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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

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

#121

Post by Benji_San »

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…

The "copying fees" on storage (this includes harddrives/SSDs, phones, CD/DVD/BD or pretty much any storage medium in some countries) is actually a fee for "private copying" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy) not pirate copying. Historically these fees were introduces with cassettes as it was possible to obtain private copies by recording radio broadcasts and by copying a cassette. I suppose it did make sense 40 year ago as private copies of e.g. songs wasn't usual before cassettes.

The fucked up part is that these fees still exist today when it is generally not possible to easily create private copies due to DRM. I can only assume that politicians who signed of and keep supporting on these laws are either bribed or brain dead.

E.g. CopySwede(https://www.copyswede.se/in-english/undersida-in-english/the...) is the Swedish lobbying organization which collects and lobbies for the fees in Sweden.

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

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

einpoklum wrote: post #110
matheusmoreira wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc.

Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself, with no actual surplus value being produced. It's a resource leak, a circular reference in the economy.

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

#123

Post by qwerty456127 »

Zhyl wrote: post #119
qwerty456127 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On a related note, I haven't seen any publisher or content producer sell "licence only" i.e. I pay them for the right to be able to own/view the content. This could either be a "buy direct, acquire elsewhere" or "pirate first, pay later". In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am…

Microsoft (via a very respectable local retailer) used to sell Office keys which I could only use with Office OPK ISO I could only find available for download on ThePirateBay.

As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/keygen anyway, almost every movie is ripped anyway, business users (pirating is more dangerous for them + they often need support) pay anyway (even if the activation form would accept any random string for serial), most of the users who download pirate copies would not buy a legal one (usually because it's hard for them to afford it) anyway (and that's how software like MS Windows and Office monopolize markets in developing countries where everybody just uses a pirate copy). So why to invest so much resources in DRMs, activation, genuine disks etc?

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

#124

Post by UncleSlacky »

IshKebab wrote: post #32
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.

Is it really more comprehensive? SciHub lets you get literally every paper that is available even if they haven't already obtained it . That's why it's so popular - you can put in some super-obscure paper from your niche field that only 1000 people in the world care about and it will still spit out a PDF.

I did once encounter a paper it didn't have - in those cases, you can try ICanHazPDF on Twitter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF

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

#125

Post by neffy »

improbable22 wrote: post #58
martin_vejmelka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough? Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one…

The norm at least in parts of physics is to update the arxiv version once the paper is accepted, with a note saying "v3: matches version to appear in XXX", with a DOI link. Where "matches" means the content, but not the journal's formatting, spelling & comma preferences, etc. (And ideally this note would also mention any substantial changes, like "new section 4 explaining..." or "derivation in 3.2 re-written, but no…

I do the same (over in comp sci.) - usually the journals will let you put pre-print articles up on arxiv, researchgate, and web pages, and then the final article - sometimes with added spelling mistakes - many of the journals have off shored the editorial process - is on their site.

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

#126

Post by wtmt »

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…

> 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.

Are you really fulfilling your duty if you just buy content with a poor user experience without letting those who you pay know how bad it is? Would they know or have any incentive to fix the system if everybody bought things and still pirated them?

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

#127

Post by tgvaughan »

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 too am part of a well funded university, arguably one of the richest in Europe, and we were recently informed that it's possible we won't have a Nature subscription this year. Of course the reasons are complex, and there'll no doubt be a workaround arranged, but it goes to show that even the most fortunate of us aren't necessarily immune to needing sci-hub to get work done.

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

#128

Post by kilotaras »

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…

Pharma industry in Switzerland also grew rapidly after start due to the fact that it didn't have patents, unlike neighboring countries.

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

#129

Post by nguoi »

goatkarma wrote: post #79
nicoburns wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is definitely a possibility. Our Security team have a quite rigourous follow-up process and that's never been raised but absolutely not out the realms of possibility. However some accounts for users in non academic departments have been used previously too. I can guarantee Sandra in HR has no interest in open science :-D I should note that I am a huge advocate for OA and thinks the who journal ecosystem is a rotte…

I think you should have indicated that you weren't certain in the original accusation.

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

#130

Post by speeder »

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…

I am brazillian.

Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original.

The reason is convenience and good service.

When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get:

often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style)

easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff).

sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time).

Translated to portuguese.

Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all.

Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience.

EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it.

Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here.

This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought...

Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.

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