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The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

blogs.lse.ac.uk

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Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#91

Post by rgj »

nicoburns wrote: post #65
rgj wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition…

Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year. For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were availa…

> for some reason (possibly strong student unions?)

In fact, in my experience the student union actually took advantage of that situation instead.

When I started studying at TU Delft in 1991 the student union had a deal with the local bookstore to give 10% discount to their members. So in your first week as a freshman you were told to become a member of the student union because you would get a discount on all those books written by professors.

The student union said they represented 95% of the students, but 90% of them were only a member of the union because of the discount.

Oh. I see they still have the discount, and the student union actually has their OWN (commercial) publishing house nowadays. https://www.delftacademicpress.nl/index_en.php

"Members of the VSSD get a considerable discount on the books of Delft Academic Press because the publishing company is part of the student union VSSD."

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#92

Post by bonoboTP »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #84
maeln wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than unde…

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

> Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.

Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#93

Post by HorstG »

buboard wrote: post #73
goatkarma wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years of working in HE IT. Random unaffiliated Scihub users in China contacting our University IT helpdesk after the phished accounts Scihub was using to proxy an article had reached it's EZproxy download limit and the 'you have been blocked' message they receive instructed them to contact our helpdesk!

are u sure they were really "phished"? scihub would have no problems finding volunteers who would 'phish themselves'

And after donating credentials, the donor and IT are better off just claiming the password was "phished" (winkwink) when caught.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#94

Post by michaelt »

teekert wrote: post #37
Rerarom wrote: post #12

Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The latter is a way more comprehensive repository.

Do you have a tor link? Also for scihub for that matter?

My go-to source for links to piracy websites that sometimes change URLs is Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#95

Post by juliendorra »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #84
maeln wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than unde…

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive licen…

In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives).

The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law.

Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM.

So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#96

Post by neiman »

The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers.

Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen.

Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self-organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#97

Post by Vinnl »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #86
nicoburns wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year. For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were availa…

Maybe could be related to the tuition as well? In most of Europe universities are free for the students

There's a steep discount, but they're certainly not free in the Netherlands (nor in many other European countries).

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#98

Post by sytelus »

neiman wrote: post #96

The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers. Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of tho…

Hardly. It's, in fact, booming right now. You know who are the biggest benefactors? Top journals like Nature and all of IEEE. They are paywalled like nobody's business. In fact, they are much worse than Elsevier. But community only hypes about the later while lusting over publishing in Nature and much of the IEEE.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#99

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #89
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention. There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all. Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessari…

> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets…

Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc.

For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper.

Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.

Re: The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

#100

Post by qwerty456127 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #99
qwerty456127 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets…

Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc. For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you ge…

So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?
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