Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 391 posts

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#121

Post by VortexDream »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #103
amelius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists should put Scihub in the acknowledgements section of their papers. As in "this research would not have been possible without Scihub".

Interestingly, when I was still in university, I never used Sci-hub at all. I can download almost any paper using school's network (or VPN) since the library have subscriptions for basically all the major publishers. I only started to use it occasionally once I've graduated (but I didn't really do any formal research any more.)

Interestingly, every student I know uses sci-hub.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#122

Post by 542458 »

enriquto wrote: post #89
smt88 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be wonderfully altruistic, but it would be career suicide as well.

This is simply not true. The world has changed a lot the last 10 years. In many scientific fields, you are actually expected to publish your "preprint" in the open and also your source code.

In what fields are you expected to publish your source code? In the fields I’ve interacted with it was always an “above and beyond” thing that nobody would raise an eye at you not doing.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#124

Post by tyingq »

qayxc wrote: post #113
NelsonMinar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of needing an unlicensed copy of an article to read about a website that publishes unlicensed copies of articles.

You can just disable JavaScript and the site works fine.

Right-click, inspect, delete element with Javascript left on also works.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#126

Post by enriquto »

542458 wrote: post #122
enriquto wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply not true. The world has changed a lot the last 10 years. In many scientific fields, you are actually expected to publish your "preprint" in the open and also your source code.

In what fields are you expected to publish your source code? In the fields I’ve interacted with it was always an “above and beyond” thing that nobody would raise an eye at you not doing.

i was thinking about image processing or machine learning, but i'm sure this is the case in other fields as well. Reproducible research is a "hot topic" in many places, and for good reasons.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#127

Post by crumbshot »

leephillips wrote: post #114
crumbshot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she learned of an article on my site that describes several methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles, Just looks like an emphatic disagreement to me: https://web.archive.org/web/20200928010251/https://twitter.c... , https://web.archive.org/web/20200928011503/https://twitter.c... Also, considering the etymology ("of the womb"), your criticism…

Thanks for digging that up, I appreciate it; I didn’t think of looking in the Archive. We’ll have to disagree about whether her reaction was hysterical. She called my article “ridiculous” and compared it to recommending that people use horse-and-buggy transportation. I was pretty mystified by the tenor of her remarks. One of my points was that Sci-Hub could become unavailable, either globally or locally, so it’s good…

> Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use the word “hysterical”, which has a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be female.

Then do you think maybe you misread Elbakyan's tone from her word choices, in a similar way to how I misread yours? She even stated in her last reply that she wasn't being hostile.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#128

Post by 542458 »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #92
slim wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you are a researcher, you should publish directly on sci-hub (is that even possible?) Make sci-hub the greatest and most prestigious scientific publication

> most prestigious The existing "prestigious" journals are prestigious because of the peer-reviewing process. How do we solve this problem with Sci-hub? I mean, you can publish your research anywhere (like your homepage) already if you choose to.

It’s not really the peer review process that makes them prestigious. The peer review process employed by world-class journals doesn’t guarantee good science (see: all sorts of high profile retractions). And it’s not really a complicated system - it’s easy to clone, as the procedures are all public and the important players are all volunteers.

But cloning the top journals’ peer review process wouldn’t make you a top journal. Many mid and low tier publications use the same peer review process as the high tier ones.

It’s more of a bit of a tautology: the most prestigious journals are the most prestigious because they’re seen as the most prestigious - which means they get all the best submissions, the best people volunteer to be organizers, speakers, reviewers, and people pay attention to their proceedings increasing their citation numbers.

This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#129

Post by breck »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #101
jazzyjackson wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If going patent-free is good enough for the transistor… Do you have any rebuttal to parent’s points on Purdue and tech monopolies?

Yes, of course. Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO? Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the opioids had been generics? Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is alcohol addition a huge problem, or not? Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on patents and not on massive spending power, political leverage, and other influencing mechanisms? Do you not understand…

> Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO?

The legal ones do, absolutely.

> Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the opioids had been generics?

"get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is the way to go." Richard Sackler in a 1996 email. I do not see OxyContin situations in a world with intellectual freedom, no. No government enforced monopoly profits, no massive incentive to overprescribe and lie. No copyright, and you get far more honest media, education, and healthcare industries.

> Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is alcohol addition a huge problem, or not?

Maybe it's far more of a problem that is generally known, but that truth is not made apparent because we don't have true freedom of the press b/c of copyright laws.

> Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on patents

On patents and copyrights. If we were to declare tomorrow that search engines did not have to respect copyright law, we would see far better search engines than Google in a year or less.

> The reality is that patents are a relatively tiny element in cost of entry to markets.

Patents deter a huge number of startups from forming. Nearly every successful startup I know of gets targetted by patent trolls, and must decide to play that game and go along with the system. This is very discouraging to a huge number of innovators, especially in critical fields like chip design.

> It's honestly baffling why the anti-copyright crowd believes removing patents and copyright will be some kind of magic bus ride to utopia, when there is no rational reason whatsoever to believe that.

Not a magical bus ride to utopia, but a doubling to perhaps 10x increase in human productivity and equality, yes.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#130

Post by phone8675309 »

ivoras wrote: post #77

What about China? It's famously irreverent towards western-style copyright, seems like it could (well, it's a difficult "it", granted) score some brownie points by making a mirror which is accessible both within and without their great firewall.

This could be a big competitiveness advantage for China in two major ways: 1) there is a large contingent of Chinese nationals studying abroad, and them having access to SciHub makes it easier for them to be accustomed to it should they return to China to research there and 2) it would give China metrics on what papers are looked up and by who (sometimes down to the institution level), which might help them find high impact places to build upon research that other people might not have thought of.
Post reply on HN