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A World Without Sci-Hub

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Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#101

Post by frankling_ »

jasode wrote: post #92
frankling_ wrote: post #12

The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Funding and career advancement hinge on publications in these venues. If we accept that publishers don't offer much at all in return for the publication fees/library subscription costs (barely any editing, reviewers work pro bono, hosting PDFs is very cheap nowaday…

>One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, [...] , each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), Your proposed solution will not work because the sibling journal doesn't have the same paid support staff to do the unpleasant work that academics do not want to do. The…

True, I guess my perspective is biased towards CS. In that field, what I've seen in terms of editing on the part of a publisher amounted to requests for minor formatting changes (to be done by the authors) and insertion of a copyright notice. I have never heard of any publisher-side "first pass screening" of submissions to conferences I was involved in or journals I know the editors of. There, desk rejects are done by the committee/editors (and personally I would be very nervous having a non-expert do this job). To the best of my knowledge, in CS, there is nothing being done that comes close to justifying, say, the open access publication fees at their current level.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#102

Post by spansoa »

Sci-Hub needs to be uncensorable and forked into a separate project, without Alexandra E. at the helm. It needs to be a Tor hidden service with the admin being completely anonymous. There's too much heat around the project currently. Jumping from ccTLD to ccTLD may help a small bit, but a hidden service with an unknown admin (or group of admins!) is exponentially better.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#103

Post by pacbard »

jtbayly wrote: post #97

> “few public figures, if any, draw the direct connection between the expensive barricades around scientific research and the conspicuous epistemic collapse of significant portions of the American political discourse.” That’s because it’s a major claim that has to be defended, not simply declared. On its face the claim seems absurd to me.

It could even be argued that the barricade around scientific research is what kept the epistemic "superiority" of academia and academics. Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. It's possible that this democratization process has opened up the scientific knowledge to the masses but it is also possible that access to scientific literature doesn't really help without the training required to make sense of it.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#104

Post by ghoul2 »

Everytime scihub is mentioned on HN, multiple comments go on about how it should go "distrubuted" - ipfs, torrents, etc. While the current database of scihub is hugely valuable and must be protected in whatever way we can, the true value of scihub is in the "invisible" network of sources for the papers - how quickly papers find their way into the scihub db once they are published. A non-updating scihub will start to depreciate in utility very quickly. _Thats_ the true value Alexandra E brings to scihub - and not easily replaced if she quits/gets into legal trouble/etc.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#105

Post by jtbayly »

spansoa wrote: post #102

Sci-Hub needs to be uncensorable and forked into a separate project, without Alexandra E. at the helm. It needs to be a Tor hidden service with the admin being completely anonymous. There's too much heat around the project currently. Jumping from ccTLD to ccTLD may help a small bit, but a hidden service with an unknown admin (or group of admins!) is exponentially better.

Putting it on the “dark web” is just a different, more effective barrier than the money barrier the industry wants.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#106

Post by mdp2021 »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #80
mdp2021 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The declining quality of journalism comes from cultural tolerance of bad quality - otherwise, they could just have remained unpublished. In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). Similarly, the interest towards openly accessible research results is public.

> In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). I assume "raking" is a typo for "ranking", but I'm still not sure I understand your point. The only official rankings for newspapers I'm aware of is circulation. Are you saying that a newspaper from say Ireland o…

No, the size of the target market is certainly not an indicator of quality - on the contrary: an idealized public tends to enhance quality.

Rankings exist; a widespread one is the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. If you check the 2021 ratings on the map¹, you will see that excellence is reserved to a few countries only - CostaRica, Portugal and Ireland fare better than the UK, France, Germany, the USA and Australia.

With "receiving public funding yet not reaching thresholds of quality for public use" it was meant that if the news organization receives public funding, its quality should reach some level well above that of an agency financially left to its own devices, and its quality should justify public investment. An entity receiving public funding is supposed to respond about its use - practices, outcomes etc.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg

--

Now: the poster seemed to indicate a relation between "market" (number of buyers) and quality. The idea that information, commentary, analysis and research results and validation can be made akin to a "deregulated and for profit industry" (e.g. the music industry) is perplexing. Bread and water - privatized or not - must be accessible and not toxic, as part of societal organization. Less buyers' funding does not imply quality decrease, and free access to vital parts of knowledge is public concern.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#107

Post by kriro »

The real way to change anything (imo) is to get the tax payers more angry at the status quo and out-inovate the current journals.

Right now, I'm pretty sure most people don't care about academic publishing or even know what is going on. The scandal in my opinion is that a professor or phd candidate is paid by the state to do research and then the state has to pay again to license the contributions their employees made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free.

The main problem is that the academic system is a dog eat dog world with people clinging to their positions or fighting with all dirty tricks in the book to get tenure, reputation or funding. I'm not sure how to fix it.

The way to get to a better world probably leads through blood sweat and motivation by small groups. Run an open access journal, make it the best or highly regarded in your small niche. The more of these exist, the better.

Maybe that's an interesting area for an accelerator to pump some non-profit money into. Hire some people as editors, make the content available for free. Use startup strategies to turn it into a very feisty publisher where academics want to publish. Make sure the stuff in the journal is easy to cite and becomes cited often etc. Use a bowling pin strategy to start with one topic (probably something computer science related) and once that is excellent, branch out.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#108

Post by Terretta »

Every time this comes up, I ask if the “academic publishing industry” provides any service where I, as an individual, can subscribe for one reasonable subscription fee, to one single site, with all the research.

It seems no.

- No one service or site or subscription or pass

- No reasonable fee

- No aggregation of all the research

They’ve externalized the useful work back onto the user. Sci-hub does that work for me.

If I could pay $100/month* for sci-hub, I would.

* Footnote: Arbitrarily rating it as 3x more value than, say, Bloomberg. And while I think it should be a public service rather than a fee, if there is a fee, it likely should be geo-adjusted by global income bands: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/4085814679889422...

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#109

Post by dsign »

pacbard wrote: post #103
jtbayly wrote: post #97

> “few public figures, if any, draw the direct connection between the expensive barricades around scientific research and the conspicuous epistemic collapse of significant portions of the American political discourse.” That’s because it’s a major claim that has to be defended, not simply declared. On its face the claim seems absurd to me.

It could even be argued that the barricade around scientific research is what kept the epistemic "superiority" of academia and academics. Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. It's possible that this democratization process has opened…

Scientific papers are incredibly specialized, and no amount of general training makes them easier to read. The best way to get good at reading your topic is to... well, do a lot of reading/corroboration reviewing of said papers. Access to scientific papers is needed, no matter what.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#110

Post by matthewdgreen »

pixel_tracing wrote: post #7
jf wrote: post #2

What are pragmatic things that we can do to push for open access for academic papers?

You start with the scientists make it prestigious to publish in an open source journal, make it sexy, make it lucrative.

Forget sexy and lucrative. You make the NSF and NIH et al. require a link to an open website like Arxiv for each paper mentioned in an annual report. Instead of the crazy system that NSF currently has where you have to upload PDFs to their private Department of Energy archival service that taxpayers can’t access.
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