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Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

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Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#41

Post by loup-vaillant »

bborud wrote: post #28
MetaMan wrote: post #17

Taking things on face value I congratulate him. There's been a few times when I've tried to access an interesting academic paper only to find that it's only available behind some pay- wall. Why should we have to pay for a scientific paper if it was produced by a public funded institution? What's the long term effect on the spread and advancement of knowledge if access is restricted and "gamed" for profit? If he's sue…

once you start taking a closer look at academic publishing practices quite a lot of it ranges from "silly" to "morally questionable". and not just in publishing. there's particularly one practice that I find particularly distasteful, and that is the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publicaion on papers. either to market the paper itself ("ooh, look, I have a famous professor's na…

[…] I find particularly distasteful […] the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publication on papers.

I heard an argument that I find difficult to take down: even though you may write a paper alone, the research it is based on probably wasn't done alone. Even if you did your research alone, it likely stands on the research done by your lab mates. Even if it doesn't, you don't really work alone. You talk to people, most notably your advisor, or your research director (depending on your position). Whether you know it or not, those conversations gives your insights that shouldn't go un-thanked.

The bottom line is, it's a team, and the signature should reflect that (non-)reality.

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#42

Post by TheOnly92 »

araneae wrote: post #12

"Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay" Is it any surprise that the fed is attacking torrent sites? Even a tech news site puts incorrect titles on its news articles. He didn't upload papers to the Pirate Bay, he uploaded a 165kb torrent file to the Pirate Bay. It may sound like semantics but it has real legal repercussions.

"A way to get thousands of scientific papers on The Pirate Bay"

Awkward.

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#43

Post by Produce »

nightski wrote: post #8
Produce wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got an idea about this in the concept phase. Think OSS meets science.

Don't think this will work out as well. Not only can you get paid to do OSS, but we (programmers) also have the option of obtaining very high paying jobs while working on OSS projects on the side. Not only this, but lots of research requires quite a bit more expensive equipment than writing software. I mean I would love to see something like this work but I have my doubts :)

I'm not looking to profit from this so I'll give you a brief summary of the concept.

Essentially, the idea is to remove, or at the least, decrease, political influence over science. The problem right now is that very few scientists can research things which actually interest them. Often, they are working for a company which is attempting to make more money, or the military, which is attempting to kill more people, or academia, where the idea is to get the most prestige. All of those things directly decrease the quality of research and have no place in science.

As a scientist, I could go onto this site, write up a hypothesis and outline the experiment that needs to be performed to test it. Then, people who have an interest in the particular piece of research could provide funding, loan equipment or even directly contribute by becoming part of the team. After the experiment has been completed, the results are released in the public domain (this also helps to break up the monopoly that scientific publication have). Crowd sourcing is then utilised to verify the findings and discuss their implications.

To put it another way, science should be something that everyone can do, given enough free time and determination, yet, as things are, only a select few get to do this and often have to deal with mountains of politics to get to that stage.

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#44

Post by sp332 »

lhnz wrote: post #37
sp332 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is still pretty misleading. TPB only hosts the .torrent file, they don't have any of the contents of the files being shared. They don't even run a tracker anymore! Any method of distributing a small file to a large number of people would have worked in the exact same way. The only thing TPB has that (e.g.) Google Docs doesn't is mindshare.

They don't run a tracker anymore?! Are they using other people's trackers or just the DHT feature?

The .torrent file can list multiple trackers. If it includes TPB's old trackers, connections will fail but the DHT and other trackers usually manage just fine. In fact, TPB said that trackers are obsolete ("not up-to-date") and that everyone should just use DHT and peer exchange (PEX) instead of relying on centralized trackers from now on. Some people still use trackers, but it's not really necessary.

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#45

Post by chalst »

araneae wrote: post #12

"Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay" Is it any surprise that the fed is attacking torrent sites? Even a tech news site puts incorrect titles on its news articles. He didn't upload papers to the Pirate Bay, he uploaded a 165kb torrent file to the Pirate Bay. It may sound like semantics but it has real legal repercussions.

"Thousands of scientific papers torrented at The Pirate Bay"

'torrented at' seems to be emerging as the favoured idiom denoting the hosting of a torrent file.

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#46

Post by CWuestefeld »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #41
bborud wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once you start taking a closer look at academic publishing practices quite a lot of it ranges from "silly" to "morally questionable". and not just in publishing. there's particularly one practice that I find particularly distasteful, and that is the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publicaion on papers. either to market the paper itself ("ooh, look, I have a famous professor's na…

[…] I find particularly distasteful […] the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publication on papers. I heard an argument that I find difficult to take down: even though you may write a paper alone, the research it is based on probably wasn't done alone. Even if you did your research alone, it likely stands on the research done by your lab mates. Even if it doesn't, you don't reall…

I don't buy that argument. A person who is responsible for nothing more than the research research ought not to be an "author" of the paper. Research is nothing but data; the choice of what research to use, and the conclusions drawn from that data, are what make the paper.

The argument you cite does not support listing all those folks as authors. For example, one could have papers "Authored by X, featuring original research by J, K, and L".

Re: Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to The Pirate Bay

#47

Post by loup-vaillant »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #46
loup-vaillant wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[…] I find particularly distasteful […] the practice of putting the names of people who had nothing to do with the publication on papers. I heard an argument that I find difficult to take down: even though you may write a paper alone, the research it is based on probably wasn't done alone. Even if you did your research alone, it likely stands on the research done by your lab mates. Even if it doesn't, you don't reall…

I don't buy that argument. A person who is responsible for nothing more than the research research ought not to be an "author" of the paper. Research is nothing but data; the choice of what research to use, and the conclusions drawn from that data, are what make the paper. The argument you cite does not support listing all those folks as authors. For example, one could have papers "Authored by X, featuring original r…

Oh, I don't buy that argument either. But I have heard it in more subtle forms. I just didn't know how to convince the very people that use it of its invalidity.

For that matter, your suggestion to classify the various authors by the nature of their contribution should shatter my argument to pieces. Adding something like "supervised by C" should blow those pieces to smithereens.

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