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

The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 247 posts

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#151

Post by xzcat »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #123
Zhyl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, I haven't seen any publisher or content producer sell "licence only" i.e. I pay them for the right to be able to own/view the content. This could either be a "buy direct, acquire elsewhere" or "pirate first, pay later". In theory this would be a major win for the content creator. 100% revenue going directly to them with no overhead for distribution, infinitely scalable (to stress: _in theory_, I am…

Microsoft (via a very respectable local retailer) used to sell Office keys which I could only use with Office OPK ISO I could only find available for download on ThePirateBay. As for efficiency (no overhead for distribution etc) I don't really understand why do companies waste resources on technical measures of copyright protection in the first place. Almost every program which is even slightly popular has a crack/ke…

I'm under the impression that massive investment in DRM is more of a way to satisfy tech and (pirate) culture-illiterate humans while making deals for content. Even Steam needed to nominally do something and Gaben's position on piracy/drm is very well-known.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#152

Post by devurand »

rlayton2 wrote: post #40
entee wrote: post #7

Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept. I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays th…

Academics write the paper for free, academics review the paper for free. I've published quite a bit and never had worthwhile input from a non-academic editor. A journal's only real cost would be in hosting costs, which I'm sure would be minimal for static content. While the big-ticket journals have a value from being so picky, often this is at the expense of some things. For instance, it is hard to get replication st…

> I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used instead, where academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it a total weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and haven't got much traction.

A reddit-clone with strong verification/validation of user accounts seems like it would fit the bill. I can imagine a system with a small monthly fee to participate, subreddits with paid moderators (read: reviewers), voting system that would float good papers to the top, and of course comments. The pay-to-participate barrier would hopefully keep the quality high but at a minimum cover the hosting costs. And run by a non-profit foundation.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#153

Post by specialp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #122
einpoklum wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are these intermediaries still around? Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

> Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself…

This isn't really true. I work for a non profit scholarly society publisher, and we pay millions of dollars a year for copy-editing/formatting and also the work to find referees that do not have conflicts of interest/are not busy/actually respond and are qualified to assess the paper is indeed costly. If it were zero or negative sum there'd be loads of open platforms out there for peer-review and publishing.

I am also a big fan of open-access and hate paywalls myself. I also don't like big, for profit, predatory journals. There is value in curated and managed journals. Just not the value that these big corporations are reaping from them.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#154

Post by adamsea »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #122
einpoklum wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are these intermediaries still around? Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

> Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself…

Some probably do those things some of the time.

The others require the appearance of having done so.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#155

Post by JadeNB »

Topolomancer wrote: post #5

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced…

> I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub.

I don't know how well funded your university is—some are so much so as to make the caveat I'm about to mention a bit silly—but, for many reasonably funded universities, a statement like yours has to be qualified with "I have access for now …". Publishers can, and do, up their prices unreasonably at any time, and, at my university, I always have to assume that the access I've got today might disappear with a greedy price grab by the publisher tomorrow.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#156

Post by SeanAppleby »

refurb wrote: post #142
Calloutman wrote: post #13

I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publ…

Are you planning to publish all of your own papers in open access journals? That would be putting your money where your mouth is. I’ve seen plenty of researchers say “information should be free” and then later publish everything in closed journals because the open access ones have low impact factor. Seems hypocritical to me.

When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right?

If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all?

What's stopping someone from building an alternative curation pipeline on top of open access journals that gives academics equal or better signal/noise to the journals they read, and a similar socially accepted prestige for getting into that curation pipeline?

I get that there's not a clear path to monetization, but maybe it's possible, particularly if you could execute more targeted curation for academic subfields that are too small to have their own journals, that you could find some donors and lean on academics supporting the curation process themselves out of their seeming discontent with publishing to drive down costs.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#157

Post by nelgaard »

chdlr wrote: post #87
mschuster91 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewers are getting paid from the university, as are the paper authors. The problem is that the journals exploit the taxpayers and grant providers.

I would disagree for the first part: Review usually does not happen during paid hours or is even somehow formally accredited by universities.

Universities pay you for teaching and researching. Reviewing is part of the researching.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#158

Post by SamBam »

Topolomancer wrote: post #5

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced…

> Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.

I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#159

Post by bergstromm466 »

speeder wrote: post #130
qwerty456127 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

I am brazillian. Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original. The reason is convenience and good service. When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get: often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Go…

Ok you might want to watch this short documentary. Your fun 'pirated' games and software with 'better support' might cost you dearly when your daughter or your girlfriend/wife gets filmed by a hacker, using your own webcam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw - "Security awareness: Filmmaker explores RAT malware, buys access to random PCs for just 15 cents a piece - made short film about his experience"

Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#160

Post by vasili111 »

Calloutman wrote: post #13

I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publ…

>If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing)

Which country are you from? Where are you now, in industry? Is there less toxic environment than in academia?

Post reply on HN