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Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

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181–190 of 280 posts

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#181

Twitter is slowly being more dangerous day by day. Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level researcher who haven't used scihub. We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please stop pushing humanity to backward direction.

Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election. Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink? 0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/sta…

Please check the url at the top of your browser. If it begins with "news.ycombinator.com" you're in the wrong place. Try posting here instead: https://parler.com/

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#182
post #82
post #33

Earlier 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…

There was a talk about medikanren which can make deductive connections from a database of facts extracted from medical research. The speaker used it to find a treatment for his son's rare genetic disorder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yval98eOyZc http://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper10....

I've spent many hours reading Matt Might's website: http://matt.might.net/articles/

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar? Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols? This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand t…

Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a paper with their consent. And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity…

> Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals?

Yes.

Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.

That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something

Executive salaries.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#185
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election. Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink? 0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/sta…

Please check the url at the top of your browser. If it begins with "news.ycombinator.com" you're in the wrong place. Try posting here instead: https://parler.com/

[dead]

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easi…

> Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. Publishers only archive and index. The rest is done for free by scientists.

If that was true we would not have any physics journals and many math journals. We'd just have people peer reviewing arXiv. Peer review is a lot more complicated than people think to find the right reviewers, minimize conflicts of interest, prodding reviewers, reviewing their reports. Also having editors read submissions first to see if it is even worth sending to peer review. This costs money and is not free. And it is why we have not seen a free model of this supplant journals.

This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.

We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.

The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#187
post #33
post #4

Rights 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…

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…

SciHub got me out of a bad procedure (serious enough that I'd be put fully under), or rather a series of bad procedures. Reading all of the papers on my condition gave me another effective option that not only 1) avoided the procedure, but also 2) if I had gotten the procedure, it's the kind of procedure that would have to be repeated every few years when the symptoms reoccurred. Turned out that a far cheaper, less arduous treatment could hold off symptoms indefinitely. I'm grateful to Elbakyan every day, and am also long past when I would have probably had a second or third occurance.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#188
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easi…

> Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of a paywalled work), without being selective, and without copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do it much more cheaply than Elsevier.

I agree arXiv and Sci-Hub are useful. In the case of arXiv it does indeed cost money to run but not much as they are taking in PDFs and storing them without review, copy editing or curation. And that is fine. But arXiv has not replaced journals still. Getting work disseminated has not been an issue since the dawn of the internet. And that is not expensive either.

The service Elsevier provides albeit at a high margin and predatory business tactics is more than just archiving and displaying a PDF. And Sci-Hub is stealing the extra value they provide by curation, and peer review facilitation. We might agree with it since they aren't a nice company but the costs of copy editing, curating and reviewing those papers is not being done by Sci-Hub they are just doing the cheapest part of the process by being a repository for paywalled papers. They aren't being more efficient publishers by getting the value add part for free. Someone has to pay for that part. And if Sci-Hub just hosted non pirated work that was not reviewed or copy-edited it would be just as laudable as arXiv.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#189

How can Sci-Hub and LibGen be mirrored? When I last looked into it, it was closed source.

Sci-Hub is closed source. LibGen is open source, but published as code drops rather than using an actual VCS. Download the web app from http://gen.lib.rus.ec/code/libgen_legacy_catalog_20190831.ra... Download the database from http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/

Sci-Hub is also mirrored to Library Genesis.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#190
post #161
post #157

I wish there was a decentralized scalable version of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube. It would run off our mobile devices and PC sort of like bitorrent. I am aware of webtorrent (web based torrenting p2p) for videos and such but still nothing in production. IMHO, the next person that comes up with a highly scalable, decentralized, widely distributed mesh network of devices to securely transfer files between peers will not…

twitter: https://joinmastodon.org/ youtube: https://joinpeertube.org/ The fediverse checks many of the boxes you mentioned. While I personally enjoy using it, it still lacks usability for many people, I think.

facebook: https://pleroma.social/

instagram: https://pixelfed.org/

blogger: https://write.as/

soundcloud: https://funkwhale.audio/

At the end of the day, though, the Fediverse is just like any other social network - most people join because their friends or people they know have.

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