She is a hero. Brave, outgunned, and fighting to the end.
Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
231–240 of 391 posts
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is important up understand that the laws are such that “justice” is equated with “maximizing capital”, as cynical as it is to say, and as such any financial support given to those who fight such a system will inevitably prove to be gestures without much effect. She may attempt to better humanity, but the neoliberal capitalism that permeates all governments, west to east, will stand against her for the primary reas…
it's one industry while others stand to reduce costs if she succeeds. the relatively warm welcome she receives here should indicate how willing other bourgeois segments are to support her platform. free access to information is not by itself anticapitalist, though it sure does make it easier. but recuperation is ever a threat (free software vs open source for a topical example).
When she fails — and she will — ask yourself why she failed. The answer will be couched in legal tenets, but the underlying fact remains that the intent of the law is to protect existing capital, at all costs. This is true from Washington to Beijing, from London to Johannesburg.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#233Anyone 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…
Isn’t there a torrent available? I thought I had heard that scihub is immortal because of torrented copies.
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Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#234Anyone 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…
There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85M articles (77TB)
http://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/
index for all the papers in these torrents (SQL db): https://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz
also see https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your premise is a fantasy. Yes, many people for long time have boycotted Elsevier.
I am really confused, why are you assuming people that are vocal about this continue reviewing for Elsevier (or assuming this about me in particular)? This is simply not happening. Is it really that surprising to you that only part of a community is working on the social problems in the community, while the rest is focusing on their main work: science.
This is a general attitude among every naysayer against progress: "you can not demand that society changes for the better if you are active part of society". Do you not see how ridiculous that is?
And you were already given examples of prestigious journals that have transitioned to the open access model. And universities that boycott elsevier. And grant agencies that demand work to be published open access. What more do you want? For this to have happened last decade? Well, things take time.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#236I don't understand how the header follows from the article?
She seems to be fine. She decided to fight the case in India, on her own, because she thinks she can win it.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#237I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described in the article. As a result, any pa…
I'm very confused, why would she ever have to comply with orders of an Indian (or indeed, US) court if she resides in Europe?
She doesn't, but many people really really want to change this. See this discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662701
The topic of borders and the Internet is a really weird one in general. Somehow the very same people who would like Alexandra to flout any laws will jump up and down and yell "Google should be forced to do what my country tells it". Personally I find this baffling.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#238Could someone with knowledge of the matter explain why scientists still publish to these journals, and still sign up for access?
It seems like as long as every university in the world can just switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight.
Why are paid journals still a thing?
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#239There is a rescue mission to save Scihub papers, you can help seeding the torrents https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
Surprised nobody decided to upload them onto filecoin/ipfs. Would be a great test to a real-life use case of the decentralized web
Yes, see this post on IPFS by /u/shrine (who started the SciHub rescue mission on Reddit) http://freeread.org/ipfs/
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#240Could someone with knowledge of the matter explain why scientists still publish to these journals, and still sign up for access? It seems like as long as every university in the world can just switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight. Why are paid journals still a thing?
It is slowly happening, but the inertia is a significant impediment. Every scientists agrees that open access is the way to go. But it takes a decade or two to create the "social proof" that your new community journal is indeed one of high standards. If you already know that the editors of your goto journal have high professional standards, you do not want to potentially waste time and risk your reputation on supporting a community journal. It is a social problem, not a technical one. Usually solved by getting all the luminaries of the field to be editors for your new community journal (which is a tall order).