31–40 of 92 posts
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Just make it _as good_. Add legitimacy at the same level of convenience and you win.
I'd pay $10 a month if addition to pasting a doi -> pdf, that I could also search backward and forward along citations. I'd love to be able to download a paper and everything it references.
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked). Publishers don't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current business model of publishers is predatory and harms science more than it helps, but I see self publishing and private open source initiatives as equally problematic. The definitive long-term solution, in my view, is a centralized public repository, like the Library of Congress. Call it the Federal Scientific Repository or the National Research Papers Database. It would be funded by Congress, or the LoC, a…
How on earth can self publishing and open source even be problematic? Let alone equally so as ones whose only role is profiteering by restricting public spread only by if they get their cut or not and providing no validation - peer reviewers.
Unfortunately, this dynamic is more social than anything: there can only be so many aggregators that can occupy the zeitgeist. That scarcity of attention leads to rent-seeking behavior, which is the main problem with academic journals. The current situation is probably approaching optimal; large institutions fund the moderation and aggregation through journal subscriptions, while access is widely available via Sci-Hub.
Without a profit motive, such moderation would be even more politically-driven than it is today. At the same time, the Sci-Hub community does need to ensure its continued existence because it is such a massive boon to science writ large.
Sci-hub means I can read the latest science about my disability without $40 paywalls on top of a mediocre paper which give eye-poppingly low margins to the actual authors. Papers which ironically often discuss how society makes disability a problem by throwing unnessecary barriers in front of the disabled. That yarn on about how the disabled lack autonomy over their own healthcare.
Sarcasm aside, that title is waaaay loaded. It sort of insinuates sci-hub users are the burden and not the journals.
With all the people using Sci-Hub, I wonder if it is becoming possible to make legislation to either or both
* Declare Sci-Hub and its practices legal outright, and make it the new normal.
* Carve out extra protections for open access to science in general.
Consider also the value of SciHub that you have received already: It has made the authoring of Review papers much easier, and probably improved their quality since you can parse hundreds of papers faster. No longer do I have to worry if the publisher's site is accessible from home, if their website is not down, if i'm gonna have to click 10 links to get the pdf etc etc. A click of a bookmark and PDF is downloaded. Li…
I'm not sure to what extent this helps, but it's at least possible to hyperlink to an individual page in a PDF.
,,I do not, however, contribute anything to the system; I free-ride off their criminality'' The writer has to constatly remind me that running the proxy is a crime, but using it - even if she knows that it's not the legitimate way to get the information- is not. This may be true, still I don't like the tone, as clearly sci-hub is providing the huge value to people, not her. I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving…
Seems like it'd be difficult to precisely estimate the effect of open literature on advancing education, research, and development efforts.
Back when I was a student, we had access to a lot of journals -- but not all of them. And to use them, we had to connect through a laggy VPN to the university, as we often traveled; sometimes it was down. And then when we worked with industrial partners, we couldn't just email them relevant papers as that'd have been illegal. And we couldn't even just email each other papers, as I think the terms-of-use required us to independently download articles.
And, again, that was with university subscriptions! Rising students and professionals who go into industry typically can't access articles at all. Sure, if they really need a specific paper they can try to find a way, but that's a horribly inefficient way to do research; to be effective, a researcher really needs to be able to browse through the literature freely, reading lots of papers without being distracted by technical barriers.
Given that the current system slows down everyone, it's hurting all of us. All of science, technology, engineering, medicine, whatever -- it's all less than what it could've been because we're being held back.
But how do we quantify the on-going harm? How can we guess what sorts of inventions weren't made because researchers didn't have access or were fighting with a buggy VPN? How do we guess at how much education's being held back by students not knowing how to access the literature before college? What about all the damage from working professionals not being able to browse the literature related to their field?
Anyway, yeah, the article's constant references to Sci-Hub, as though it's somehow criminal, were definitely jarring. Sci-Hub feels like it should be legal based on the same sorts of arguments that make self-defense or providing emergency assistance legal.
Consider also the value of SciHub that you have received already: It has made the authoring of Review papers much easier, and probably improved their quality since you can parse hundreds of papers faster. No longer do I have to worry if the publisher's site is accessible from home, if their website is not down, if i'm gonna have to click 10 links to get the pdf etc etc. A click of a bookmark and PDF is downloaded. Li…
> (with articles being pdf and unhyperlinkable) I'm not sure to what extent this helps, but it's at least possible to hyperlink to an individual page in a PDF. https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf#page=2
For those who support sci-hub's mission and would like to help ensure it can never be taken away, you may be interested in the following project to lay the groundwork necessary for a widely-replicated, decentralized version of the repository: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library... All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library genesis project and made available as t…
> Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism
IPFS has no anonymity, so individual nodes could be attacked the way individual torrenters got sued back in the day.
> but there are many ways this could be done
There are currently no scalable ways this could be done. If there were you wouldn't have a single bold researcher providing a single point of failure search engine that hops to some other location each time authorities shut it down.