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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!
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…
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!
Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub, including torrents: https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-downl...
Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data
And platforms like https://unpaywall.org try to link open access papers.
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And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks: https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/
I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publ…
Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.
Perhaps my perspective is ignorant, but in my sub-field of computer science, most people put their papers/pre-prints openly accessible on arXiv, ResearchGate, or personal web pages (if the publisher is not open access). I've never used Sci-Hub because I never had to, and when at home or traveling, I rarely have to use my university's VPN, because I cannot read a paper "for free". This is probably a good cultural indi…
I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see to that.
Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream - but not fast enough...
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…
There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all.
Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work.
On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I should note that I am a huge advocate for OA and thinks the who journal ecosystem is a rotten house of cards waiting to tumble. I just see the direct impact of phished accounts at my institution..
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> 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 availa…
Source - I was in a class where a lecturer broke this rule. It was a £100 book with only two copies in the library for a class of 30-40. We (students) queried it and the lecturer was ordered to bring a printed copy (as in laser-printed) of the relevant chapters for each student.