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Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#111

Post by jccalhoun »

Bedon292 wrote: post #110
jccalhoun wrote: post #95

I'm an academic and I have access to most journals through my college's library. I still use sci-hub all the time simply because it is much easier than the legal method where I have to go to my university's library page, log in, search for the article that I already found, struggle with the shitty search to find the article that I already found through google, then click the link to the database, then I get to downlo…

Does your college not offer integration with google scholar? Go into the settings and check 'Library Links.' Scholar then gives me a link directly through the library proxy if the University has access to the Journal. It is amazing, but I have always wondered how many people have access, or even know it exists.

it doesn't for some reason. If I go into the settings for google scholar my university is greyed out. The college I did my phd at had it though and that was nice.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#112

Post by vanderZwan »

IshKebab wrote: post #82
quickben wrote: post #37

This round is going to be fun. See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended. But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization. "Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.

This is quite different to music and film for a variety of reasons: 1. Film and music were always vaguely reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane. 2. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was refe…

Regarding point 4: piracy has provided the ability to masses to a wealth of obscure, hard to find cultural gems. I for example am into animation. There is no way I would have been able to access, legal or otherwise, half of the films I have seen, many of which are cultural milestones in the history of animation.

Also, in wealth terms, if you start with the reasonable assumption that a pirated copy doesn't directly translate to a sales loss, then piracy can be argued to be a net plus, since vastly more people "profit" from it (the people who download) than there are people who suffer from it (the people being pirated).

Just wanted to mention those arguments, since I rarely hear them in these discussions.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#113

Post by tomjen3 »

jancsika wrote: post #100

Would it be illegal for a person to publicly claim that they would mirror content from sci-hub if N other scientists also made the same public claim? Further, suppose a person anonymously made a copy of a partial snapshot of sci-hub content. Would it be illegal for that person to post a public search engine that responds to requests for articles from the collection with a only the hash of that document? Finally, supp…

NAL, but (in the US) almost certainly not. After all stating the following is/was legal:

They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#114

Post by tomjen3 »

KGIII wrote: post #68
_lm_ wrote: post #34

I wonder if closed-access publishing is part of why academia seems so insluated from the "real world". People write for their audience, and if the general public can't read academic papers, then academics are going to write as if only other academics are reading. Likewise, if research output is difficult to access, the feedback loop between ideas and implementation is broken; folks outside academia can't easily comme…

I need to say this carefully. Some things can't be written for a general audience. It can not be distilled that much. That isn't to suggest that citizen scientists should be discouraged, just that some things are actually pretty difficult to explain and to grasp. To be very clear, I support open publishing. I just feel obligated to point out that most of the general public isn't going to understand and it isn't ever…

Math is one thing. I did a lot of research into bio to check if Aspartame was dangerous, and while I didn't understand everything I was able to gleam enough.

I have also read many psycology papers, never had a problem with them.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#115

Post by tomjen3 »

Bakary wrote: post #35
_lm_ wrote: post #34

I wonder if closed-access publishing is part of why academia seems so insluated from the "real world". People write for their audience, and if the general public can't read academic papers, then academics are going to write as if only other academics are reading. Likewise, if research output is difficult to access, the feedback loop between ideas and implementation is broken; folks outside academia can't easily comme…

Scientific output is often misrepresented by the media and misinterpreted by large portions of the public. This contributes a lot to the issue you've outlined. Another problem is that even if all the research in the world were freely available, only a small portion of the population would still seek it out.

But if it is misrepresented, I can go read the original paper for myself.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#116

Post by KGIII »

tomjen3 wrote: post #114
KGIII wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to say this carefully. Some things can't be written for a general audience. It can not be distilled that much. That isn't to suggest that citizen scientists should be discouraged, just that some things are actually pretty difficult to explain and to grasp. To be very clear, I support open publishing. I just feel obligated to point out that most of the general public isn't going to understand and it isn't ever…

Math is one thing. I did a lot of research into bio to check if Aspartame was dangerous, and while I didn't understand everything I was able to gleam enough. I have also read many psycology papers, never had a problem with them.

Excellent. Again, I don't ever want to discourage learning. I just know many will not. That and, well, some of it can be pretty rough to digest.

But, absolutely keep reading, learning, growing, and sharing. I'm just not going to publish with the general public being the intended audience. On the other hand, I'm more than happy to try to explain stuff, for those who are curious.

I'd never discourage a citizen scientist. Never.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#117

Post by kanzure »

mmmnn wrote: post #19

Does anyone know how Elbakyan was 'outed' as the creator of Sci-Hub? When I first started using it, it all seemed quite secretive as to the creator's identity. Was this something uncovered during the lawsuit?

I am not completely sure, but I think I doxxed her by accident on public IRC on 2013-07-06 ( http://gnusha.org/logs/2013-07-05.log ; someone else edited the public logs ("strangeland") to try to minimize my damage to her).

I recognized the rotated scihub admin profile picture because I had met her in person at a Harvard conference in 2010. She was on my pidgin buddy list, of all things.

Opsec is super important, y'all. Even someone who likes scihub (such as myself) might accidentally doxx you when they get all excited about finding who you are (such as I did). I get the sense from the rotated profile pic and subsequent self-publicity that maybe anonymity hasn't been a top priority for her the whole time, maybe she had her name on it earlier than 2013?

I should have exercised more caution.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#118

Post by Bartweiss »

IshKebab wrote: post #82
quickben wrote: post #37

This round is going to be fun. See, I'm old enough to remember this battle starting for music and movies. We know how that ended. But now, it's for the very knowledge that drives our civilization. "Stallman was right", oh how that statement is going to get tested.

This is quite different to music and film for a variety of reasons: 1. Film and music were always vaguely reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane. 2. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was refe…

1. is painfully true. Movies and music cost money to make, and that money is recouped by sales. We can talk about profiteering and Hollywood accounting and the like, but fundamentally sales still fuel production.

Academic work also costs money, but journals have tricked someone else into paying for it. Research gets done on government, corporate, and university budgets, submitters get no compensation, and reviewers do the hard work behind publication for free. Journals have been priced far above costs for decades, but with the advent of online distribution costs have sunk even further while prices continue to rise.

The best (moral) argument against piracy was always "if everyone does this, we won't get more media". That's not even true in the case of journals: it looks an awful lot like the system would find a way to work even at 100% piracy rates.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#119

Post by Bartweiss »

kanzure wrote: post #117
mmmnn wrote: post #19

Does anyone know how Elbakyan was 'outed' as the creator of Sci-Hub? When I first started using it, it all seemed quite secretive as to the creator's identity. Was this something uncovered during the lawsuit?

I am not completely sure, but I think I doxxed her by accident on public IRC on 2013-07-06 ( http://gnusha.org/logs/2013-07-05.log ; someone else edited the public logs ("strangeland") to try to minimize my damage to her). I recognized the rotated scihub admin profile picture because I had met her in person at a Harvard conference in 2010. She was on my pidgin buddy list, of all things. Opsec is super important, y'al…

Huh, fascinating. In all the stories about Elbakyan, I can't seem to find any reference to when she was first revealed as the Sci-Hub founder. It'd be sort of wild if this was how it came about.

Re: Sci-Hub as Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

#120

Post by dang »

Grue3 wrote: post #38

She is a [redacted] Putin supporter. Supports Russian invasion of Ukraine as well. Hell, the whole thing is probably financed by Russian government. "Folk hero", my ass.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14633365 and marked it off-topic.
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