A World Without Sci-Hub • Hacker News Board

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#141

Post by _def » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:02 PM UTC

Floegipoky wrote: post #124

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…

I don't think that's the point they are trying to make. I think it trickles down from research to journalism to everyday people.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#142

Post by Terretta » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #120

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…

What about Deepdyve?

Good question. They don’t make this obvious, but:

- you don’t get the article, you get a browser window

- they only have about 1/2 of the articles (!)

Quoting from their FAQ:

Q. What does "renting" mean?

Renting articles is the simple and affordable way to get the high quality articles that you want, with the same layout and formatting as the printed or PDF versions.

"Rented" articles are available through DeepDyve's cloud-based service and can be viewed through your browser from anywhere you have an internet connection.

Read full text articles as often as you want during the rental period, and depending on your plan, you may print a limited number of pages per month. However, rented articles cannot be downloaded or shared.

Q. Why can't I rent, download, or print some articles?

DeepDyve works with many publishers but unfortunately not all of them have given us permission to let our users rent, download, or print some/all of their articles.

If an article is marked as "Preview" it means we only have permission to display the abstract but nothing else. As for downloading PDF’s, approximately half of the articles in our collection can be purchased and downloaded directly from DeepDyve. For the remaining half, DeepDyve provides a link that takes you to the publisher site where you can purchase the PDF directly from them.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#143

Post by DarmokJalad1701 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

wrycoder wrote: post #120

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…

What about Deepdyve?

Depends on the field. For example, none of the IEEE or AIAA journals are available there.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#144

Post by IndPhysiker » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #125

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 t…

Many for-profit journals are now giving authors a few freebies of final versions to share with friends as the PDFs have DRM included. Old school researchers back before social media would use new articles they can't access as a reason to introduce themselves and build the professional network, which I sincerely hope is still going on.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#145

Post by hyperstar » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

is it impossible to access sci-hub without a browser extension?

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#146

Post by gms7777 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:26 PM UTC

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.

I am a researcher, and despite having institutional access to most papers I want, I still rely heavily on Sci-Hub as do my colleagues. It has been such an incredibly valuable resource and I'm constantly surprised by how complete it is -- I very rarely come across a paper I need access to that it doesn't have.

I do wonder sometimes if it almost makes it too easy, in a way that ends up propping up the status quo of closed publishing and takes away the incentive of publishing in open access sources. Early in my career I remember discussions about publishing in closed journals, concerns that papers will be less read because people may not have access to them. In the last few years, I feel like this has gone away because it seems like everyone (among researchers at least) knows about Sci-Hub.

I mean, I still think that on the whole, Sci-Hub is a good thing for the research community and the state of the publishing industry -- it gives people access to the research and ultimately does take some money out of the publishers' pockets. But it does also make a broken system feel less broken, and thus people are less willing to actively push for change.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#147

Post by IndPhysiker » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:27 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #136

conz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't want to because publishing in open access costs us $2000. Out of curiosity, what does publishing in closed-access journals cost?

Closed-access journals charge the paper author thousands of dollars per page.

It varies depending on the subject area and publisher. Some are free to publish, some have a few hundred dollars a page or more for color (as though they actually print them still), where others might charge thousands to balance the operation costs of a printing company along with journal subscribers. Some journals essentially demand a first born.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#148

Post by biophysboy » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

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.

You might know this already, but you can also just ask the authors, and they'll often send it to you. Definitely not as convenient as Sci-Hub, however.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#149

Post by nexuist » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #122

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 f…

The problem is that this assumes academics want to change and use new methods to distribute their work. The primary goal of all academics is to secure more grants - what happens afterwards is an afterthought.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#150

Post by nefitty » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

mandmandam wrote: post #71

nefitty wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your agenda is, but you're clearly ignoring the uniquely fashy things China and Russia are doing.

You can question my agenda all you like, though I think it's against the 'guidelines' here. But the fact is that the world agrees with me. More people on this planet think that America is more dangerous to democracy, peace and stability than Russia or China, or Iran, or Pakistan. Thank you for the vivid illustration of my point though. I had nearly added a line about how deflection kicks in like an automatic reflex t…

I'm arguing in good faith here. Isn't Russia actively using information warfare to destabilize enemy democracies? Isn't China using cyber warfare to cause economic harm to other countries?

What is it about the USA that is worse than that? People here are brainwashed on Facebook? I'm just honestly not sure what the argument you're making is besides, "Polls say people in other countries think America is bad for democracy." That could be an accurate result for a poll, but what behavior exactly are you pointing at that makes you so confident in using that as an argument?