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How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

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Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#11

Post by j-pb »

amaajemyfren wrote: post #8
jannes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No

If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.

This completely misses the point.

Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money.

The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice.

So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a fair price?

So universities pay twice. The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses.

That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#12

Post by dash2 »

31758329051230 wrote: post #9

Both of these complaints are very superficial given how positive the article actually is.

Yeah, it's easy to get jumpy when you are written about in public.

The bigger picture is that she is absolutely doing God's work. As an academic: screw Elsevier. Those guys, once at the forefront of the printing revolution, are now greedy rent-extracting parasites holding back another communications revolution. The sooner they go out of business, the happier I will be.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#13

Post by meibo »

amaajemyfren wrote: post #8
jannes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No

If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.

Even if there was a "Netflix" of scientific papers, a few years after its prime all of the publishers would notice that it's far more lucrative to make their own Netflix and take all of their content for themselves again, forcing people to go back to Torre- I mean, Sci-Hub.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#14

Post by agarsev »

amaajemyfren wrote: post #8
jannes wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No

If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.

I think that what some outside of academia might miss is that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific output by the entities that grant you funding and career prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not the distribution problem.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#15

Post by lovasoa »

The original article presents her in a very bright light, as a smart and brave woman who is engaged in a legal battle against large greedy corporations. And I find the photo quite cool.

I think she is just overly susceptible, and maybe a little bit paranoid (which is understandable for a person with enemies as powerful as hers).

This reminds me of the time when a russian entomologist named a new wasp species he discovered after her in her honor, and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for a few days in retaliation !

edit: sci-hub was blocked only a few days, not months, my memory failed me.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#16

Post by j-pb »

kwyjibo12345 wrote: post #7

Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the pocḱets of publishers. To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/S…

I hope that there will never be a "legal-streaming" equivalent.

These papers have been paid for already, through the salary of the people that wrote and peer reviewed them.

There is a theft happening, but it's not the way commonly portrayed.

It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community, universities and tax payers, and the politicians and bureaucrats are complicit.

The only reason why people publish with these journals is so that they can get funding for their projects, because the people in charge of distributing these funds are using "most prestigious papers" as the only metric and often have a revolving door relationship with publishers.

The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.

We need to build a better research system, that cuts out the leaches, and distributes money to researchers more fairly. And as a bonus we'd also get rid of the paper mills.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#17

Post by kwyjibo12345 »

j-pb wrote: post #11
amaajemyfren wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.

This completely misses the point. Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money. The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils dow…

The common life cycle of a paper is as follows:

1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays

So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription.

For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#18

Post by amaajemyfren »

j-pb wrote: post #11
amaajemyfren wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.

This completely misses the point. Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money. The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils dow…

You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect there will be some project management (following up on peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers, etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will need to collect some money. My view is it should be small in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in the world.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#19

Post by Tepix »

kwyjibo12345 wrote: post #7

Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the pocḱets of publishers. To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/S…

These papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.

Re: How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub

#20

Post by uniqueid »

I have a superstition: I don't see a robust future for Sci-Hub, Internet Archive or Wikipedia. The internet relentlessly turns everything into worthless trash, so Sci-Hub will die, Internet Archive will wind up with Doritos ads and a paywall, and Wikipedia will focus on sponsored articles and deprecate, in one way or another, articles that aren't commercial.
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