Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#251

Post by krastanov » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #248

krastanov wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Some people have boycotted Elsevier. The vast majority of scientists have not - they continue to get their papers published by Elsevier journals, donate their time as editors and donate their time for peer review. Let me be more direct - why? If Elsevier is clearly the "bad guy" here? And if. as your put it, "as decade later" scientists are still donating their time for free, why do you think it will change? How long…

The answer is trivial: because of inertia, they have much more important and interesting work to do, so the activism is left for the few. But again, in every single comment of yours you are neglecting the monumental progress that has already happened: open access is a fairly standard requirement for top institutions and becoming more common. The world you are imagining in your complaints does not exist.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#252

Post by wtmt » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

No, she’s not in real trouble this time. What seems to be in trouble is getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little bit less relevant over time.

The courts here in India are notoriously slow on many cases. Depending on luck, the hearings don’t even start for a long time after an initial notice is sent to defendants. If the publishers are able to push the court for an earlier hearing, we’ll know how soon Sci-Hub can get back on track (surely she’s not going to stop maintaining the site and stop uploading new papers regardless of how the case turns out). I don’t think the publishers would be content with just new papers not being uploaded. If the case drags on, the backlog of newer papers to upload may become an immense effort that may create some “holes” in the data archive.

I just hope the court decides sooner and we can get on with Sci-Hub growing.

P.S.: This link shared in another comment worked for me without any CAPTCHA prompts - https://archive.ph/huNwk

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#253

Post by andi999 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #240

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #238

Could 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 support…

One problem is that open access journals get paid by the author. So all so called predatory journals (not doing peer review, just taking the money and publishing the paper) are open access. Recently there was some hysteria about this, even if you publish by accident in one of those journals your career takes a very big dent.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#254

Post by bawolff » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:58 AM UTC

nzmsv wrote: post #237

jorvi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone loves an underdog.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#255

Post by krastanov » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

andi999 wrote: post #253

krastanov wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 support…

One problem is that open access journals get paid by the author. So all so called predatory journals (not doing peer review, just taking the money and publishing the paper) are open access. Recently there was some hysteria about this, even if you publish by accident in one of those journals your career takes a very big dent.

It seems reasonable to me to pay a small one-time publication fee for an open access journal, to cover clerical and typesetting work (professional typesetting is important and expensive). Predatory journals exist and would exist independently of what the best practices of good journals are.

I have received plenty of emails inviting me to submit work to predatory journals, but their low quality and lack of peer review and general ethics is pretty obvious and they are easy to avoid. They feel more like a spammy annoyance than a real threat.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#256

Post by dkshdkjshdk » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

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.

As a scientist who does not need extra brownie points, this is exactly what I'm doing: every single review request coming from an Elsevier publication is ignored.

And, yes, it is the quality of peer review (i.e. the work done by unpaid editors and reviewers) that makes a certain publication prestigious or not.

Elsevier does typesetting and distribution, both of which can easily be done otherwise (see LaTeX and Sci-Hub). It sure as hell does not do peer review.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#257

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:24 AM UTC

mkl wrote: post #245

twobitshifter wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there a torrent available? I thought I had heard that scihub is immortal because of torrented copies.

Only the existing bits. New publications wouldn't be included, so eventually the archive would become less relevant and stop being shared. There's significant cost for the required storage (currently 77TB according to andyxor's comment).

108T 104T 3,9T 97% /home/scihub

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#258

Post by 1cvmask » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:34 AM UTC

Anyone here know Indian law and how it operates in real life?

Why is she bullish on potentially winning the case? Is there a law in India that she is counting on? Or as I suspect she is counting on a sympathetic judge who might rule in her favor by finding some precedent from around the world.

If say she does win how would the appeals process work?

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#259

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:45 AM UTC

dasudasu wrote: post #110

wolverine876 wrote: post #8

What will happen to research outside wealthy institutions if Sci-Hub shuts down? Are there alternatives?

Lots of people upload their research to ResearchGate (even though I really dislike the site for other reasons), make it available from their research group's web page, or in some fields upload it to ArXiv or BioRxiv. It's usually not against the terms of paywalled journals to do any of these things. Google Scholar or even the regular Google search engine can be decent at finding these PDF links. As a last resort, if…

Good points, but there is another use case: AFAIK (and in my limited experience), much of research involves reviewing many papers, to find the right one and to glean information here and there. It's not always a hunt for one specific special paper.

How is that use case addressed when the cost of finding each paper seems to be so much higher?

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#260

Post by jacobolus » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 5:58 AM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #76

tbabej wrote: post #28

I 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 pessimistic. Long before sci-hub, library genesis and Alexandra there was ebook-club / library.nu and Smiley (its creator). When it closed it was described as the burning of the library of Alexandria. There were a lot of non-technical books on that site and it was amazing. Still, it lost the battle. Ultimately, sci-hub will unfortunately get the same end. Until the Scientific society stops maintaining the leeches…

If sci-hub goes down it will significantly disrupt nearly every scientific researcher, in every field, all over the world. After getting used to a world where every paper is obtainable, it would be very difficult for people to go back.

I’m not really a scholar or academic per se, but the independent research I do (which involves skimming thousands of papers per year, 99% of which are irrelevant or useless) would be an order of magnitude harder without sci-hub. Most paywalled papers I just would never bother to read, unless I happened to be sitting in a university library or something.