https://radoncnotes.com/scihub-its-back/
Here's a quick recap and reaction on the blog.
Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
81–90 of 171 posts
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish someone could build a better UI for this research internet. Hyperlinks for all references would be a good start. Finding some way to make some automatic glossary of definitions of technical terms would make scientific papers substantially more accessible too.
Yeah it's called Web of Science. It's very good but it's not free unfortunately. And it doesn't go as far as hyperlinking references in PDFs or defining terms. I agree those would be great, but unfortunately there's not much incentive for paper authors to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Science
Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the bibtex entry has an URL or a DOI, and most bibtex entries copied and pasted from curated sources already have them.
If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked references, it's probably just because they're published in journals whose templates don't support it. In my particular research field, most publication venues' templates starting supporting those links around 3-4 years ago, so my papers from, say, 2015 have no hyperlinks in references, while those from 2019 do. This didn't require any significant extra effort on my part, in fact in general it requires less because well-curated bibtex entries are easier to come by now than some years ago.
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#83I just noticed something funny: The library of Alexandria was accidentally burned in 48 BC by Julius Ceasar. Here we are in 2021, we now have Alexandra's library, which rivals the first in size and scope, and there are at least as many forces trying to burn it. But fortunately this one is digital and you too can have a copy in your hallway closet for the price of some harddrives and bandwidth. Go make a backup, if yo…
Copyright holders taking down these libraries should be considered a crime against humanity.
Sciencide or knowledgecide. Let's hope our descendants condemn companies and personalities behind these attacks like we condemn criminals of the past.
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
So when academics casually share papers with their collaborators, are they technically exposing themselves to lawsuits? Or is being part of a research organization/university with subscriptions to these services enough to mitigate that risk?
It depends on the circumstances and the publisher. In many cases publishers permit authors to host the accepted version of the paper (but not the final version that includes revisions based on reviewer feedback) on their personal/institutional website and to email copies of the paper on an individual basis to people who request them. For example, see https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright (under "Author Ri…
You are almost always allowed to self archive the final version, but you have to share the PDF you generated yourself, not the nicely formatted one from the publisher. And some publishers only allow self-archiving outside repositories like researchgate. But most importantly, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar would pick up most links from blogs and Arxiv.
Use https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ to check. Also, EU projects in most cases now require open publishing and publishers make exceptions even when OA is forbidden (“self archiving is allowed if mandated by the funding agency”).
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#85True question: is there a value that elsevier&co are providing? Proofreading or Selecting the articles, by example? If so, even if their price reflect more their de facto monopoly than this value, if we want to replace them we need to also find a way to replace it. Could we outcompete them?
Nominally, publishers proof read, copyedit, format and publicise my articles after they've been through peer review. Occasionally the editors -- inevitably based in Chennai -- spot a typo that the reviewers missed. Sometimes they cock things up massively, especially equations -- I had a big argument about a tickz-based scheme once. The formatting is done automatically and for me as a latex author I really think we co…
Do journals coordinate the peer review, or does that happen prior to the submission to the journal? I was under the impression it's journals that get the peer review process going.
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the papers are often funded by public money.
I'm glad initiatives like [Plan S]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S ) exist ^^
Desktop version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#87True question: is there a value that elsevier&co are providing? Proofreading or Selecting the articles, by example? If so, even if their price reflect more their de facto monopoly than this value, if we want to replace them we need to also find a way to replace it. Could we outcompete them?
Nominally, publishers proof read, copyedit, format and publicise my articles after they've been through peer review. Occasionally the editors -- inevitably based in Chennai -- spot a typo that the reviewers missed. Sometimes they cock things up massively, especially equations -- I had a big argument about a tickz-based scheme once. The formatting is done automatically and for me as a latex author I really think we co…
> Science and Nature effectively exist because they are Science and Nature.
Right, the perception of being associated with authoritative and knowledgeable publishers which follow certain formalities (in other words "the proof you as a scientist belong to the Club") has been an important part of academic career progression, even if in the last few years the reputation of peer-reviewed papers in general has taken a dive.
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nominally, publishers proof read, copyedit, format and publicise my articles after they've been through peer review. Occasionally the editors -- inevitably based in Chennai -- spot a typo that the reviewers missed. Sometimes they cock things up massively, especially equations -- I had a big argument about a tickz-based scheme once. The formatting is done automatically and for me as a latex author I really think we co…
Do journals coordinate the peer review, or does that happen prior to the submission to the journal? I was under the impression it's journals that get the peer review process going.
Yes, they do. And editors -- academics, sometimes paid, usually not -- are the ones who do it. There's a lot of "old boy's network" involved there too, as although each author "suggests" a referee usually the editors submit it to someone not suggested by the authors as well. I didn't include that in the list because it's not really a skill done by the journal, more, as they would say, facilitated by it.
Frankly, they profit from: academics writing articles (funded by someone else); academics editing a journal deciding who should review articles (usually, but not always, for free); academics reviewing articles (always for free); and academics citing articles in subsequent ones.
The whole system is a house of cards, and a relatively immutable one.
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about a Netflix but for science information . Pay $15 a month for access to a rolling catalogue of science info.
Why? The authors write the papers for free, the peer review is done by other scientists for free. Why should this "netflix for science" get to reap the profits by locking it behind a paywall? The reason why predatory publishers still exist is a coordination problem. The journals have prestige built up historically, and the scientists need to publish in prestigious journals for their career. It's a chicken and egg pro…
I'm not sure about how fair the whole system is, but if we assume the papers should be free, then a service where the papers are available is still reasonable to have a small fee.
Someone needs to rent and service the servers, update the software, bandwidth costs money, etc..
Re: Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all PDF files, which have their own compression, so it's unlikely there would be substantial gain from additional compression. Each torrent has 100 zip files, and each zip file has 1000 PDFs, but the files are stored uncompressed within the zips (i.e. using the STORE method).
> It's all PDF files, which have their own compression, so it's unlikely there would be substantial gain from additional compression. You could write a custom compressor that decompiles journal PDFs to valid TeX, then compresses that. Or at the simpler end of what's technologically possible, you could at least extract shared assets such as fonts that appear in multiple files. Keep files from the same journal together…
You could losslessly translate PDFs with compression to PDFs with no compression (bitmap images excepted), tar them up and compress the lot. This would get you a fair bit of gain for little pain.
However, I guess they use .zip STORE because it's fairly robust against minor corruption.