161–170 of 247 posts
From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
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.
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…
I think publishers are important in the review system giving authorities to publications. Without publishers (with the platform being the only publisher) we loose the "authority system". Without publishers we will be in a system more like wikipedia. We can base it on peer reviewer authority, but the platform and scientific comunity will need to fix rules to when recognize a pubblication as "reviewed and accepted". Th…
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Are you planning to publish all of your own papers in open access journals? That would be putting your money where your mouth is. I’ve seen plenty of researchers say “information should be free” and then later publish everything in closed journals because the open access ones have low impact factor. Seems hypocritical to me.
When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right? If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all? What's stopping someone from building a…
A lot of scientists talk big when it comes to open access, but when it comes time for them to publish their own work, they published in closed journals since they have a bigger impact factor.
They basically put their own careers ahead of their belief in supporting open access.
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…
Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide credit by the number of authors?
And then there is bibliometrics, the art of lying with publication statistics. Everything humans get wrong is even worse there. A. Aaronson is different from Al. Aaronson, right? No paper has more than 3 authors, right? Journals always count for something, conferences don't, right? etc.
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…
> Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity. I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."
Complement means when two things go well together.
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…