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Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

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Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#61

Post by zaarn »

fwgwgwgch wrote: post #23

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.

In short Elsevier.

The movie industry has it's fair share of copyright protectionism (DRM is popular) and same goes for gaming.

Elsevier is worse. They get paid by scientists so they publish their papers. They get paid massive amounts of money by universities (sometimes even the same that paid the scientist) to be granted access to research. Research largely funded by tax money. Research results that had already been paid for to even be published there.

There is a very good article in the SlateStarCodex if you're interested in a more in-depth article on it.

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#63

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pmyteh wrote: post #54
fwgwgwgch wrote: post #23

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.

I'm an academic. I've never met one who has objected to Sci-hub. Many of us use it, even to get papers we do have legit access to: journal publishers' access control systems are a pain in the arse. Leaving aside the societal merits, our incentives are to get published, then get read. Sci-hub helps with the latter, and doesn't harm anyone except the publishers (who most academics cordially dislike anyway).

I imagine even the most socialist/communist/whatever is at least partly incentivised by earning a living too.

In fact, isn't that the problem, that quantity of publications (and citations) is used as a metric for continued employment? Those awarding research grants, etc., don't provide a free open-access publication as the place publication is required.

It seems governments could fix this in favour of the public quite easily; require publication in an open access journal of all research (papers and data) with any funding from the public purse.

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#64

Post by dagw »

gkya wrote: post #60
Myrmornis wrote: post #31

I'm 100% in favour of sci-hub. However, note that they are very anarchic when it comes to commercial books, not just journal articles! E.g. from the Sci-Bay search results, this is $131 on amazon.com, and quite possibly the authors do want the royalties. [BOOK] Intelligent optimisation techniques: genetic algorithms, tabu search, simulated annealing and neural networks D Pham, D Karaboga - 2012 - books.google.com ...…

I believe people in academia are paid to write these books anyways, so they might as well not receive the royalties. As a prospective academic myself, I find it unethical.

I believe people in academia are paid to write these books anyways

While that does occasionally happen, it's definitely not true in general. The people I know who wrote academic books did so by taking a sabbatical from their university job and/or working evenings and weekends for the actual writing. Occasionally they can apply for a separate writing grant to cover their lost salary, but that's completely separate from their day job.

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#65

Post by pbhjpbhj »

zeth___ wrote: post #7
veridies wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't think Hacker News would be in any trouble with this one. The link is to a noteworthy site, not to any infringing content; you'd have to take action and use a specific search term to find copyrighted content. And the implication of posting it is clearly that people should find it interesting and discuss it, not that they should use it to download articles.

And it's not like searching in google scholar, getting the doi and putting it in scihub was any great hardship before.

A guy in the UK got extradited to USA for making a web page with links to sites that hosted copyright material ... YMMV.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120113/09184917400/us-to...

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#66

Post by matheusmoreira »

hrasyid wrote: post #46
matheusmoreira wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An API is a contract. HTML can be tweaked and become incompatible with your parser at the developer's whim.

That just means your code must be maintained. You can verify that the HTML has a given structure and log a failure if it doesn't.

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#67

Post by samat »

This reminds me of Popcorn time so much.

Rightholders do not fear torrents as long as they are unusable for the general population.

The second they see something usable — they go berserk.

Gonna need some popcorn to watch this one.

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#68

Post by paulhilbert »

zaarn wrote: post #61
fwgwgwgch wrote: post #23

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.

In short Elsevier. The movie industry has it's fair share of copyright protectionism (DRM is popular) and same goes for gaming. Elsevier is worse. They get paid by scientists so they publish their papers. They get paid massive amounts of money by universities (sometimes even the same that paid the scientist) to be granted access to research. Research largely funded by tax money. Research results that had already been…

I read this quite often and frankly do not understand it. How is Elsevier worse than ACM, IEEE or Springer? I found them to be equally intolerable but still Elsevier gets routinely picked as the prime example...

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#69

Post by Vinnl »

samat wrote: post #67

This reminds me of Popcorn time so much. Rightholders do not fear torrents as long as they are unusable for the general population. The second they see something usable — they go berserk. Gonna need some popcorn to watch this one.

Likewise, the traditional publishers often respond to demands by funders to make research available by e.g. allowing researchers to share their work elsewhere, and often only after a year or so after publication [0]. This makes the barrier to do so higher, and makes the research less findable. It's not odd to expect that when initiatives like Unpaywall [1] make that research more discoverable, things like embargo periods will get worse.

[0] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...

[1] https://unpaywall.org/

Re: Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

#70

Post by Vinnl »

gpm wrote: post #14
jrochkind1 wrote: post #8

Google Scholar definitely and intentionally offers no API. I don't see this lasting long...

At a glance it looks like it's really just a proxy, that was limited to scholar.google.com and mutates the page slightly (adds a header, sci-hub links). Does google generally block proxy servers?

I'd imagine that would be quite hard: many university libraries have their own proxies which make sure that visitors to the library are able to access the content that the library has paid for, and often modifies Google Scholar (with their cooperation, I believe) to list links to accessible versions of the content next to search results.
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