links should still be usable. (Edited: fixed link)

Even if an entire satellite transponder (36 MHz) was used to broadcast these files (assuming 100Mbps broadcast/downlink), it would still take two months to download the whole thing.

Well, that depends on the code rate and modulation.

DVB-S2X 32APSK 32/45 could do 150Mbps with the same bandwidth (as in, the same amount of radio space, not internet bandwidth).

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#114

Post by sabercow »

jMyles wrote: post #86
ksk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_all

By posting this link, are you trying to indicate a belief that I am exhibiting this fallacy? Can you explain how? GP asked, "Why are people breaking copyright law?" I thought I gave a reasonably solid explanation - some of the people in question aren't breaking copyright law while others (certainly a good number of people here on HN) don't regard copyright law as a legitimate imposition of state power in the informat…

Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise).

The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost.

This is only your loss. Some people will not talk to you because they know you'll just be looking to say "gotcha", not help arrive at the truth. When most people bring up ideas with others they're looking for meaningful invalidation or corroboration with the net effect of refinement of the idea.

It's often popular, so you'll amass karma on HN, but I don't think you'll find it productive when improving your worldview. Forums like this have a wide variety of people with a varying degree of sophistication in a subject. You can appeal to the people with the least sophistication in the subject and be very popular. But you'll annoy the people who are skipping unnecessary steps. This is fine, but you'll end up moving the forum in the direction of less sophistication.

If a maths analogy will help: imagine that you are in a group of first year maths students talking about the reordering of terms of a sequence. To the more advanced students, this means we are talking about a convergent sequence and specifically a bijection from N to N. Since it's a conversation the details are elided and these students are already making the assumptions that are, to them, obvious. Objections that their statements are untrue for some divergent sequences will simply lead to those people being left behind when the next chat happens.

In practice, on the Internet, some people just aren't told where things are spoken about. I only tell you this out of love. Good luck.

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#116

Post by PeterisP »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #70
Kognito wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference. I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.

Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?

I'm not sure if I get your question right. Pretty much everyone in the academy will be reviewing some papers (there are reasons why it's nearly unavoidable, long story), and they're doing that for free.

Are you asking if they will be reviewing papers exclusively for open access journals and avoiding non-open access ones? Or something else?

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#117

Post by jacquesm »

logicallee wrote: post #106
aldanor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s dozens of millions of articles total, not thousands.

wow. I didn't know there were a grand total of dozens of millions of journal articles published total worldwide. My guess would have been hundreds of thousands at most. These are journal articles, not high school book reports, right? I'm astounded at the number you quote. For example there are about 10,000 papers submitted per month to all of arxiv[1] - which is a huge number. That totals 132k per year or so. For the…

There are a lot of scientists and they work hard (and get paid peanuts, which seems unfair).

Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers

#120

Post by MagnumOpus »

ksk wrote: post #92
rwnspace wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people often do approach researchers. It's just nigh-on impossible to expect researchers not to try and get published in Nature, for example. The effect on credentials (and career) is too great. And of course the department they work for will be pushing for it too. Besides being the main source of academic esteem, there is a serious structural issue where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet…

The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) of "journals provide little to no value and therefore publications should be free" and "researchers value the curation of top journals because (seemingly) only high quality papers get accepted" are quite at odds with each other I think. >where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. But they are given the 'knowledge'. Sur…

> "journals provide little to no value[...]" and "researchers value the curation[...]" are quite at odds with each other I think

They aren't because the journal corporations don't provide the curation, they provide the brand name that attracts heavy-hitting papers. The curation is provided by academics for free. The brand name ("impact factor" of historic papers in that journals) is the one thing that prevents migration.

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