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Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

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Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#81

Post by nickpsecurity »

return0 wrote: post #77
nickpsecurity wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible comparison. Best to look at other publishers. To start with, let's look at one with free labor for contributions and review. It costs $45.9 million a year. You might have heard of it: https://annual.wikimedia.org/2014/#s-6 The next comparison would be finding a firm that does all of Elsevier's services. You start by knowing what they are. They're a part of Relx Group which describes its activities here: http…

- the 17.000 editors are almost all unpaid. The paid editors who coordinate the free work of others are typically very few per journal (e.g. Cell: 8 editors, Neuron: 6 editors) - The print sales, (along with most of their sales) come from bundling everything in large subscriptions that the universities are then forced to accept. 99% of the paper they make is not used. Most people download the papers and re-print them…

Damn. That knocks out quite a bit of the baseline cost for an alternative.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#83

Post by userbinator »

gherkin0 wrote: post #57
colejohnson66 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that?

> What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that? Pretty sure no-one gets "immunity from copyright," at list not to the point where they could mirror Sci-hub with impunity (at least no on in the US). I'd very surprised if archive.org did not respond to DMCA take-down requests, etc.

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#84

Post by userbinator »

jostmey wrote: post #60

I wonder how many people have book marked sci-hub under its IP address http://31.184.194.81/ so that every time the domain name changes the bookmark still works.

Put the domain name and its IP in your HOSTS file, that's what it's for.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#85

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

refurb wrote: post #78
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the big publishers offer is prestige and most academics are addicted to that prestige. Getting into Science or Nature is like a heroin. No academic-run open access web journal offers this high. Apart from that, journal prestige also plays a key role in the distribution of funding, for example in the UK. Many researchers feel they just cannot afford to publish in more ethically correct journals because these jour…

Exactly. If these publishers weren't offering anything of value, then why would authors continue to use them when open source alternatives are available? No one is holding a gun to their head saying "you must publish your paper in Science!"

Actually there's incredible pressure on academics to publish as much as they can, in journals with as much prestige as possible.

There may not be actual guns involved, but funding and research opportunities are very much on the line.

Which raises the question: who are the pirates here?

In what sense is a corporation holding an entire professional community to ransom while adding no real value not being piratical?

In reality the journal publishing "industry" is just another example of aggressive for-profit enclosure of what was once considered a public good.

I'm more ambivalent about rights issues around creative works, because I think everyone wins when unusually talented artists and creators earn enough to work full time.

But academic publishing seems straightforward extortion of value from universities and governments - ultimately from tax payers - with no plausible upside.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#86

Post by vacri »

lottin wrote: post #59

Academic publishers are parasitic industry. They profit from somebody else's work without contributing anything of value themselves. If they go away, everybody wins.

This is a dead horse that gets overly beaten. One powerful value-add that groups like this do is manage the anonymous peer-review process, a fundamental part of modern science. Do they take too much money? Sure. Are they worthless? Absolutely not.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#87

Post by vacri »

Jerry2 wrote: post #62
jostmey wrote: post #60

I wonder how many people have book marked sci-hub under its IP address http://31.184.194.81/ so that every time the domain name changes the bookmark still works.

There's no need to bookmark the IP. Sci-hub actually runs a DNS server and you can simply specify 31.184.194.81 as one of your DNS servers in your computer network settings. Under OS X you can just add it in Sys Prefs. It's probably similar under other OSes. If you do that, sci-hub.org, sci-hub.io, sci-hub.club still work just fine.

Is this the 2016 version of "This page best viewed in Netscape at 800x600"?

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#88

Post by wernercd »

chris_wot wrote: post #48
wernercd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know... competition. Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office? Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s) doesn't... If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, t…

This issue of geographically dividing markets doesn't make any sense for products that are essentially information products that are distributed by the Internet. Measures like geoblocking just drive people in markets who are blocked from accessing content, or who are charged higher prices, to just pirate the material. Or alternatively they bypass the geoblocks. Even now people are starting to ignore the various mecha…

Geoblocking goes beyond simple greed... different countries have different laws, supply, demand, etc. Some countries may outlaw certain things. Others may have a much lower amount of money per person/family/gdp.

While I agree on the base level (Why should county a pay more than country b... like Australia routinely pays more for software), just saying "it's not fair" or "its unethical" is too simplistic.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#89

Post by cmarschner »

gleb wrote: post #75
nisa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do they spend all that money on? Here is the most recent annual of their parent company: http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/... I don't have the time nor knowledge to give a summary on this but it's quite interesting - e.g. page 8 - 50% of their income are subscriptions and 80% of these are electronic. The other 50% are "transactional" I guess that means fees. I can't read investor rep…

Page 94 - Consolidated income statement

So, roughly, 50% cost of sales (print, inventory, online services), 40% salaries, 10% depreciation

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#90

Post by uxp »

userbinator wrote: post #83
gherkin0 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that? Pretty sure no-one gets "immunity from copyright," at list not to the point where they could mirror Sci-hub with impunity (at least no on in the US). I'd very surprised if archive.org did not respond to DMCA take-down requests, etc.

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

> I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted

This is a violation of the takedown request, and can result in harsher penalties for the host. It's not a great example, but MegaUpload was faulted for doing just that: Removing the link between a url and the content that url pointed to. Granted they did deduplication so there could be other links from other urls pointed to the same "illegal" content, which is what the USA went after them for, but the fact remains that it's a pretty clear grey area whether or not the host can retain that data after someone claims rights to have it removed for their own future benefit.

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