221–230 of 265 posts
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Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.
Is BitTorrent more convenient than Netflix?
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Researcher at a small company here (eg: SBIR work). I can't even tell you how many hours I've wasted looking for access to papers. Can't exactly use something like Sci Hub at work. But once I do find articles, usually with the help of a local university, I am able to do a lot more work. But combine the normal problem of having to run through many papers and add the inability to see beyond an abstract easily. Open acc…
You're probably aware of this already, but to be sure and to help potential other readers, Unpaywall can help you legally find gratis versions of articles: https://unpaywall.org/
Also can you explain more what you do? With Flockademic.
This is a magnificent cultural artifact, a modern day library of Alexandria. That it had to be 'stolen' is disappointing. Wonder how it must feel for Elsevier to have their entire business up on a torrent. Zero sympathy here.
PDFs are a convenient vector for viruses, trojans, etc. And the users downloading these papers tend to work for academic/research institutions that could be ripe targets for hacking & IP theft.
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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 thing…
under-specifying is also a problem, especially when the framing is a bit sloppy. it leaves a lot of room for weaseling about what was or wasn't meant, and people end up talking around topics and not arriving at some kind of understanding.
it seems to me that the problem here is the question, which seems to be poorly rendered given the context it was presented.
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No, they do not voluntarily approach publishers. It is a faustian bargain in which society ultimately pays the price. I suspect that you either do not understand how academic reputation is built or you think it is somehow beneficial for society to ensure a system that makes scientific knowledge unavailable to anyone byt the elite.
>No, they do not voluntarily approach publishers. What are you basing this on? >I suspect that you either do not understand how academic reputation is built or you think it is somehow beneficial for society to ensure a system that makes scientific knowledge unavailable to anyone byt the elite. Or neither. Its easy to think black/white, but thankfully the world is not so boring. I don't believe that any of the rationa…
Is this legal?
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You're probably aware of this already, but to be sure and to help potential other readers, Unpaywall can help you legally find gratis versions of articles: https://unpaywall.org/
I haven't actually seen this before. Thanks! Looks like it just does what I do manually. Great idea. Also can you explain more what you do? With Flockademic.
Flockademic attempts to help researchers promote their work without relying on publishing it in "prestigious" (and often paywalled) journals. I'm hoping to have quality research get its authors known as sources of credible research, rather than its journal.
I'm also currently in the process of applying for a grant for some exciting work that aims to solve the same problem in collaboration with preprint servers, but whether that materialises depends on the success of those applications. If you're interested and don't mind the occasional Flockademic spam, you can sign up for updates here: https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic (Or to the RSS feed here: https://medium.com/feed/flockademic)
For those of you who use SciHub: do you take any special precautions against malware? PDFs are a convenient vector for viruses, trojans, etc. And the users downloading these papers tend to work for academic/research institutions that could be ripe targets for hacking & IP theft.
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Well, those means are there (most of the time), but if researchers want a career in academia, most of the time there's no other option than submitting their work to "high impact" journals. I don't think sacrificing their already slim career choices is a reasonable sacrifice to ask when speaking of voluntarism.
>I don't think sacrificing their already slim career choices is a reasonable sacrifice to ask when speaking of voluntarism. Right, but I don't see how breaking copyright law is a solution to fixing the problem either. The journals are just going to jack up the rates to cover their "losses". Is there really no other way?
Long term, hopefully there are other ways, and there are plenty of people (including myself) trying to affect that change. If there was an easy way, I'm positive that we'd have found it already, unfortunately. That's not to say that change is in the air, and it might be for the better.
(Btw, as for journals jacking up their rates: most of those rates are pretty non-standard, and the result of "Big Deal" negotiations with university libraries behind closed doors. However, both the pressure of Sci-Hub and publication of the results of some of those negotiations have led to the representatives of public money now having a much stronger negotiating position, so if anything, I'd only expect rates to go down in the short term.)