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

A World Without Sci-Hub

palladiummag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 206 posts

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#171

Post by throwaway38941 »

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…

> of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations

We can't even get critical infrastructure open source projects funded by donations. What makes you think people will start donating to free research journals?

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#172

Post by kzrdude »

tokai wrote: post #87
stuartbman wrote: post #50

Anecdotally, my university has been paying for fewer and fewer journal subscriptions. I was looking through the literature the other day and about half of the articles I needed to access weren't subscribed to by my (large, redbrick) university. I believe this is a shift recognising that academics will just skirt the access via sci-hub as a way for universities to trim their library budgets.

Nah is almost definitely because of lower funding for the library. The budgets globally are so squeezed now that publishers are actually lowering their fees for the first time since the industry started.

And because the publishers are being squeezed from all sides, including from sci-hub and proposed legislation, universities requiring open journals and so on.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#173

Post by scoopertrooper »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #167
jjoonathan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OP's point was that Russia and China are objectively less free than America, but yet they are the centres for academic copyright infringement.

To suggest that China or Russia were in any way more free than America, would be intellectually dishonest and could only be explained someone acting as a shill.

I'm not from America and I am clear-eyed about its foibles, but being more free than either of the aforementioned countries is a pretty low bar to cross.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#174

Post by ravitation »

gms7777 wrote: post #146
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 clo…

I think there is some nuance even for those with institutional access (e.g. field, institution, etc). I am also a researcher (though I hesitate to call myself that), and I read (or skim) through quite a few papers every week, and I very rarely run into a situation where I do not have access through the publisher. It's so uncommon that I very rarely think about (my own) access at all...

I only say this to provide my day-to-day experience, I do think Sci-Hub is a net positive, and I'm certainly in favor of seeing the status quo change.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#175

Post by deepburner »

throwaway38941 wrote: post #168
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…

you're phrasing it like web hosting is some gargantuan unheard of task.

> 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.

it's not free but it's pretty cheap. you can pay a tiny fraction of what the public universities are currently paying for access to these journals to maintain a repository of scientific papers.

look at scihub, is it being funded by Bezos, Bill or Buffet? no. if a single person can host all those papers herself backed by only random donations, I don't think any government or hell, any university would have any trouble doing the same thing with marginal amount of support.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#176

Post by ravitation »

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…

I see this all the time...

I work in medical research (basic science, not clinical), and I see people "cite" papers, based solely on their titles, without understanding, or likely even reading, the nuanced findings of the actual papers.

It's dangerous because it gives people, often with secondary agendas, the illusion of scientific backing when there really isn't any (or when it's far more nuanced).

I'll just note that I am still in favor of open over closed, but I think we're lagging in scientific literacy currently.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#177

Post by [deleted] »

Vinnl wrote: post #153
jonathanstrange wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

[deleted]

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#178

Post by vehemenz »

stuartbman wrote: post #50

Anecdotally, my university has been paying for fewer and fewer journal subscriptions. I was looking through the literature the other day and about half of the articles I needed to access weren't subscribed to by my (large, redbrick) university. I believe this is a shift recognising that academics will just skirt the access via sci-hub as a way for universities to trim their library budgets.

Same deal here. Some journals are not available, and the ones I have access to are difficult to search because they're spread among multiple aggregation services.

This in a top 50 university in the US with ~50,000 students.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#179

Post by jhrmnn »

throwaway38941 wrote: post #168
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…

The money needed for the “unlimited online access” is a tiny fraction of what the publishing industry currently devours. Arxiv and its clones already now serve a large portion of the whole scientific output at a fraction of the cost compared to the journal publishers. So that’s not a problem.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#180

Post by deepburner »

sitkack wrote: post #132
jonathanstrange wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anonymity removes the difficult aspects of human social interaction and allows everyone to focus on the science. Peer review itself is wonderful and is what enables science itself to work as well as it does.

Frankly "peer review" is the furthest thing away from wonderful. While the idea is legitimate, it is undermined at every step of the way.

* Reviewers are basically forced to it for free. If you're a researcher you won't have the time to properly fact check a 40 page paper for free, it just isn't going to happen. So they (we) don't. The review process isn't very rigorous.

* Journals are leeching off of the public money by double whammying both the scientists and the institutes while providing minuscule value. Their gains are absolutely disproportionate to what they provide.

* Even the most involved and convoluted peer review processes aren't as anonymous as you think. When there's already a handful of people in your field, you can pretty easily tell someone's identity from their writing style.

I would love to pretend that the system is great and works very well but it just doesn't and this pretense and the phenomenon of holding new systems to a higher standard than the current one is preventing us from actually improving the system.

Post reply on HN