41–50 of 114 posts
Can someone help dispel my ethical concerns over using papers like this? Eg sci-hub. Any and all arguments, on both sides are very welcome.
Can someone help dispel my ethical concerns over using papers like this? Eg sci-hub. Any and all arguments, on both sides are very welcome.
It allows for open-access of the epitome of human progress, which is something unavailable to low-income communities. It's copying data, not stealing from a museum, so it's not as if any journal is losing much, if anything. There's no real ethical downside - allowing people who wouldn't normally have access to research helps to reduce inequality, and allows human progress to advance a lot quicker than if it weren't o…
That it lets you freely access some scientific materials regardless of whether the rights owner (or authors, for that matter) agree to it or not is just a minor side-effect.
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A timely request: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/19/the-dark-rule-utilitari... "So this is my argument that Sci-Hub can be ethical. Universalized it would destroy the system – but the system is bad and needs to be destroyed. And although this would break the law, a very slight amount of law-breaking might be a beneficial solution to inadequate equilibria that could be endorsed even when universalized."
> but the system is bad and needs to be destroyed The system needs to be reformed, and that is currently happening, peacefully. Perhaps not everywhere at once and perhaps not as quickly as you might prefer, but open access publishing has made great strides in just a few short years. This doesn't liberate the millions (probably) of academic articles whose authors relinquished their copyright to big publishers, but it…
You mean SciHub. That's the thing, really; SciHub managed to do much more for the Open Access cause in one single move than the entire "legit" Open Access movement in more than a decade.
See: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/leap.1116
Tensions like Germany vs Elsevier are possible, because Open Access is now talking from position of strength - because everyone involved knows that the alternative is not "no access", but "SciHub" or "#ICanHasPDF".
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I don't know how they are doing it, but Google Scholar does not have an API, and scraping is against their TOS. > Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide. Despite this, there is scholar.py [0], which can extract files from Google Scholar, though it explicitly doesn't work around the rat…
or try to access them using a method other than the interface Unless this actually exploits something and hacks into Google's servers to get to the content, which would be something quite different, it wouldn't really be distinguishable from someone manually visiting the site in a browser, volume aside. IMHO the pervasive attitude today of somehow requiring permission or an explicitly sanctioned "API" to access what…
My browser is my User Agent. The way it renders or interprets the data is my business.
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It allows for open-access of the epitome of human progress, which is something unavailable to low-income communities. It's copying data, not stealing from a museum, so it's not as if any journal is losing much, if anything. There's no real ethical downside - allowing people who wouldn't normally have access to research helps to reduce inequality, and allows human progress to advance a lot quicker than if it weren't o…
One could easily come up with quite a few ethical arguments against Sci-Hub -- it's there to stick it to the "West". It has nothing to do with science, human progress, or anything as lofty. Basically, just another department of the Olgino Troll Factory. That it lets you freely access some scientific materials regardless of whether the rights owner (or authors, for that matter) agree to it or not is just a minor side-…
Anyway, is there any proof that Sci-Hub is part of the Kremlbots, besides Alexandra Elbakyan being from Kazakhstan?
Google Scholar definitely and intentionally offers no API. I don't see this lasting long...
The page's HTML is the API. It's pretty easy to download a web page, parse the HTML and then extract specific bits of information from it. The browser does the same thing on the user's behalf, which is why it is called the user agent.
reminder that this went up not long ago https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com
+1, especially for the Onion site. Onion service supposed to be a primary mean to host uncensored websites instead of having to look for the latest domain name everyday, unfortunately it seems nobody cares about it. Most of the time I access it from my browser, the front-end proxy was malfunctioning, or the back-end Tor daemon has dead... Tor network itself do have capacity problem, but they could do much better than a broken front-end proxy... e.g. with Onion Balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It allows for open-access of the epitome of human progress, which is something unavailable to low-income communities. It's copying data, not stealing from a museum, so it's not as if any journal is losing much, if anything. There's no real ethical downside - allowing people who wouldn't normally have access to research helps to reduce inequality, and allows human progress to advance a lot quicker than if it weren't o…
Unless the article has been published as open access under a CC-BY (or similar) licence, it's not open access, please don't confuse the two. I agree with you in spirit - tax payer funded research outputs should be publicly available - but this is what got Aaron Swartz: it is unlawful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It allows for open-access of the epitome of human progress, which is something unavailable to low-income communities. It's copying data, not stealing from a museum, so it's not as if any journal is losing much, if anything. There's no real ethical downside - allowing people who wouldn't normally have access to research helps to reduce inequality, and allows human progress to advance a lot quicker than if it weren't o…
One could easily come up with quite a few ethical arguments against Sci-Hub -- it's there to stick it to the "West". It has nothing to do with science, human progress, or anything as lofty. Basically, just another department of the Olgino Troll Factory. That it lets you freely access some scientific materials regardless of whether the rights owner (or authors, for that matter) agree to it or not is just a minor side-…
Forgive me for not seeing the downside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One could easily come up with quite a few ethical arguments against Sci-Hub -- it's there to stick it to the "West". It has nothing to do with science, human progress, or anything as lofty. Basically, just another department of the Olgino Troll Factory. That it lets you freely access some scientific materials regardless of whether the rights owner (or authors, for that matter) agree to it or not is just a minor side-…
If the Scientific Publication Mafia is your definition of the "West", then, yes, let's stick it to the "West". Anyway, is there any proof that Sci-Hub is part of the Kremlbots, besides Alexandra Elbakyan being from Kazakhstan?
Though this doesn't change the fact project itself is very useful and obviously it's her own personality problems rather than some conspiracy.