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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

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

#101

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #75
Calloutman wrote: post #13

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…

> My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. 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.

It's a great question. Inertia/legacy is a big part. But you're seeing new journals pop up with heavy weight support (eLife, PLoS, etc.) that are getting cited more and becoming higher impact. You also now have pre-prints like Arxive and bioarxive. I guess the point is peer-review, modern science moves slow because it takes time to disrupt the trust people put in a Nature, Science, Cell, etc publication. Once higher impact papers start going to other journals, the pre-tenure profs will feel comfortable to follow.

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

#102

Post by rakoo »

inertiatic wrote: post #82
pojntfx wrote: post #2

Anyone 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 c…

Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.

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

#103

Post by nicoburns »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #86
nicoburns wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It could be, but I believe this has been the case in the UK since well before tuition fees were introduced. In the past, I think it was mostly a non-issue there were far fewer students, so university libraries generally had enough copies of books to go around.

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

#104

Post by markus92 »

chdlr wrote: post #87
mschuster91 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At my university, reviewing is explicitly mentioned to be on your own time: we cannot write any hours for it.

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

#105

Post by nicoburns »

rgj wrote: post #91
nicoburns wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> for some reason (possibly strong student unions?) In fact, in my experience the student union actually took advantage of that situation instead. When I started studying at TU Delft in 1991 the student union had a deal with the local bookstore to give 10% discount to their members. So in your first week as a freshman you were told to become a member of the student union because you would get a discount on all those…

At most UK universities, membership of the student union is automatic as part of joining the university (there's no fee associated with being part of the union, so there's no real reason not to join), and the university funds and coordinates with the student union to provide several university services, especially anything to do with social life or student well-being.

It does depend a bit on the university though. I've heard that some have a more oppositional relationship. And there are still issues with some students not feeling represented by the union. They are usually democratic institutions though, with every student getting a vote if they want it, which helps alleviate the worst of those issues.

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

#106

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #100
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc. For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you ge…

So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?

It can indeed be done for free, and in fact there are some totally free journals that are indexed (actually I am using "indexed" as shorthand for clarity/simplicity, because it's a bit more complex than that: it needs to be indexed on a certain database -proprietary, by the way- and ranked with a high enough impact factor - a crude metric based on citations per paper). The problem is that they are still a minority, and often if you are working on subject X, it turns out that no indexed journal on that subject is free. Or maybe there is one, but your paper gets rejected from it so you then need to resubmit to a non-free one.

And why do publishers like Elsevier hold most of the indexed journals? Pure inertia. We keep sending papers there because we need to for reasons like the ones explained above, then our papers get citations, so those journals keep their impact factor high. And it is extremely difficult for new entrants to break into the rankings, because sending a paper to a new journal that is not indexed yet has a huge opportunity cost (months of work that you aren't going to get recognition out of for tenure, promotion, grants, etc.) so unless they start with really great momentum (support from a powerful scientific society, an open letter by big shots in the field, etc.) they never get the needed papers and citations to climb the rankings. So it's not that publishers do a better job so their journals have higher impact factors, it's that they have a captive market.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #84
maeln wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 licen…

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by einpoklum »

> Sci-Hub ... an out and out copyright pirate

Arrr! Shiver me timbers.

> papers harvested (illegally)

illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others.

Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually.

> in China Sci-Hub is banned

(Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.

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

#109

Post by Terretta »

michaelt wrote: post #88
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.

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/…

Is there a single commercial source with the same or more coverage as sci-hub for $600/yr or less?

I’ve got a half dozen subs in a kind of Venn diagram and still am missing things. I’m in a position to pay for convenience, but while paying, am constantly annoyed it’s worse for the user. Same story in film/tv.

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

#110

Post by einpoklum »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #75
Calloutman wrote: post #13

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…

> My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. 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.

> Why are these intermediaries still around?

Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

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