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A World Without Sci-Hub

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Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#151

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

neffy wrote: post #139
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…

It's worse I think than is generally realised. Back about 8 years ago I looked into getting some kind of university level library access for independent research - was quite happy to pay a fairly significant amount. I tracked down one of the London Universities who offered this if you paid to join their library (it was a couple of hundred pounds then), turned up in person to do so, and was politely told this had just…

Hard to believe this is the 21st century. :-(

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#152

Post by nefitty »

johncoltrane wrote: post #67
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.

Item A being at index 0 of a list doesn't imply the absence of item B and item C from that list.

Perhaps it's an unordered list of similar items?

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#153

Post by Vinnl »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #119
Vinnl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice (as you partly allude to), the problems you speak to already often occur for traditional peer review, except they're less traceable there. Sure, collusion rings and nepotism is (still!) possible, but the data is out there for everyone to see and to call you out on. Now winking through a paper risks your reputation (the very thing that makes your endorsement relevant!), rather than only being potentially n…

I don't think it's a good idea to explain away valid criticisms as inertia. I also don't buy the implicit claim that giving up the anonymity of the peer reviewers could improve peer reviewing. It seems obvious that giving up anonymous peer review would make things worse and that putting the reviewer's reputation on the line would not improve things. It creates all kinds of conflicts of interests and biases. You also…

I don't mean so say that criticisms aren't valid; just that perfect is frustratingly often the enemy of better.

For example, the status quo can be justified by "it seems obvious that" rather than being evidence-based. In practice, single or double blind is very often not actually blind [1], in which case it's hard to argue that it would be any different than transparency. Likewise, a new solution "creates all kinds of conflicts of interests and biases", without even considering whether the existing CoIs and biases are any better. Likewise, if people who game the system today have a low reputation, why would the same not hold true in a new system? Likewise, does anonymous peer review actually improve the quality of the reviews (e.g. [2])?

It's good not to blindly embrace something new, but I think it's important to withold judgement too, and see how it plays out in practice, and to make an effort to compensate for the prejudice people typically have towards the status quo.

And yes, absolutely agreed that much more needs to be addressed to improve science. But I also very much take issue with the idea that peer review is fine as-is.

[1] https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2017/10/31/the-fractured-lo...

[2] Heading "quality of feedback": https://plos.org/resource/open-peer-review/

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#154

Post by petschge »

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…

Because the rules allow us to send out copies of the final article in "personal correspondence with other researchers" but limit upload to preprint servers (arxiv) and institutional repositories (our own website) to the last version that we submitted, without the services of the journal, i.e. before language editing and layouting.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#155

Post by wrycoder »

Terretta wrote: post #142
wrycoder wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, but you can store articles in folders online and bookmark them. You can print a certain number of pages per month - 25, I think, and that adds up. Is it really necessary or even useful to print out or store locally?

It seems like their viewable content is 20% of the available literature, and the coverage is increasing. They appear to have recently added APS journals current up to five years ago. Adding arxiv to that, the physics coverage is pretty good, especially for historical research. (You also can access APS journals via your local public library.)

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#156

Post by wrycoder »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #143
wrycoder wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Deepdyve?

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

Yeah, IEEE is always a problem. Even IEEE members have to subscribe to individual journals, and there are a lot of them.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#157

Post by mlinksva »

> Few people today are priced out of streaming films or buying MP3s

The article is trying to underscore the expensiveness of scientific literature (undeniable) with the above, but it is true for any reasonable value of "few"?

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#158

Post by Bayart »

biophysboy wrote: post #148
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.

I'd definitely think about doing exactly that if I were after a new paper but most of the stuff I'm interested in is in history, law history, linguistics and diplomatic. Those papers often precede the Internet, not even mentioning dead authors.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#159

Post by btrettel »

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…

While I'm not aware of anything quite like what you've described, some possibilities for accessing the scientific literature as an individual are discussed here: https://onscienceandacademia.org/t/how-do-you-access-recent-...

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#160

Post by btrettel »

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?

Is there a list of journals or publishers that are on Deepdyve? Seems to me that the only way to know if an article is on there is to sign up.
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