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FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

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Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#201

Post by betterunix2 »

azalemeth wrote: post #191
elcritch wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often yes they do get assigned the copyright for the article.

Indeed. The horrible phrase is 'copyright transfer agreement', which is typically a condition of being published. My experience is that the better journals are more of an arse about copyright. I've just written two book chapters and spent maybe a day getting permissions to reuse published figures, sometimes including my own (!) in other works.

On the other hand, publishers have very little power when it comes to enforcing their copyrights when the author of an article decides to make it available on their personal web page. I have never met a researcher who refused to provide a copy of a paper when asked, despite technically violating a copyright by doing so. Academic publishers know that if they start threatening researchers they are playing with fire -- their business model is already obsolete and is only kept alive by institutional inertia, and the last thing they want is for researchers to find the motivation needed to ditch the publishing companies (the technology is widely available, now it is just a problem of politics and of organizing a community to change).

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#203

Post by kergonath »

adrusi wrote: post #172
arp242 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals. Just because some bad science gets in doesn't mean it's 100% useless; perhaps the bad science we're see…

It's not common for researchers to find that no journal at all will accept their paper, so it's not like there's a bunch of bad science being done that we just never see. The result of getting rid of the reputation system of prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal possible, many researches will lower the quality of their research. But I think…

> But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.

Or clickbait and algorithm gaming. And social networks would be even more important. You already allude to getting associated with big names. It is already common to get one in the author list to get accepted in a “good” journal.

There are already too many papers being published on many subjects, so you tend to follow closely what comes out of a smaller community, and recommendations from the bibliography databases. Honestly, the problem is more with how research is evaluated by institutions and funding bodies than with the publishers, as greedy as they may be.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#204

Post by anonuser123456 »

xNeil wrote: post #174
anonuser123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is. Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size of their research grants.

I was trying to point out how high tuition for universities is. I'm not sure if this is a US-specific problem, so I won't comment on that, but my point was universities receive so much money to conduct research, and then put that very research behind extremely expensive paywalls. If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your explanation). So…

It's a mess at every level, that is definitely true. I would say that it does not make sense from a public policy perspective. Public money does pay for the research, so the public should benefit from the knowledge.

The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low.

Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#205

Post by kergonath »

ehsankia wrote: post #133
vaylian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely right that the current system is nonsense. It only exists, because back in the day there was no internet. Scientists needed publishers that would print and distribute scientific results. But publishers might deny publication in their journals if they thought the science is not good enough. Thereby the publishers established a reputation system. For example, it is really hard to get a scientific pap…

But even compared to other publishing, like books. From my experience books sell for less (both paperback and e-book), and also a significant chunk of it goes to the author. Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales? Also, as you mention, newcomers need the reputation given to them by journal, but I don't understand how this is a stable system. In theory, well established scientists, who give the journals i…

> But even compared to other publishing, like books. From my experience books sell for less (both paperback and e-book), and also a significant chunk of it goes to the author. Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?

One data point: we were 3 authors who worked for several months on a chapter of an authoritative book in our field. We got €100 to split. Of course, we get fuck all for our papers.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#206

Post by matheusmoreira »

gravypod wrote: post #183
boramalper wrote: post #146

What I find the most fascinating is that a single person, possibly with the help of a few select others, is able to curate, index, host, and serve 85% of scholarly literature[0] which otherwise would be inaccessible to many. 80 million papers are available on Sci-Hub to its half a million daily users.[1] That is around 80 TB of data, and 2 TB of daily outbound traffic.[2] Given the fact that Sci-Hub has achieved all…

Something that came up often when talking to people at my college was that our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that. We're talking multi million dollars per year per university per journal contracts. Reviewers are volunteers. Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible. How much does it cost to replicate a fil…

> our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that

> Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible

Yes. The truth is these problems and costs are created by the copyright industry. Since copying is illegal, they have set themselves up as the only legal source for this material and that requires a lot of storage and bandwidth.

All they have to do is place their copyrighted works in the public domain. The storage and distribution problems will solve themselves immediately and at zero cost to them. People will literally do their work for them.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#208

Post by justinpombrio »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #171
vaylian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are completely right that the current system is nonsense. It only exists, because back in the day there was no internet. Scientists needed publishers that would print and distribute scientific results. But publishers might deny publication in their journals if they thought the science is not good enough. Thereby the publishers established a reputation system. For example, it is really hard to get a scientific pap…

> If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about. Not only is this correct, but it is the origin of peer review as we know it today. Despite what most academics assume, peer-review itself is a relatively new concept in science. Nearly all of the most incredible scientific discoveries w…

> but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis

The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized that ~half of published results in many fields fail to reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My impression was that this goes back as far as you care to look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to reproduce. So the only new thing is that we noticed this, which is a step forwards, not back. Is there reason to believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#209

Post by dagw »

ma2rten wrote: post #49
haxiomic wrote: post #26

Science Publisher Elsevier's reported profit margin is 38%, compared to Apple's 21% – there's lot of cash at stake for them and a big warchest to defend it For anyone looking to understand the background on the science publishing industry, how it ended up this way and why they will fight Sci-Hub so aggressively, I found this discussion really informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo&t=8s&ab_channel=..…

I'm wondering why it's only 38%. They charge a lot and mostly work with volunteers. It should not cost 62% of what they charge to run a website to host some pdfs.

Elsevier is a pretty big company offering lots of different products and services[1]. I suspect even Elsevier is smart enough to see that the current publishing business isn't sustainable and are trying to pivot into something else. The profits from their publishing arm (which is undoubtedly a lot more than 38%) is no doubt financing a lot of that pivoting

[1] https://www.elsevier.com/solutions

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#210

Post by CamperBob2 »

generalizations wrote: post #115
crumbshot wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By her own words, in creating and maintaining Sci-Hub, Elbakyan was driven by communist ideals: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc850001 https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc920674 Interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of the hacker spirit. If only the world had many more Alexandra Elbakyans, and fewer Elseviers. Humanity as a whole would be a lot better off without th…

Yeah, like that horrible capitalist company that funded the research lab which invented the transistor, Unix and C. We'd be so much better off without it out its 'capitalist, profit-driven creations'. (AT&T, Bell labs) /s

Bell Labs was the beneficiary of a government-enforced monopoly on telephone service, but never mind that.
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