Someone really needs to create an alternative to impact factor that doesn't heavily bias in favor of long established paid journals. Elsevier and other such journal publishers rely on business models that drive up the cost of education, reduce access to knowledge, and skew the incentives of researchers - in short they make humanity collectively dumber and we all suffer for it. It would be in everyone's best interest for researchers to switch over to publishing in free journals, we'd be good, but that won't happen so long as the free journals are labelled inferior to the paid ones, and thus researchers are penalized for bucking the system.
Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
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Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us sh…
Thank you for sharing an inspiring story. When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the doctors. My conclusion…
> My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be sure to do your own research
I would alter this slightly to "have a trusted advocate do research and talk to many doctors". The person with the life threatening diagnosis may not be in the right frame of mind to advocate for the best treatment. Should you ever find yourself in the hospital, having a capable ally alongside you can make a world of difference.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
I understand that. But isn’t it useful to know about other avenues, in case SciHub is unavailable to you, or you just don’t want to use it?
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#114Hackernews comments were generally onboard with Twitter banning Trump for controversial tweets that can be considered as incitement. As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that disregards and breaches copyright. If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer areas (Trump), you shouldn’t be surprised when they do the same for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub). It scares me that these…
In my experience, those applauding twitter for banning Trump are a different demographic than those who are criticizing the ban on Scihub.
I find both to be an abuse of power by Twitter. Sec. 230 protects Twitter from being accountable for content produced by its users. At the same time, it wants to engage in political activism at an organizational level.
Twitter wants to be the all-powerful Editor-in-chief with power to censor the world's headlines. But, they also want to be unaccountable for the content produced by its platform. That is blatantly hypocritical.
A corporate entity with pure profit motives and without the people's mandate, should not have the power to control speech without accountability.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
My only problem with this is who determines what is election misinformation? If Russian authorities call another dubious election in favor of Putin, do we just accept that now and ban any dissenting opinions? I mean after all their authorities have set the official narrative, isn't anything else misinformation now?
While I think the comparison is a bit unfair, it does raise an interesting dilemma. I really don't know what you do in that situation. I don't think their government would be considered the trusted authorities on the matter, but who would be? At the same time Twitter is not a Russian company and does not have a large Russian presence that I know of. Are they under any moral obligation to help maintain free and fair e…
Yeah I just used a more extreme example to make the point.
Twitter is US based but they purposefully operate in a multi-national manner serving users across the world, so it's easy to argue that there is some responsibility.
If Twitter wants to play arbitrator and set that expectation to the international community, what happens when they don't remove "misinformation" in other countries?
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#116At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix laws so that it becomes either legal or useless. That's no easy task, but it's much better than having scientists from all over the world rely on it while simultaneously pretending they are dangerous criminals.
SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect. Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all. Second blow s…
If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here.
And also Netflix.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
And having to pay double digit for a paper just to make one citation.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#118Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before. If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fractio…
Gabe Newell was known for taking this stance if I recall correctly, describing piracy as usually a service problem and not a pricing problem.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#119How can Sci-Hub and LibGen be mirrored? When I last looked into it, it was closed source.
The important part is not the source code but the content. As for libgen, they provide torrents per 1000 (I think) books, so maybe downloading and seeding those could be helpful? (But I heard they recently created IPFS mirros as well)
Both are important here. When I was looking into it, the data was useless without the source code. The names are obfuscated and impossible to query without the application source plus the map of file names to document metadata.
I would be unable to mirror LibGen and Sci-Hub with what is currently available. I would be ECSTATIC to be proven wrong.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#120Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before. If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fractio…
> The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor... I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and politics the same way: XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it should be more efficient and productive, people should choose it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest without coercion or propag…
what's a monopoly?