Sci-Hub and Library Genesis are indispensable.
What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.
I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only bitcoins.
The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
81–90 of 247 posts
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#82Anyone who unironically thinks that the obviously positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy is a lunatic.
Piracy also has obviously positive effects, and you'd be a fool to argue otherwise.
But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms of consuming art.
Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube model.
Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix model.
Ditto for books, games, what have you.
The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale.
I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one outweigh the other.
But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#83At least in my case, Sci-Hub was the difference between getting access to research and not -- and I'm based in the UK.
I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a paywall.
I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay the yearly alumni society membership and access fee).
So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#84I 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…
When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than unde…
That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans.
I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws.
Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.
It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels.
Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.
Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 P…
And my perspective is from someone who does research on small-world networks in their spare time.
For me it's a matter of having access. I can easily find seminal papers like Kleinberg or Watts-Strogatz. Anything that is more recent and builds off of these papers tends to be locked up and I'm not able to afford buying these papers one-off, since I don't even know for sure they'll be in a direction useful to my research.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Maybe could be related to the tuition as well? In most of Europe universities are free for the students
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're still providing a valuable service for free. Why can't everyone get paid?
Reviewers are getting paid from the university, as are the paper authors. The problem is that the journals exploit the taxpayers and grant providers.
I would disagree for the first part: Review usually does not happen during paid hours or is even somehow formally accredited by universities.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#88Why 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.
University of California terminated a $10 million / year subscription to Elsevier [1] but $10 million per year divided between 21k academics and 280k students [2] is only $2.76 per person per month.
Of course, how you square that with the journals that charge $30+ for a single paper and $600+ a year for an individual subscription is, perhaps, your point...
[1] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/1/18245235/uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#89I 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…
While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention. 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 necessari…
> 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.
Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.
Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes, you managed to unmangle my pre-coffee reply attempt correctly :)