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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#21

Post by entee »

frede wrote: post #11
entee wrote: post #7

Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept. I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays th…

The research institutions would of course save money on the journal descriptions that could then be used to pay for open access submissions.

Fair. I guess there could be a different model too: I pay a "subscription" which means I get x submissions per year for the institution or something along those lines.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#23

Post by paulcarroty »

When any platform really makes difference, their rise is only factor of time. Piracy of books/document/magazines is much easier than multimedia, also tons of cheap readers/tablets available(thanks, Amazon).

Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#24

Post by thaumasiotes »

hyfgfh wrote: post #16
givepause wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because (shh) it's a secret. Survival through camouflage.

Yeah, its not like they overcharge for badly written books and also use a scheme with teachers where you have to buy books to pass in tests

Did you mean to respond somewhere else?

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#26

Post by Topolomancer »

entee wrote: post #8
Topolomancer wrote: post #5

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced…

I love the DOI->PDF single search, it's how it should be. I'd prefer a better more responsive format, (PDFs are still hard to read on a phone or less than huge tablet) but nothing is quite as good for, "just give me the damn paper". And editorship is highly variable, even at the highest end. I remember catching an article in Nature where two curves in separate panes were clearly copy-pasted yet claimed to be differen…

Fully agree here; whether PDF is best is really debatable, but I want the 'one click to get a useful format' rather than having to struggle with their badly-implemented readers (which, by the way, are lacking accessibility; I am your quintessential near-sighted nerd and I often have to 'manually zoom' because some dolt thought it might be a good idea to deactivate increasing the font size).

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#27

Post by roenxi »

Curiously, even if the quality is lower the open platform would presumably still win. There are a huge number of people in the category "desperately need to know, but don't realise that their need justifies paying to know". The sort of person who is comfortable reading an academic paper and will cheerfully implement something from arxiv, but their employer considers them a boring coder and isn't about to pay for access to a paywalled journal. Such people turn up in every discipline.

And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#28

Post by fbn79 »

Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers (and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose author/reviewers gratification.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#29

Post by thaumasiotes »

entee wrote: post #7

Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept. I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays th…

> If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower.

r/scholar (on Reddit) was the precursor to sci-hub, and made most things available.

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