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Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

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Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#51

Post by lolc »

Merrill wrote: post #45

Journals and papers should be obsolete. New results should be entered into an AI system containing the existing body of knowledge on the subject and which can rapidly evaluate whether the new result is consistent with, contradicts or extends existing knowledge. It would also evaluate plausibility, reproduceability, methods and materials, plagiarism, etc.

Haha if that existed the AI could just emulate infinite monkeys on typewriters to create papers it could then filter for the plausible, reproducible ones to publish. Hm, maybe it would have to adversarially train the emulated monkeys into monkey researchers to get better throughput.

Seriously though our beloved AI doesn't have reliable object permanence yet. It can't read now and it certainly won't be reading research papers for a while. Be nice, give it some time to grow.

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#52

Post by kanzure »

m-p-3 wrote: post #42
covertlibrarian wrote: post #22

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…

I wish I could help, but I cannot afford at least 70TB even for myself..

Then this comment isn't for you, but rather other HN readers.

If you believe in the importance of science, and if you're a software engineer at FAAAANG, then you can afford a 75+45 TB (scihub+libgen) hard drive array. If you are making $300,000/year then a $5-10k hobby project to store distilled human progress is something that you could make financially possible for yourself.

Consider doing this, because this might be the last opportunity to get a relatively complete copy. Just having a copy and letting it sit for 10 or 20 years can be hugely valuable to the world, let alone your community.

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#53

Post by frrad »

covertlibrarian wrote: post #22

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…

It's still extremely raw, but I've done some work on decentralized access to sci-hub. Given an index of scihub ID DOI which can be generated from the DB dump made available by libgen https://github.com/frrad/scimag it's possible to selectively download only the parts of the torrent required to get the article you are looking for.

Check it out, contributions welcome. https://github.com/frrad/skyhub

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#54

Post by petschge »

buboard wrote: post #39
rectang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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

unfortunately, bibliography , which is the most important kind of link is almost never hyperlinked.

An increasing number of papers in my field have the DOI the cited paper as a hyperlink to dx.doi.org which will redirect to the publisher website. Note that this is often done without optical hints (text in black not blue, no underline) so it can be hard to miss.

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#55

Post by [deleted] »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #32
GlitchMr wrote: post #17

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…

My roommate is a student with full access to basically all journals. Funny enough, he still uses scihub because it is easier to use.

[deleted]

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#56

Post by Robotbeat »

TheOperator wrote: post #34

Journals cost the general public access to science while having an even more questionable value than most copyright holders who at least bother to do things like remaster their old properties or develop new drugs. May they burn in hell. 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 whic…

Zero margins. Scientific authors get exactly zero money from academic publishers. In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish, i.e. if it's open access). Zero or negative. They get exactly zero dollars of that $40-per-article fee. Which is why authors will often GLADLY give you the article for free if you email them.

Scihub is in a legal grey area (not really legal, so I can't technically advocate for its use in my position), but in a way it's automating the normal process of asking researchers for a copy of the paper, thus saving the researchers' time. (Researchgate is a more legal version of this, but with much less access to papers.)

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#57

Post by joelthelion »

TheOperator wrote: post #34

Journals cost the general public access to science while having an even more questionable value than most copyright holders who at least bother to do things like remaster their old properties or develop new drugs. May they burn in hell. 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 whic…

> which give eye-poppingly low margins to the actual authors

You mean exactly 0? Authors are almost never paid to publish in a journal.

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#59

Post by onychomys »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #32
GlitchMr wrote: post #17

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…

My roommate is a student with full access to basically all journals. Funny enough, he still uses scihub because it is easier to use.

I use sci-hub at home because remoting into my academic network requires me to use 2FA. It's not like the journal is charging my institution per download, so there's no monetary difference between me getting it either way. So I go the lazy route and I don't really feel bad about it.

Re: Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

#60

Post by Phemist »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #32
GlitchMr wrote: post #17

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…

My roommate is a student with full access to basically all journals. Funny enough, he still uses scihub because it is easier to use.

I also have full access to basically all journals and recently surveyed well over 500 papers in my field of research. Sci-hub was an indispensable tool for this, because it provides a consistent user interface to download _all_ papers. I was able to automate 90% of the PDF downloads because of it, some were blocked because of captcha's, but I was able to solve those manually.

This type of semi-automation would be very impractical and cost an order of magnitude more time if I had to dig through the probably non-existent API documentation individual publishers have, or try and scrape their I'm sure by now heavily obfuscated websites.

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