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Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

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Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#51

Post by TeMPOraL »

raphman wrote: post #12
rainforest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?

> What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated? - organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook). Sure, many publishers d…

> making sure that the paper stays available for a long time

It's something that could actually be handled much better (and cheaper) by an inter-university p2p network (like BitTorrent). Such a network would double as an on-site, offline-available library of papers.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#52

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

refurb wrote: post #25
tmptmp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work? These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.

What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.

>Typesetting

Trivial

>third party review

Trivial, and happens just fine without publisher "help"

>offering visibility in a high quality journal?

Most journals are not "high quality." They're often very niche efforts, sometimes started and run as an easy way to get publication credits outside the handful of prestige publications.

Ambitious academics know that one way to raise your profile is to organise your own conference - and ask a publisher to collect and print the proceedings for you.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#53

Post by teh »

chinathrow wrote: post #26

I would love to learn more why Elsevier _only_ reports a profit of 37%? I've read here on HN and elsewhere multiple times, that most of the work done is outsourced to third party labor, which is done essentially for free: - writing papers - organising reviews - reviewing papers

I worked as a contractor for MacMillan (they publish nature) and it's hard to believe how much money they spend for no results. The project I was on had been running for a year when I joined. I noped out after three months and I heard it was shut down a few months after I left with nothing to show.

That was 4-6 people full time and my entire floor of 80 people was full of projects like that - projects you never heard of.

The weird thing is that everyone I worked with directly was very smart, and went on to do cool stuff.

Summary: If I had to guess the remaining profit is wasted on silly projects and high manager salaries.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#55

Post by refurb »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52
refurb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.

>Typesetting Trivial >third party review Trivial, and happens just fine without publisher "help" >offering visibility in a high quality journal? Most journals are not "high quality." They're often very niche efforts, sometimes started and run as an easy way to get publication credits outside the handful of prestige publications. Ambitious academics know that one way to raise your profile is to organise your own confe…

Trivial

Obviously that's your opinion, but since when does the effort it takes to create something matter about the price? It's pretty trivial to move product from a factory to a retail store, yet people have no problem paying for that.

And again, if it's trivial, then there is nothing stopping anyone from starting their own journal. But amazingly, nobody has done that.

What's the saying about "find out why the fence is there before you tear it down"?

Most journals are not "high quality.

Who cares about most journals? Nobody reads them anyways. I'm talking Nature, Science, etc.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#56

Post by refurb »

morgante wrote: post #40
refurb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exact work these publishers are doing? Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal? The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.

> That means these journals offer something of value to them. Prestige, obviously. The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection). The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public reso…

Public resources? How do you figure? Not all research public is a public resource. Pharmaceutical companies publish, as do private foundations. Anyways, if the research was funded through public money, it gets published for free anyways.

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#58

Post by iamnothere »

finnn wrote: post #35
Fuxy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessing the ip posted in the article it shows the bitcoin address posted by the OP. I even switch over to https to make sure the request is not modified.

>switching to https They don't even have a valid certificate for that domain. BUT interestingly, on a US (DO NYC) server or my house (US/Comcast): $ curl http://sci-hub.cc/donate Please donate to Bitcoin: 14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA % however, on a French (OVH) server: $ curl http://sci-hub.cc/donate {cut for brevity, a fair amount of HTML here} Please send donations to bitcoin wallet: 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZ…

Tested from US university IP, I also get the 1K4t wallet address. Maybe a caching issue with the CDN (assuming they use one)?

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#59

Post by amelius »

zo1 wrote: post #10

Is there a donate location of sorts that we can pay into to support the efforts that the sci-hub person/team/organization is doing? This is a another good cause that I would find worthy to donate to. Edit. Ok, found it: http://www.sci-hub.cc/donate Apparently, only bitcoin donations are possible at the moment. BitCoint Wallet for donations: 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM

Is it legal to donate?

Re: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

#60

Post by SeanLuke »

raphman wrote: post #12
rainforest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should publisher's work be free? I think not. What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?

> What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated? - organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook). Sure, many publishers d…

About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them:

- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board.

- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.

- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.

- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.

- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure rent-seeking.

It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.

If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears.

The big problem is not computer science, I think, which is rapidly moving to an online model. The big problem is that non-CS fields have no typesetting facility -- they submit articles in Word, which Elsevier/Springer then hands off to typesetters in India, who typically reset the whole thing, including bibtex entries, in LaTeX for publication. These entire fields are still reliant on copy editors and typesetters, and thus are stuck with rent-seeking.

I think the right approach is for a journal to require that authors have their papers certified by one of several "copy-editing / typesetting certification agencies" (a concept I made up). It's up to the authors to pay for that. This would almost completely eliminate the value of a publisher, and as there are multiple certification agencies vying, the cost would drop to a reasonable amount.

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