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A World Without Sci-Hub

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Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#161

Post by leephillips »

btrettel wrote: post #159
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-...

I’ve collected a few ways to get papers at https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#162

Post by naasking »

pacbard wrote: post #103
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.

It could even be argued that the barricade around scientific research is what kept the epistemic "superiority" of academia and academics. Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. It's possible that this democratization process has opened…

> Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research.

I think we'd be better off letting people read the papers themselves, even if they do a poor job of it. Seems very unlikely to be any worse than science journalism as it currently exists.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#163

Post by naasking »

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…

> 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.

I'm not sure why people still believe this. High-impact journals like Nature have the highest rates of retraction. The incentives around scientific publishing are too perverse to make naive claims like that journals enforce some kind of quality standard.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#164

Post by spansoa »

jtbayly wrote: post #105
spansoa wrote: post #102

Sci-Hub needs to be uncensorable and forked into a separate project, without Alexandra E. at the helm. It needs to be a Tor hidden service with the admin being completely anonymous. There's too much heat around the project currently. Jumping from ccTLD to ccTLD may help a small bit, but a hidden service with an unknown admin (or group of admins!) is exponentially better.

Putting it on the “dark web” is just a different, more effective barrier than the money barrier the industry wants.

> more effective barrier

Tor, or more specifically the Tor Browser Bundle is not some huge hurdle to overcome if you want to browse certain content. I imagine for the audience of Sci-Hub, downloading then using Tor is no biggie.

The only real hurdle may be discovery of the right .ONION but once you search for `The Hidden Wiki` on DuckDuckGo you will be soon in Onionland and there are plenty of search engines and directories on there that could potentially point to the latest Sci-Hub .ONION

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#165

Post by AlbertCory »

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…

I've said it before and a bunch of people objected to calling out Reed-Elsevier specifically. You know what? Too bad.

Reed-Elsevier. Reed-Elsevier. Reed-Elsevier.

Here's the summary of that article: "For the academic publishers, it is about extracting rents"

They don't want to sell Cokes at the beach; they want the official government monopoly on selling Cokes at the beach.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#166

Post by throwaway38941 »

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…

Does the "social media industry" provide a service where you, an individual, can sign up to one single site, and access every social media post that exists?

No. Because they're different social media sites. They do not work together. They compete.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#167

Post by DiggyJohnson »

jjoonathan wrote: post #134
nlitened wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Unfortunately, not that many free countries are left on earth, where one can download and distribute scientific papers without getting into jail.

Non-cooperation with US authorities is a very different thing from general freedom. I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN. In the case of scientific publishing, the US authorities are in the wrong and I'm glad their reach does not extend everywhere.

> I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN.

This sounds like some "... assuming your not a Red ..." Cold War-era dialogue to me.

Is that really the best way of expressing your point about the differences between personal freedom and non-cooperation with US law.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#168

Post by throwaway38941 »

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…

> 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 made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free.

Ignoring the fact that you can indeed get the research for free if you e-mail the researchers... Who is going to pay for unlimited online access?

Somebody has to pay for it. It is not free to publish journals, or keep tens of thousands of them, with millions of articles, around indefinitely, for instant access by anyone on the web.

The only thing you can change is who is paying whom. Either you pay a publisher so that they maintain access. Or the people actually publishing an article pays the publisher (Open Access), in which case it's taxpayer money from the researchers' budget paying for it. Or you have lawmakers create some government subsidy for them to maintain access, or you have lawmakers create some government agency to maintain access. Other ways to pay include big private donors, universities, libraries, museums, endowments, foundations, societies, etc.

In all of those cases, someone will be paying. The question is, who, and how much? So far, nobody has offered to cough up all the dough. Maybe you can get Bezos, Bill and Buffet to chip in.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#169

Post by throwaway38941 »

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…

> You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier.

If you staff and pay for it.

You're also forgetting that the entire point of Journals is so that research institutions don't have to think about how to dole out the grant money. In addition to actually creating an entire new journal, you also have to make sure its "reputation" is better than the existing journals, or nobody will use it.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#170

Post by sam0x17 »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #74
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.

As a scientist, I am obliged to cite every paper that is relevant to my work and that I refer to in any way, be that by paraphrase, mentioning, or direct quotation. You can't just ignore previous work because you don't like the way it was published.

Annnd that's how we got where we are folks.

I guess it depends how you view your obligations. If you don't want people to be able to read, vet, or reproduce your research because the citations are suspiciously tricky to follow up on, that is of course your prerogative. As a scientist free and fair access to accurate and easily verifiable information should, of course, be in the forefront of what you care about. It is completely doable as well -- I've done it with my research for years. Even when citing books, I always ensure the relevant passages are available in Google Book search or something like SciHub. If not, I won't cite that source, because I wouldn't have been able to access it in the first place anyway.

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