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Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

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Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#111

Post by rsfern »

Santosh83 wrote: post #21
cblconfederate wrote: post #16

It's kind of whimsical to read the praise of sci-hub and fear about its future here. Tech people have access to pools of billions and billions of dollars that are casually being thrown on mindless minor addictions that offer nothing to humanity. Can't someone make an initiative or startup that disintermediates those very old publishers who are trolling science?

There is no profit in it. Of course someone like Gates or Bezos could support a SciHub hundreds of years into the future, but they will avoid the inevitable controversy that will come attached. Rich people will play it safe. The poor can't afford the pennies. So ultimately it falls on to a few middle-class activists and concerned people all over the world. Ethically SciHub (or the idea behind it) is on much firmer gr…

> There is no profit in it

I don’t know that I’m 100% convinced by this. Elsevier makes like 40% profit margins, and their primary contribution to researchers is prestige lock-in, basically.

Scientific publishing is in many ways stuck in the previous century. There are plenty of interesting opportunities to build technology to make that entire ecosystem more awesome, especially as funding agencies increasingly require open access publication.

Maybe there’s still not enough to build a stable company, but I took your reaction as a bit fatalistic

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#112

Post by michaelrpeskin »

blueblisters wrote: post #40
sixtyfourbits wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably; use a VPN. Yes they're copyrighted - albeit not by the authors who actually wrote them, but by the publishers who require copyright assignment for the privilege of having your work hosted on their website.

So when academics casually share papers with their collaborators, are they technically exposing themselves to lawsuits? Or is being part of a research organization/university with subscriptions to these services enough to mitigate that risk?

No one talks about this, but for many (most?) of the papers they publish, there’s no copyright to assign. When I was in grad school, 100% of my research was federally funded (NSF, Navy, NASA) so they insisted that every product of that research be freely available with no restrictions. When we get an article ready for publication, the Journal would send us the standard “you assign your copyright to us” forms. We’d sign them but also send a copy of “the green form” stating that it was federally funded and we didn’t have any copyright to assign. They just ignore that.

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#113

Post by IshKebab »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #82
IshKebab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's called Web of Science. It's very good but it's not free unfortunately. And it doesn't go as far as hyperlinking references in PDFs or defining terms. I agree those would be great, but unfortunately there's not much incentive for paper authors to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Science

Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the bibtex entry has an URL or a DOI, and most bibtex entries copied and pasted from curated sources already have them. If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked references, it's probably just because they're published in journals whose templates don't…

It's not adding the links that is hard. It's choosing the destination URL. Where do you link to? I guess you could link to doi.org. Probably better than nothing but still not ideal because it doesn't actually take you to the PDF.

Can you show an example paper with links?

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#114

Post by sleepingsoul »

londons_explore wrote: post #12
lcvw wrote: post #5

I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substi…

I really wish someone could build a better UI for this research internet. Hyperlinks for all references would be a good start. Finding some way to make some automatic glossary of definitions of technical terms would make scientific papers substantially more accessible too.

Have you come across scite (https://scite.ai) yet? We're also innovating in this space by extracting citation statements from full-text articles and classifying their intent.

So let's say paper A cites paper B. If you look at paper B, we show you:

- how many times it was cited

- the direct paragraphs from paper A where it was cited

- the sections from paper A where paper B was referenced

- ... and a lot more

You can also now search these citation statements directly to find evidence-based information pretty quickly.

- Short video to showcase that search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjCn-4uMJk

- Website with a bit more details: https://citation.to/

You can also visualize citation networks similar to ConnectedPapers, set notifications for new citations on groups of papers you're interested in, and much more.

(Disclaimer -- I work here!)

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#116

Post by sleepingsoul »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #41
lcvw wrote: post #5

I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substi…

What about a Netflix but for science information . Pay $15 a month for access to a rolling catalogue of science info.

You can more or less do this with scite's Citation Statement Search[1,2], or by setting email notifications when we detect new citation statements to one or more papers (grouped by a topic you're interested in like a disease or drug, an author, or more)[3].

Quick video of our citation statement search to give you a glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjCn-4uMJk

[1] https://scite.ai

[2] https://citation.to

[3] https://help.scite.ai/en-us/article/how-can-i-set-alerts-on-...

(Disclaimer -- I work at scite!)

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#117

Post by lcvw »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #41
lcvw wrote: post #5

I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substi…

What about a Netflix but for science information . Pay $15 a month for access to a rolling catalogue of science info.

Libraries can get you a physical copy of pretty much any paper or book for completely free. But somehow getting a digital copy is not on the table? It’s just insane, I would happily pay for a service that did this even if it included drm or something. The journals would never go for it though because they live off of the insane rates research institutions pay to subscribe.

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#118

Post by ncphil »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #42

I find it fascinating that SciHub seems to be highlighting two large issues. - Globalisation and the rule of law. Mostly that's a good thing. But SciHub would unlikely survive if Russia was unable to give US courts the middle finger regularly over the last decade. I am not convinced that the benefits of totalitarian regime outweighs the downsides but it is a thing - copyright law is not patent law, science is not pat…

The main flaw in both patent and copyright law is that the terms of protection are entirely too long. It's now over a century for some corporate owned copyrights. That directly contradicts the goal of copyright: to advance science and the arts by encouraging the building of a commons. The terms of exclusivity were meant as incentives to that end, not personal or institutional rewards. Lately I've been thinking that those terms should have been gradually shortened as the pace of change and speed of communications (including opportunities for sales) increased. At this point IP law is actively hindering the advance of science and art. Projects like Sci-Hub are restoring sanity to a system that lawmakers have for various reasons sold out to the barbarians.

Two years, non-renewable, for any invention or work that had absolutely no public funding. Anything with direct public funding goes immediately into the public domain.

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#119

Post by foobarbecue »

IshKebab wrote: post #113
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the bibtex entry has an URL or a DOI, and most bibtex entries copied and pasted from curated sources already have them. If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked references, it's probably just because they're published in journals whose templates don't…

It's not adding the links that is hard. It's choosing the destination URL. Where do you link to? I guess you could link to doi.org. Probably better than nothing but still not ideal because it doesn't actually take you to the PDF. Can you show an example paper with links?

DOI is the correct thing to link to because the author or publisher has chosen this as their canonical URL for the object. The DOI could and sometimes does point to the pdf, it's just conventional to point to an html version of the paper. It would make a lot of sense to me to standardize a field in the DOI metadata containing the PDF URL. (source: I manage the DataCite membership of a large organization)

Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

#120

Post by KNrDajfZ »

lcvw wrote: post #5

I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substi…

It's the typical Eastern European (or non-US centric) Internet. The IP laws make sense only if people have the capital to buy stuff. When I was a kid in a post-Soviet country, no one ever bought anything original (like a CD with a game). Everything was bootleg or pirated from the Internet.

After [the US lobby started to push for copyright enforcement in the EU under the threat of sanctions](https://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lap...), things have changed. The copyright and IP laws that US lobbies push to the world are killing the idea of free Internet and only benefit large corporations that are untouchable.

Elsevier is Dutch-based and they are fierce in suing everyone who tries to get away with getting free papers that were paid for by the taxpayers.

The "free" Internet doesn't exist anymore, but it's good to have places like Russia where the IP law is not strictly enforced, because everything is broken so no one cares.

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