Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A World Without Sci-Hub

palladiummag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 206 posts

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#81

Post by paisawalla »

advael wrote: post #70

I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most par…

I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits.

What are the core functions of a journal?

1. facilitate reviews

2. distribute articles selected through #1

It seems to me that #2 is where the potential for restrictive and exploitative business models really shows up. The curation function #1 should be something that can be accomplished at nominal expense. Universities should be able to fund that collaboratively for very low cost, pro-socially without a need to recuperate those costs. Why don't we see that? I suspect that it's the existing journal industry blocking such a development.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#82

Post by southerntofu »

mach1ne wrote: post #48

The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…

> Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation.

That is true across all fields, not just for publishing scientific papers. That's why we need a true cooperative economy, that is an economy of cooperatives which do not compete with one another but promote active cooperation to reduce the overall competition/privatization in society.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#83

Post by squiggleblaz »

xorfish wrote: post #17
mettamage wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's things like this that make me believe that the US isn't a truly free society. It simply pretends it is. But all nations have their problems. The US simply has more than one might think.

The US has the highest prison population per capita in the world. Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.

> Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.

Mostly because certain people profit off it. If you have private prisons and lifetime voting bans for someone locked up for a few months you have mega incentives to get a lot of people behind bars.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#84

Post by advael »

paisawalla wrote: post #81
advael wrote: post #70

I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most par…

I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits. What are the core functions of a journal? 1. facilitate reviews 2. distribute articles selected through #1 It seems to me t…

I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many journals getting the work of expert scholars as peer-reviewers for free. As someone in a different comment thread pointed out, part of the barrier for such a move is that funding decisions build journals in as a gatekeeper, so effectively funding is locked behind publication. It's possible that simply removing the publishers from the equation would create the result everyone but them seems to want "automagically"

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#85

Post by jonathanstrange »

hoseja wrote: post #78
jonathanstrange wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is looks like a horrible idea. The system violates anonymous peer reviewing standards. These are sometimes even mandated by law, e.g. our funding institution would not allow us to count such a publication as "peer reviewed." There are many good reasons why peer review needs to be anonymous on both ends (the reviewer is anonymous and the manuscript is anonymized). Many reputable journals have even switched to tri…

I'm sure if you applied blockchain and crypto enough times, this could be solved in some byzantine and massively inefficient way.

Don't forget to make scientists constantly mine for cryptocoins on their GPUs if they want to keep their crappy postdoc job, that way it's profit for everyone. :P

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#86

Post by _yacj »

> But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam.

Those are fair sentiments but in my experience, replacing one ideological solution (capitalism) with another (socialism) just shifts the pile of money to be made, from one group of people to another.

From my perspective, I'm not sure there really is a solution as, no matter what we try, at some point somewhere greed just seems to get the better of us.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#87

Post by tokai »

stuartbman wrote: post #50

Anecdotally, my university has been paying for fewer and fewer journal subscriptions. I was looking through the literature the other day and about half of the articles I needed to access weren't subscribed to by my (large, redbrick) university. I believe this is a shift recognising that academics will just skirt the access via sci-hub as a way for universities to trim their library budgets.

Nah is almost definitely because of lower funding for the library. The budgets globally are so squeezed now that publishers are actually lowering their fees for the first time since the industry started.

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#88

Post by johnday »

_yacj wrote: post #86

> But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam. Those are fair sentiments but in my experience, replacing one…

Who exactly do you see as profiting from a globally open-access paper store?

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#89

Post by Vinnl »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #69
Vinnl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I volunteer for a project [1] where the idea of "cutting out the middle man" is taken even further: removing the journal from the reputation transfer. So rather than a reviewer lending their reputation to a journal, and that journal then conferring a stamp of trustworthiness onto an academic work, reviewers lend their reputation directly to the works they review. The works themselves can still be shared far and wide,…

This is looks like a horrible idea. The system violates anonymous peer reviewing standards. These are sometimes even mandated by law, e.g. our funding institution would not allow us to count such a publication as "peer reviewed." There are many good reasons why peer review needs to be anonymous on both ends (the reviewer is anonymous and the manuscript is anonymized). Many reputable journals have even switched to tri…

In practice (as you partly allude to), the problems you speak to already often occur for traditional peer review, except they're less traceable there. Sure, collusion rings and nepotism is (still!) possible, but the data is out there for everyone to see and to call you out on. Now winking through a paper risks your reputation (the very thing that makes your endorsement relevant!), rather than only being potentially noticed by an observant editor.

(Something similar goes for researchers in charge of your postdoc funding: how many co-authorships are earned, and how many are ways to game the current system?)

I'm certainly not saying that a public endorsement system is the end-all-be-all and won't have its own problems. However, I do get frustrated every now and then by the institutional inertia that arises from holding new initiatives to higher standards than existing ones (see also: using the Impact Factor to evaluate academics).

Re: A World Without Sci-Hub

#90

Post by japanuspus »

mach1ne wrote: post #48

The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…

I believe your argument misses a critical point: The practicing researchers have no difficulty judging the value of articles appearing in a given venue. The whole "fake journal"-thing only really took of after new public management moved the decision power on hiring and grants from scientists to MBA's who could not judge publications on merit.
Post reply on HN