Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads

Post by GlitchMr » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

Post by grawprog » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

michaelmior wrote: post #69

grawprog wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Post by DarmokJalad1701 » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

kanzure wrote: post #52

m-p-3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by michaelmior » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

grawprog wrote: post #73

michaelmior wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. Yeah...me too...I'm guessing people didnt actually read what I wrote...

Post by jsilence » Tue, Jan 28, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

lolc wrote: post #51

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 researc…