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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)

#61

Post by rgj »

Tenoke wrote: post #55
qwerty456127 wrote: post #48

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal. To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowl…

>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if any…

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them.

I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.

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

#62

Post by hwh »

rgj wrote: post #61
Tenoke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if any…

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition…

Actually they are writing them during that time and use their staff (paid by public money), too. Whether it's copywriting, news checking for the next edition or, in fact, writing passages.

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

#63

Post by varelaz »

I understand why people like Sci-Hub, but basically it will not exist without work of journals that they scrape. If it will consist of unvalidated papers that everyone can submit it will be far less usable, it will be bloated with false research and non-science papers. I don't think that this format of work is vitable in a long term. As far as I see it should be converted to format like Apple Music, when new big player will come with some nominal subscription fee, like 10$/month and will open everything it has, or to Wikipedia format, when there is some comunity that can moderate open source articles and publish them.

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

#64

Post by lorenzhs »

lrem wrote: post #39
azangru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

Many (most?) do, that's where Google Scholar took its PDFs from pre-scihub.

Google Scholar still gets its PDFs from preprint servers and author's websites. I suppose you meant to say that Google Scholar's web indexing is how many people got their PDFs pre-scihub?

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

#65

Post by nicoburns »

rgj wrote: post #61
Tenoke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if any…

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition…

Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year.

For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were available through the library system. Some courses did require a textbook, but use of older editions was encouraged, and often a photocopied "pack" of the relevant chapters would be made available for a small fee (<£15) by the faculty office.

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

#66

Post by robtherobber »

teekert wrote: post #37
Rerarom wrote: post #12

Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The latter is a way more comprehensive repository.

Do you have a tor link? Also for scihub for that matter?

Posting links publicly to resources that (allegedly) infringe on copyrights potentially gets users and/or HN in trouble. However, the article itself mentions at least one address you can access and, of course, there's is always the googling option.

This is like a semiotics game where we play with the signifier and the signified: http://changingminds.org/explanations/critical_theory/concep...

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

#67

Post by jononor »

fbn79 wrote: post #28

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.

I think the ability to pay a monthly fee, as an individual, to sponsor research would be great. But if you allow the publishers to continue to be the middleman, they will continue to be in power and will take most of the cut. I would not buy such a product, on principle. The authors and reviewers are the ones that provide the vast majority of the value. So the monetary (and social) reward structure should be centered on them. The platform facilitating this would need funding too, but their cut should be more akin to a payment processor, say 2-5%. So more like Patreon than Spotify.

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

#68

Post by nicoburns »

goatkarma wrote: post #54
matsemann wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this FUD or do you have anything to back this up with?

20 years of working in HE IT. Random unaffiliated Scihub users in China contacting our University IT helpdesk after the phished accounts Scihub was using to proxy an article had reached it's EZproxy download limit and the 'you have been blocked' message they receive instructed them to contact our helpdesk!

You might be making quite the assumption that those account credentials were phished, rather than voluntarily donated to Scihub. Support for the project is pretty wide (probably well above 50% of academics), so I'd expect credentials from almost every university to be donated to them.

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

#69

Post by goatkarma »

cjslep wrote: post #56
goatkarma wrote: post #41

One thing that is often overlooked is method that Scihub uses to obtain articles, and the impact that method has on the very researchers who use it. Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the phished credentials) . The same credent…

Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through. If you bothered to read TFA, you'd have realized this statement was already addressed by TFA's point on publishers mistaking Sci-Hub's appeal as "simple to use" like single sign-on. Which makes me question your credibility.

Err I read TFA...Just read the top comments on this HN post to see ease of use is absolutely key to why folk use it.

My perspective is from the University side of things so can only speak for that rather than from the perspective of users who do not have access to the content at all.

I've spoken to users who workflow consists of googling the article title to get the DOI, then putting that DOI into Scihub to get the PDF, without even going near the University's library system. Most of the time the Library actually has an electronic copy, but the process to get them, even with SSO, is laborious and confusing. Just look at the SSO login screens for different publishers sites : some say 'sign in with single sign on', others say 'institutional login', or 'Shibboleth login' etc. How are University users expected to jump through these hoops when the can search for the title or DOI and get the PDF instantly?

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

#70

Post by jplayer01 »

paulcarroty wrote: post #23

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.

I don't see a moral dilemma. The journals don't pay anything for the research that they publish. In fact, they paywall research that is often funded by the public.
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