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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

#261

Post by jacquesm »

blix wrote: post #97
wincy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had “read” them. The first time she mentioned the drug to a doctor he just snippily corrected her on the pronunciation but nothing else. My wife carefully documented everything the paper said in a “Cliff’s Notes” sort of version with links. The next meeting we had with them they were much less hostile, it was like night and day. I guess they were impressed by her careful note taking. Even so the doctor who did p…

Doctor's dislike when patients come in having tried to figure out something about their condition or treatment on their own. It seems to knock them out of their routine. I have personal experience with this as a patient and a family member of physicians. I wish I didn't know what docs say and think about their patients. It's a really unfortunate characteristic of the US medical system.

It goes further than that, it challenges their ego and the feeling that they know everything better than the patient does. This is not unique to the medical profession, but there the damage is immediate and sometimes fatal.

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

#262

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

specialp wrote: post #238
tchalla wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This costs money and is not free I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of this journals for a better of the decade. I personally know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not do anything more than it.

I do not know the case of every editor for all journals. Just sharing my direct knowledge as an employee of a large not for profit society. We did indeed pre pandemic have ~100 editors coming in the office not for free. THey now work remote not for free along with others around the world that are paid. Here are our financials it is public. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131... Not you but ju…

If you work for APS, then you ought to be aware that APS is quite exceptional if it pays editors for overseeing the peer-review process. I am fortunate to work in a field where our main journals are still issued by non-profit learned societies, not gigantic corporations like Elsevier, and still the only people who get paid are the proofreaders and typesetters – the editors and peer reviewers have to work for free.

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

#263

Post by _Wintermute »

marcosdumay wrote: post #183
eganist wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access.

This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.

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

#264

Post by agumonkey »

vbezhenar wrote: post #224
agumonkey wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly .. tons of people spend more than that on gears of way less value (think GPUs for leisure purposes only). Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.

I think that kind of donation exposure would open you to some legal risks. Now you're some kind of visible commercial entity, not just some random IP address in the tracker response.

These days people do fundraising for all sorts of reason and get money. One could always invent a good story to avoid explaining the real reason behind the gears.

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

#265

Post by tpxl »

wongarsu wrote: post #128
TheRealSteel wrote: post #100

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…

Torrents are available here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded. Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT

Are there any guidelines on what to download if you want to host? I could throw a couple hundred gigs of storage and a decent uplink at it, but if I download and never reach a good ratio I did more harm than good.

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

#266

Post by mncharity »

esperent wrote: post #236
hobofan wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Students. A science-literate public. It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it. This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.…

In my university my student library account gave me access to journals so even though scihub didn't exist then I don't recall ever not being able to access a paper. I assumed all universities do this, is that not the case?

Using research literature in science and engineering education is a developing area. Undergraduate life sciences has been a focus, and freshman science literacy. But CREATE-like (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment) strategies have also been used pre-college.

IIUC, pre-college has tended to blend in, or focus on, science journalism.

But I suggest there may be long-term potential to use research literature more extensively, and down towards primary school.

Parts of papers can be much more accessible than others. A delightful paragraph in some paper's introduction section. Some photo, or diagram. Some graph. Or parts of a survey paper, or of a 'context of these papers' column in a good journal. There's been work on using more papers, broadly and more shallowly, rather than diving on each. Doing that pre-college, will be tech sensitive.

Tech matters. Small-group collaboration tooling is important. Annotation of papers, by group and instructors, is helpful. Assorted stop-dead friction is amenable to tech fixes - "what does this mean?", "$40?!?", "what parts of this text might I be able to understand [without having to skim it all myself]?".

So perhaps picture some years out, a small group of middle school students, with AR NPC peer support, surfing a content blend, of educational, outreach, journalism, and research literature, with assorted tooling support.

For now, apropos sci-hub... If you think hitting paywalls is frustrating, picture the impact on STEM-retention at-risk students, with little experience, and very uncertain they are welcome here. Or you, now, surfing an HN comment, hearing of research literature being used to teach critical thinking to pre-service teachers, briefly intrigued, which might be gone in a moment, or become the seed a passion project - you google scholar, and... $40 to see more than a low-content abstract. Or sci-hub.

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

#267

Post by marcosdumay »

_Wintermute wrote: post #263
marcosdumay wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access. This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.

I'm not allowed to distribute anything that I ever published (what is not much), but yes, I think that one rule has more variance.

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

#268

Post by talhah »

f430 wrote: 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…

The scuttleverse [1] comes to mind when you mention this. It allows for creating a decentralized mesh network with communication between each node end to end encrypted. It's able to operate off the grid and allows communication through Lan, Bluetooth etc. Happens to also work offline as the content is stored on your device and any posts you make sync up with others later. I'm not sure about the scalability of it though.

It's also available on mobile [2].

[1] https://scuttlebutt.nz

[2] https://www.manyver.se

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

#269

Post by talhah »

elliekelly wrote: post #92
TimMurnaghan wrote: post #65

In the end this could work out well. People go where the stuff that they want is. I occasionally dust off an old twitter account when I want to reach an org which is otherwise hiding any means of human contact. So if scihub does manage to make a meaningful presence somewhere like mastodon that's all for the good - and just hastens the decline of twitter.

Is there any reason to believe mastodon is “better” than twitter though? I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say about twitter and I’m neither a twitter nor mastodon user but I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues? And it seems like it would come with its own set of issues when it isn’t centralized.

> I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues? Scihub can host their own mastodon instance which means they have power of moderation, Twitter cannot impose whatever rules they want to.

Being federated means posts on Scihub can be seen on other mastodon instances. This allows Scihub to allow a select few users to join their instance without limiting visibility of their content as it can still be seen and interacted with through another mastodon instance.

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