61–70 of 160 posts
Does anybody know how to find the corresponding torrents for the papers that sci-hub has fetched? Is there some sort of prefix I can punch into torrentz.eu?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.
That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir. Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass t…
It's pretty obvious that there is a revenue stream that disappears when choosing open access over a paid viewing model.. To cover that - when an author publishes a paper and wants to use the open access model, they pay the journal. The costs come from administering peer review.
The true cost of publication is unknown - "Diane Sullenberger, executive editor for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, says that the journal would need to charge about $3,700 per paper to cover costs if it went open-access. But Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper. Many publishers say they cannot estimate what their per-paper costs are because article publishing is entangled with other activities" - also from [0].
[0] - http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
side note: I fully support open access, but using current publication system and open access would either push some costs on the scientists writing the papers which would be covered by taxpayers in the case of gov-funded research.
I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
There's no reason to assume a priori that an act is immoral. The primary criterion for an act to be immoral tends to be that it makes someone else's life worse. There is no direct effect of piracy on the author of a work. There is no physical carrier particle for piracy, and no sense organ for "being pirated"; pain receptors do not immediately fire. The indirect effects may include decreased numbers of purchases of c…
Obviously, the loss is kind of abstract for the publisher but it isn't for the small college that spends half or more of its annual acquisition budget on journal subscriptions and is then locked out of what it spent tens or hundreds of thousands on (depending strictly on which publisher locked them out until they can demonstrate that abuse as been shut down.)
Sure, if you're Hardvard or Stanford library, you can play hardball with the publisher and get your access restored immediately but if you're a small institution, someone's week in the library just got ruined to satisfy the platform owner that abuse has been shut down... For now. It really hurts the small institutions who can least afford it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore. Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.
The basic problem with the "original formulation" of civil disobedience is that power structures have evolved to thwart it. Things that should by any right be a civil case or misdemeanor are instead charged as multiple overlapping felonies in order to coerce a plea bargain, which is effective to deter all but the most dedicated from demanding their day in court. Then the court won't allow you to make the case for jur…
However, people are generally fat and happy. A surveillance state in wall-e's world just does not mean the same thing without the downtrodden masses which have fueled past revolutions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If tax payers fund its construction, it's a bit ludicrous to suggest that they should be unable to reap any benefit from it, especially when the purpose of much research is for the public good.
So, only the citizens who fund the research should have access? That, just like the current high-prices, excludes poor countries/people from access.
Suppose something is funded by US taxes. It could be harder to restrict access to only citizens than to make it available to the world. For example, should a US citizen who is overseas (eg, on a 6 month sabbatical) be able to access the system?
Or it could be that only downloads from the geographic US are allowed, but further distribution is not prohibited.
Consider an existing journal article written by a US government employees. That work is in the public domain. It is not possible to infringe on the copyright ("pirate") the paper because there is no copyright protection, and in the US there is no "sweat-of-the-brow" protection for non-creative additions like OCR'ed text added to the PDF.
I think it would be an excellent test case to take all of the papers from sci-hub, extract those where the author is a government employee, and have a "public domain sci-hub" version containing only public domain articles.
The lawyer bill would be rather high, so I'm not going to do it. You would likely also have to show that you were actively filtering out papers which weren't in the public domain, and of course reply to DMCA. I can't figure out a business model which would support that. Still, I think YouTube and similar sites show that such a site is not fundamentally illegal.
I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
"I am poor" is a poor moral justification to pirate software, movies & books. Software, movies and books are written and funded by private individuals, and if you are pirating entertainment its wrong. I'm not the moral police, but "I'm poor" isn't a very good excuse. The stand I take with Scientific Papers is much different - these papers are backed by institutions which are commonly tax-payer funded or non-profits.…
If you're really poor, then as a citizen, you probably haven't. This is a spot where wealth inequality, copyright and culture collide interestingly.
If you are poor a movie or book costs a much larger percentage of your disposable income than someone who is rich. As a society we kind of do have to answer the question of whether poverty should exclude people from culture (or science in this case). So it does become a moral justification. I support the moral right of the starving to steal from the well fed, and count it a moral failing of the well fed that there are permitted to be starving while they luxuriate in their wealth.
Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
Why is that important? I would be just as happy with an API that allows downloading articles one at a time.
One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort had revealed some surprising and useful results. With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithet…
You might, for example, look at trends in the use of a given scientific instrument, or with a bit of NP, when the field switched from using "computer" to mean a machine instead of a person.
It was an eye-opener to see how gendered the scientific papers were in the 1960s, where the scientist is invariably a "he" and the secretary/typist is a "she". Some simple questions I have are: how have those trends changed over time? Is it different for different subfields?
It's impossible to do that on my own when the papers cost even $1 per copy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventi…
I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but power…
> I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
It may be the creator's right, but it isn't necessarily the creator's will. There are a lot of reasons to publish in particular journals, and restricted access to the published paper isn't necessarily the desired effect, it may just be an unfortunate side effect.
Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?