Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something
Executive salaries.
Do stock buy backs count as profits or are they taken out before that calculation?
Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
191–200 of 280 posts
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pro…
It's only true in the first-world country. Microsoft office is ~$1000, which is 2x higher than average month salary in Thailand/Vietnam. A CD album is $10(?), which is equivalent to 10 meals. A cassette is $3, which is 3 meals. Pirate is the only way to access these things. It's a pricing problem.
Prices of software can be adjusted based on the user's location. Steam does this. It is of course subject to abuse but most people pay the asked price.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
IME, the publisher provides extremely limited support to the academics who do this work (filter/select papers, recruit reviewers, organize reviews, etc). The professors involved are generally doing it as a public service to their field. The publisher provides modest amount of support and support staff, totally out of proportion to what they then charge for access.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#194I donated ~$300 to SciHub and encourage you all to donate as well. Please give what you can, her bitcoin address can be found at the bottom of the homepage. https://sci-hub.do/
Also please post somewhere your support of her with your real name, and reach out with kind words. Every PhD I know relies on this site, but more importantly 10x+ more people I know who are otherwise "outside" academia rely on this site. How many of the world's best researchers in 30 years will have turned out to get their start in research not thanks to Academia but thanks to SciHub? My guess is most of them. And ma…
The page from elsevier website for those who want to check
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/allegations-linking-sci-hub...
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#195Rights 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…
I'm not quite in that rough shape but I have several medical conditions and for years I just stared at summaries and "Pay just $40 to read this article" and the article would be a freshman level essay about the sociological implications of illness. Now that sci-hub exists medicine is accessible.
Anybody who wants to take it down is declaring war on the sick and disabled. Shut down Elsevier instead because they're an organization of long corrupt middlemen.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Very wise, and it's important to remember that no matter how 'in the right frame of mind' you are normally, you are basically a different person when coming out from general anesthesia.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#197Why do we even allow twitter this power. Stop using twitter.
It's their website, they can ultimately do what they please. You have this power too, if you wrote your own website. So does dang here.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#198Why do we even allow twitter this power. Stop using twitter.
This is certainly the best advice. Personally I find Twitter to be the worst of the worst forum formats, and it bugles my mind that anyone actually enjoys using it.
People are addicted to memes and depressing news, cut off the head of twitter and two more will take its place scratching the same primal itch.
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership. We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine.…
> Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
#200Earlier 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
Elsevier have a lot of businesses and services outside of journal publishing that they no doubt sink a lot of money into. I'm guessing they also see the writing on the wall for their old business model and are funneling a lot of cash into trying to find new, more future proof, revenue streams