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Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

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Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#221

Post by refurb »

tbabej wrote: post #186
refurb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. This is an example of “have your cake and eat it too”. Scientists want to publicize in a prestigious journal. Elsevier is prestigious. Elsevier charges a subscription fee. Other scientists can’t access it. So what scientists want is to be able to publish in the most prestigious journals and have free access to them. It’s like if I said “i want to be able to attend the most prestigious school but I don’t want to p…

Except in this case, what makes a journal prestigious is not the subscription fees that the school has to pay, but the free work of editors and peer reviewers that perform selection from the submitted papers. There are free-access journals out there that charge virtually no fees, and still have excellent quality / reputation. One such example is Quantum: https://quantum-journal.org/

Then maybe scientists should stop donating their time? Or do they get something out of it?

And it's certainly not the peer review that makes it prestigious since those are anonymous.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#222

Post by thrdbndndn »

eldaisfish wrote: post #211
thrdbndndn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, when I was still in university, I never used Sci-hub at all. I can download almost any paper using school's network (or VPN) since the library have subscriptions for basically all the major publishers. I only started to use it occasionally once I've graduated (but I didn't really do any formal research any more.)

perhaps you're aware of this but sci-hub solves a second problem in addition to simply access - ease of use. Using a library's system requires a proxy or VPN or a credential verification of some sort. Sci-hub requires the title of the paper. that's it.

You do need to enable VPN if you're off campus, yes, but that's it. It's super simple, you don't need to go though library's website or anything.

I use Google Scholar search exclusively to find papers and you can directly click the link to open the paper (and then download). Constantly copying pasting title, URL or DOI into sci-hub is actually a hassle in this respect when you're just browsing around (I guess there must be extensions or userscripts to make it better, though).

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#223

Post by Iv »

enriquto wrote: post #31

This is extremely infuriating. Alexandra Elbakyan has done a huge positive contribution to human civilization, even knowing that it was putting herself at personal risk. She's just 32 years old. How can we help her? Does she need money, public support, vpns in every country? Whatever she needs, mankind is indebted to her and we should help if we can. Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or Lib…

I feel that her case is exactly what presidential pardons are about.

Otherwise, write to whatever lawmaker represents you to talk about it, to ask for a change of law and to support asylum for her if she ever asks it. But for now Russia seems to protect her.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#224

Post by krastanov »

refurb wrote: post #221
tbabej wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in this case, what makes a journal prestigious is not the subscription fees that the school has to pay, but the free work of editors and peer reviewers that perform selection from the submitted papers. There are free-access journals out there that charge virtually no fees, and still have excellent quality / reputation. One such example is Quantum: https://quantum-journal.org/

Then maybe scientists should stop donating their time? Or do they get something out of it? And it's certainly not the peer review that makes it prestigious since those are anonymous.

Scientists are indeed moving slowly in that direction. It seems you are under the mistaken belief that they complain without doing anything about it. The fact that someone is vocally unhappy with a flawed status quo, does not mean they are not doing something about it. However, the issue with status quos is that it takes time to change them. Why are you ranting even after being shown examples of scientists doing exactly what you want them to do?

Also, it is indeed the presence of very selective peer review that is a big part of "prestige". This is why free community driven open access journals are slowly overtaking the old journals. The price of a journal publication does not correlate much with the prestige. There are even examples of reverse correlation.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#225

Post by Iv »

enriquto wrote: post #31

This is extremely infuriating. Alexandra Elbakyan has done a huge positive contribution to human civilization, even knowing that it was putting herself at personal risk. She's just 32 years old. How can we help her? Does she need money, public support, vpns in every country? Whatever she needs, mankind is indebted to her and we should help if we can. Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or Lib…

How about that: starting a campaign to nominate her to a nobel prize. I am not sure at which she would qualify the most, but I am sure there are no shortage of academics to sing her praises (this is a condition for nomination)

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#227

Post by Cyph0n »

vb6sp6 wrote: post #187
cantrevealname wrote: post #161

Anyone remember Napster? There were extremely obscure musical recordings that were instantly found on Napster that are impossible to find even today. It took a long time for anyone to rebuild that data to the level of usefulness that Napster had. If Sci-Hub is forced to shut down due to legal pressure, technical problems, running out of money, or the founder losing interest, it would take a long time for anyone to du…

Napster was ok. Oink on the other hand...

Or its spiritual successor, What.cd

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#228

Post by dang »

ValentineC wrote: post #197
dang wrote: post #3

Submitted URL was https://archive.ph/huNwk . It's ok to post workaround links in the thread, but please don't make them the top level submission. We want the original source for that.

Can we please change the headline back to the article's? I had no idea who Alexandra Elbakyan was before this, and mostly clicked through out of curiosity. I would have followed this more if I knew it was about Sci-Hub from the start.

I hear you, but I think your case may actually be an argument for sticking with the title change. The original was baity and curiosity is just what we want people to click for.

("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#229

Post by refurb »

krastanov wrote: post #224
refurb wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe scientists should stop donating their time? Or do they get something out of it? And it's certainly not the peer review that makes it prestigious since those are anonymous.

Scientists are indeed moving slowly in that direction. It seems you are under the mistaken belief that they complain without doing anything about it. The fact that someone is vocally unhappy with a flawed status quo, does not mean they are not doing something about it. However, the issue with status quos is that it takes time to change them. Why are you ranting even after being shown examples of scientists doing exac…

When Elsevier is trying to strong arm universities with high fees and threatening copyright lawsuits, seems like a good time to stop helping them entirely? Why on earth would you keep donating your time to them?

Oh yeah, you want those juicy prestigious papers still.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#230

Post by TheDong »

shagie wrote: post #168
breck wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO? The legal ones do, absolutely. > Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the opioids had been generics? "get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is the way to go." Richard Sackler in a 1996 email. I do not see O…

> On patents and copyrights. If we were to declare tomorrow that search engines did not have to respect copyright law, we would see far better search engines than Google in a year or less. If copyright was abolished, the GPL and all open source would lose all its teeth. The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime. The people who write boo…

> The people who write books on here (and then have to fight to keep people from doing on demand pirating of them) would be given a big shrug when they try to go after them in court for copyright infringement

Do any authors of books actually manage to prosecute piracy in a way that makes them money? As best I can tell, artists lose money paying for lawyers to litigate supposedly lost sales, but whether they actually lose sales is very questionable.

> The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime.

Yup, which is good! You put them up on the web without expectation of making a dime, right? Cool. Your expectations are fulfilled, and someone gets a cool image too.

> trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives people who are creating material that is protected with copyright from sharing their material

And yet, the majority of people who post instagram images and tik-tok videos don't even realize their work is protected by copyright I'd wager, but they're still happy to share their material.

People who write open source code apply such a license specifically because they want to share the material more broadly than copyright would normally allow.

If removing copyright means that we end up with fewer people who are seeking a profit producing content and then praying on others who share and remix it, that seems good to me. We have plenty of people who are willing to produce content and be happy when other people enjoy it, use it, and share it.

If I wrote a book, I would be overjoyed to have people read it and copy it to share with their friends. It seems like a very dark mindset to think that a profit-motive is the primary reason someone might produce anything.

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