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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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

#191

Post by ska »

fluffything wrote: post #177
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…

The only feature I miss in sci-hub is going from a doi to a BibTex file for the citation.

sci-hub + zotero

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

#192

Post by Herodotus38 »

I use sci-hub regularly to look up medical papers in my work as a hospitalist. My community (US) hospital can’t afford to pay for subscriptions. Often, I need a case report or small journal article to better diagnose or treat a patient. Sci-hub has directly benefitted those people and I love it for its simple interface and ability to get you directly to the pdf with one click.

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

#193

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

xamuel wrote: post #162
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…

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?

I'd support dividing by number of authors, but it doesn't. A paper counts the same regardless of number of authors (and regardless or whether you're first author or not), unless it has "an atypically high number of authors for its field" (or something like that), in that case the committee can decide not to count it at all.

In Spain, gift authorship (adding authors that didn't do anything, typically in a mutual arrangement) is not uncommon. Not predominant, but definitely not uncommon.

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

#194

Post by tsomctl »

sct202 wrote: post #150

Alexandra Elbakyan is very brave especially considering all the US based lawsuits that are thrown at her. Aaron Swartz was trying to do something similar at around the same time, and he got the book thrown at him and he didn't even launch anything.

Brave, or smart. She lives in Kazakhstan, which doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US. All she has to do is stay there, which is harder that it sounds. We've nabbed a number of people from former USSR countries when they've gone on vacation someplace warm.

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

#195

Post by marcosdumay »

einpoklum wrote: post #108

> 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 Li…

> I wonder why it's banned there.

Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely stupid.

But, well, it's their loss.

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

#196

Post by zorked »

xzcat wrote: post #148
speeder wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Go…

Just for the record, for the most part, it should be legal to sell CD's of most Linux distributions, assuming you honor the GPL and any other licenses for any software that's physically on the disk.

I'm a bit familiar with the sorts of commerce that the parent mentioned.

Back when broadband was uncommon there were shops where you could just order anything that could be found on the Internet and they would burn a CD-R for you. They would keep the most popular files cached locally, and for the really popular stuff they would have pre-burned CDs in small kits with a xeroxed manual and maybe a colored cover and the like. Support was a big thing too, and community: it was a place where people would hang out a bit and talk to other people, share recommendations, meet people who could fix equipment, etc.

So if you ordered a Linux distro they would prepare it for you just like any software, VCD, disk full of MP3s, etc. I know of people who were introduced to Linux via these shops.

There used to be an earlier version of this sort of shop where you could bring floppy disks and they would copy them for you. As far as I know all of this has just about disappeared. Piracy exists but it is nowhere near as popular as it used to be.

What those shops basically sold was bandwidth: it was a physical version of pirate BBSs and w4r3z websites, from a time when phone and Internet access was harder to have.

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

#197

Post by qpiox »

refurb wrote: post #166
SeanAppleby wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, many (but not all) of the top journals are closed. 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.

The publishers want to have some financial income from your papers. So if you want a paper to be openly accessible, so preventing them from a future income from that paper, as an author you will have to pay their potential incomes, and this can cost up to 3000$ per publication.

That is a substantial sum even for professors from wealthy countries.

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

#198

Post by kerkeslager »

It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc.

It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.

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

#199

Post by Tepix »

goatkarma wrote: post #60
Tepix wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof required. You may work for Elsevier and just be spreading FUD.

I think pretty much any university could provide proof that Scihub uses phished credentials to proxy articles for their users. It's no secret in HE. Here's the first Google link. It's far too alarmist but should at least give the gist. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th... One other point I missed that we have to often deal with : when phished accounts are used to mass-download PDFs, many pu…

Have you seen this statement straight from the owner of sci-hub: https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/some-facts-on-s...

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

#200

Post by DrJaws »

kerkeslager wrote: post #198

It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc. It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publisher…

not only that, most of those studies are paid using public funding just to see private companies profit from them.

That's totally unacceptable and unethical

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