Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ScienceLeaks

scienceleaks.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 50 posts

Re: ScienceLeaks

#11

Post by dmix »

pornel wrote: post #5

Isn't this copyright violation? It might be difficult to defend publication of entire papers as freedom of speech. Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway. It should be ScienceTorrents.

If you're going to do something like this at least put some effort into not getting shutdown.

Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#12

Post by dxjones »

Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it.

The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#13

Post by mechanical_fish »

elvirs wrote: post #9

Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries

Warning: Pet peeve alert.

Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma.

Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost.

Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#14

Post by roadnottaken »

This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#15

Post by ajays »

The intention is noble, but the implementation is horribly broken.

I agree with Rosie that the current system of paywalls is horribly broken. (I spent 10 years in academia, so I have some idea about the system). The example cited (the "arsenic life" paper) happens all the time: you hear about some exciting new discovery, only to find that the paper is locked behind a paywall. This is NOT how it should be!

With the Internet, there is no reason for most (any?) of these pay journals to exist in their current form. The research is typically funded by the government (like the NASA "arsenic life" research), so why should its findings be closed?

We (in the CS/EE field) should be taking the lead here and getting rid of ACM and IEEE journals. After many years as a member, I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because it was clear that these organizations existed solely to support themselves.

There are some courageous authors out there who will put up copies of their papers for public access. I even know of one author who put up a PDF of a book that he published. We need more such authors!

Re: ScienceLeaks

#16

Post by mahmud »

pornel wrote: post #5

Isn't this copyright violation? It might be difficult to defend publication of entire papers as freedom of speech. Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway. It should be ScienceTorrents.

Isn't this copyright violation?

Who gives a crap? there are plenty of laws on the books that you should be honored to violate.

Rip. Rar. Host. Upload. Seed. Knowledge wants to be free.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#17

Post by elvirs »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #13
elvirs wrote: post #9

Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert . Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some k…

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#18

Post by mechanical_fish »

elvirs wrote: post #17
mechanical_fish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert . Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some k…

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do.

(You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.)

The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature. Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train.

Even in the Boston area I have yet to find a neighborhood library with a Nature subscription.

If, in fact, you know where I can legally get access to, say, the Nature and Science journals without either paying hundreds of dollars a year or physically traveling to the local college library please, please paste the instructions here.

Re: ScienceLeaks

#19

Post by p_nathan »

elvirs wrote: post #17
mechanical_fish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries Warning: Pet peeve alert . Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some k…

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

Disagree. With the move towards electronic articles, one needs a login to access the computers at the library or to read the articles.

Sorry. :(

Re: ScienceLeaks

#20

Post by stevenbedrick »

hugh3 wrote: post #3
Bud wrote: post #2

How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?

It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere. Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to uploa…

You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).
Post reply on HN