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A World Without Sci-Hub

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121–130 of 206 posts

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#121

Post by ravenstine »

I've heard multiple times, and I don't remember exactly from where, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request.

If that is the case, why exactly don't researchers stick their papers literally anywhere on the internet that isn't a paywall? Is there a legal difference between sharing a paper with an individual and uploading it to a public index?

Honestly, with the current psychology of the public, I don't think this would be worse than having journals pick holding research for ransom.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#122

Post by sitkack »

kriro wrote: post #107

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 mad…

Since corporations have captured government, the solution is as you say, to "burn down" the old journals and rebuild them on top of arxiv, dblp, semantic scholar, git, etc. The ACM is slowly starting to open up, but it really needs to go all in and just be free for everyone and get a lower amount of of funding from way more sources.

You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier. Throw in forums, video conferencing and shared docs and you can build entire academic structures in the cloud. Run a journal on a subreddit, papers on arxiv, video on meet (recordings posted to youtube), code in github, computation on colab notebooks. WeWork should offer wetlab space. ;)

Ideally we would have a storage commons where data that doesn't fit into the arxiv model of papers. Something like object storage but with some built in structure.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#123

Post by chubot »

Terretta wrote: post #108

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. I…

Yes, this is a problem (or the problem). If you attend or work at a University, you probably have good access. Working at Google also provided me with pretty good journal access -- I don't think the same is true for other employers though.

Now that I'm independent, it's searching the web, e-mailing the authors of the paper, and SciHub. This system would be a lot worse without SciHub. (And yes I donated; in fact I used cryptocurrency for the first time to donate)

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#124

Post by Floegipoky »

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.

Yeah I agree, assuming that everyone thinks the same way as academics is "echo chamber" thinking. "If I had access, I would read the literature, therefore they would also read the literature if they had access". The people who barely passed high school and share "covid hoax" memes don't give a shit about the literature, there are a lot more of them than there are us, and politicians are increasingly willing to humor them.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#125

Post by jasode »

ravenstine wrote: post #121

I've heard multiple times, and I don't remember exactly from where, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request. If that is the case, why exactly don't researchers stick their papers literally anywhere on the internet that isn't a paywall? Is there a legal difference between sharing a paper with an…

>, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request.

Yes but in most cases, the authors are only legally allowed to give away the less desirable pre-prints manuscripts that was created for journal submission. The publishers allow them to retain the copyright to their draft work. However, the copyright to the final journal article with all the nice typesetting, pretty graphs, etc is assigned to the publisher. That more desirable finished article is the one behind the paywall.

(That's not to say that some authors "break the rules" and share the final journal article instead of their preprint but that's going to depend on the particular author.)

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#126

Post by sitkack »

Bayart wrote: post #113

Before Sci-Hub, I had to find those among my friends with the right access credentials to the right publishers and ask them to get the articles on my behalf, often in batches to not make too much an annoyance of myself. Needless to say Sci-Hub has been a massive improvement to my quality of life, insofar as satiating my intellectual curiosity is needed. And I'm not even a researcher.

Two great uses of sci-hub are for historic papers when walking the reference chain backwards in time and anything IEEE.

I really wish IEEE and ACM would open their entire catalog of knowledge over a certain age, I don't really care what year they pick.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#127

Post by ncmncm »

Incidentally, many researchers still believe that, to publish in (what they think of as) "high-impact" journals, they have to sign over copyright to the journal. The journals make every effort to give this impression, but it is wholly false.

This has been a public service announcement.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#128

Post by sitkack »

zaphar wrote: post #99
mach1ne wrote: post #48

The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…

Journals don't actually sell editorialization though. They sell exclusive access to content. They claim the content is valuable because they curate/editorialize it. But the core offering isn't the curation. It's the exclusive access. They could offer the curation without the exclusive access and I'm sure many scientists would pay for that curation.

I would pay to hear prominent scientists discuss each other's work. Or have a journal where the content is the meta analysis of the paper which I find the educating part as a non-domain expert in many of the papers I read.

Like the stilted writing in patents, academic writing often has a loud thundering message in the content that is never actually expressed in the writing. If you have the right context it hits you like a red brick, to the lay person is has to be explained.

Some work is like, omg this is going to change the world and another is, showing another construction of an uninteresting thing we already knew. Both are presented in the same manner. Much of this meta analysis happens on twitter and reddit, but is easy to miss. It would be nice if it was contained within the journal structure itself.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#129

Post by DominikPeters »

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…

Springer and Elsevier in my experience (CS and Economics) do very little copy editing, and often make the paper worse during their typesetting (introduce typos, bugs, screenshot figures rather than keep the vector graphics). As a reviewer, the antiquated administrative web system they use to make me input reviews is also a net negative contribution.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#130

Post by ncmncm »

sam0x17 wrote: post #20

As scientists, we need to stop citing papers that are behind a paywall. That is the only way this will end without external intervention e.g. actual regulation outlawing certain aspects of the pay-walls.

You can anyway stop publishing in journals that would put your paper behind a paywall. Failing that, require that the journal not put your paper behind a paywall (which you usually can do). Failing that, refuse to sign copyright over to the journal (which you can always do, whatever the journal hints at). And, anyway, post a copy to a free site like Arxiv under the same DOI.
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