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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

#61

Post by damnyou »

catalogia wrote: post #18
piracyadvocate wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist. There was that study in EU that said piracy actually helped the game industry. There is also what the author was commenting, sci-hub is easier to use than the legal alternative. We go tour researchers stuck in bureaucracies, t…

It's hard to imagine how a legal service could be better than Sci-hub. You could make it as good as sci-hub, but how could you make it easier than "paste DOI -> PDF is downloaded" ? Steam beats video game piracy because video game piracy requires shit like having a torrent client or having a friend who has a copy already. Video game piracy was never as easy as sci-hub.

As other commenters have responded, being able to navigate the DAG of citations would be a nice value add.

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

#62

Post by Vinnl »

Robotbeat wrote: post #56
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 technical…

> In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish, i.e. if it's open access).

Not just if it's open access: sometimes authors have to pay "page charges" or have to pay extra to include illustrations.

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

#63

Post by Vinnl »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #36

Times change. Sometimes laws -even once good laws- can end up becoming obviously absurd. When that happens in a democracy, the laws can be changed. 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.

> * Declare Sci-Hub and its practices legal outright, and make it the new normal.

It's not exactly what you mention, but most Dutch researchers are legally allowed to freely share their work six months after publication: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/you-share-we...

> Article 25fa of the Copyright Act (Taverne Amendment) allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles & book chapters), regardless of any restrictive publishers' guidelines.

> The maker of a short scientific work, the research for which has been paid for in whole or in part by Dutch public funds, shall be entitled to make that work available to the public for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.

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

#64

Post by grawprog »

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…

>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.

This may sound tinfoil hattish, but ever since I was in school i've believed it's to keep knowledge out of the hands of the poor. Accessing journals is basically out of the question for ordinary people, unless they go to a university library, or spend money they're not going to spend, almost all reporting on science is complete and utter garbage that at best, gets most of the facts wrong, at worst misrepresents or distorts the article being reported on completely.

I don't like making blanket statements, but i've noticed, many people lack even basic knowledge of scientific methodology and almost see it as a black voodoo magic or something. Average people have no real way to verify scientific claims made by media even if they wanted to.

I have to be honest too, going through school, this attitude was prevalent among my teachers, that scientific knowlege was best left to scientists to interpret for average people. Everything around science has a 'it's our special club' thing going on designed to trickle only what information scientists and authorities deem necessary.

Hell, the data from my own project was locked away by the government behind a paywall, despite it being funded by tax money under the stipulation in our grant that our results and data would all be made publically accessible and we were only studying small mammals.

Science, especially publically funded science, should be available for everyone. I've never agreed with the idea of hidden knowledge. Human progress comes from humans learning and sharing knowledge with eachother. Keeping knowledge locked up for a special elite cripples the progress of humanity.

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

#65

Post by Thriptic »

_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 assume most of the users of scihub have legitimate access to some content. Even the most well funded universities don't subscribe to every journal. When doing a lit search, it is very common to wind up with many potentially interesting papers you don't have subscription access to. Getting access to these papers legitimately involves writing request forms for each individual paper (as access typically costs something like $40 per paper) and then sitting around for between a few hours and a few days before being granted access. Frequently the papers don't even contain the data you want (which you can't know in advance because you can only see the abstracts before paying), rendering the entire exercise a waste of time. It's far easier to simply jump on scihub, get the data you need immediately, and sidestep this process.

It's also not like there was no piracy before scihub showed up. When I encountered a paper I didn't have access to back in the day, I would ping all of my friends at various universities / companies / hospitals and request that they check if they had access. If so, I would ask that they download it and send it to me. They would do the same when appropriate. Even doing this was more efficient than going through official channels, and every time this was done it represents another lost sale. From a user perspective, the piracy has nothing to do with money and is instead entirely about friction.

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

#66

Post by sigstoat »

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..

the data is divided up into torrents of a few GB to some dozens of GB. pick a few that you find numerologically interesting (i download ones with my birth year in their number) and back those up.

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

#67

Post by gexla »

Maybe these journals should get together and duplicate the Scihub interface which pulls from whatever sources the user should have access to.

I have never used these services at a University. Do they even require a login? Or do you get automatic access just from using a terminal on campus?

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

#68

Post by Krasnol »

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…

What is the legal situation on this?

I'd love to seed. I even have the space for quite a lot but seeding illegal content in Germany is a big nono.

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

#69

Post by michaelmior »

grawprog wrote: post #64
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…

>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. This may sound tinfoil hattish, but ever since I was in school i've believed it's to keep knowledge out of the hands of the poor. Accessing journals is basically out o…

poor != unintelligent

That said, I get the concern that non-scientists can often misrepresent scientific findings. I read the other day that apparently lemon peels are 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy at treating cancer for example. But I don't think the solution is to lock away knowledge. The solution should be to try to educate people as much as possible.

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

#70

Post by michaelmior »

gexla wrote: post #67

Maybe these journals should get together and duplicate the Scihub interface which pulls from whatever sources the user should have access to. I have never used these services at a University. Do they even require a login? Or do you get automatic access just from using a terminal on campus?

Normally you get access automatically when you're on any machine connected to the campus network. Most schools also have a proxy server or VPN you can use off-campus. The Zotero browser plugin does a good job for me of automatically detecting resources that can be proxied and redirected so things work pretty seamless for me off-campus as well.
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