The thing I am concerned about with SciHub is its centralized nature. So far it has resisted everything, but supposed that eventually Elsevier manages to land Elbakyan in jail, or hack back SciHub and delete its content, what would happen? I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up. And I'd also be happy if the paper collection segment was free software, so that other entities could cooperate in case the original SciHub went down.
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
> I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up.
Agreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively broadening access to works of scientific research.
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
I didn’t know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company already had a bad record of political censorship but now it attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to exist for long.
Despite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub, it is breaking the law. Copyright infringement, whether you agree with it or not, is a crime. If Twitter received notice from the journals’ legal teams to take down the account, they may not have the ability to fight back (depending on the journals’ legal arguments).
For some more context I would like to share a precedent specifically in India and Delhi that could be relevant to this case as well, "Rameshwari Photocopy Service shop copyright case":
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
Public mone is spent two times for a paper: first time to publish and second time to read it.
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
All of these publishers are also an impediment for the progress. Just look at more modern approach for the scientific publishing - Authorea[1], PubPub[2], some similar platforms.
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
We are not compensated for reviewing on behalf of journals. We even pay to publish, and then pay to read our own paper.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
I would pay $10 if the author got at least payed $8 out of that. But since authors get payed nothing, I rather download the work from some other site and send the author a thank you mail if I really liked their work.
They could, but the optics of such an action would be really, really bad. Moreover, my gut feeling is that most researchers that use sci-hub could obtain most of the papers through their employer's subscription anyway. It's just that the UX of Sci-Hub is so much better.
You are confusing two things here: 1) the problems that for-profit journals bring, and 2) the supposed problems that all academic journals have, regardless of whether they are published by a for-profit or a non-profit publisher.
In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass that review.
If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank goodness for journals.
"This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing. Knowledge, when left to it's own nature, wants to be free and spread. The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. As an app developer, I implement all the tricks I know to stop people from pirating my work, but if they KNOW how to do it, and ARE WILLING to do it, good for them.
> The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing.
This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector, in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many other things that would be better run through public provision: housing, medical care, etc.
I think the private sector (for the most part) does a good job on delivering new housing, and are largely limited by local rules such as zoning and set-asides.
The only real criticism of them IMO is that they're cyclical with the economy. They tend to build during good times, but the most cost-effective time to build housing is during bad times (now) because construction costs are also low.
As someone who have escaped from places with public housing and healthcare provision, I suspect you were never really experiencing that. Some place for wise regulation - maybe.
That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
Ah, yes, I remember that time when I tried to copy a house and the private sector, all parasitic-like, went on about bullshit like "labour" and "materials" and "land". Like, what's that? I have rights, you know!
Not unsurprisingly a lot of comments are very negative on publishers but I think the nature of the criticism is kind of weird. Publishers in almost every comment as well in the interview are almost always portrayed as institutions that rip everyone off. But this is strange, because if it was true, everyone would just stop paying them, they don't literally hold anyone at gunpoint.
In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of Vogue for a fashionista.
When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub they don't compete with the core business model of publishers, they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities and status.
So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
> So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state.
In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field.
But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
The thing about (closed-access journal) publishers that ticks people off is just how little of the value they create for their cost. They get the papers they publish for free, they get the peer review for free, they even get most of the editing for free (academic editors are generally volunteer, although copy editors, who check for spelling and formatting, are generally employees).
As for why people keep paying, the answer is industry lobbyists. Whenever there is a movement to require open access of research, industry lobbyists shut it down. Although in many fields like physics and mathematics, people are bypassing journals (closed or open) in favor of preprints.
> what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention
If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.) For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the corporation could perform more high-quality editing, proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically.
Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF.
So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned societies managed to do just fine) and a vague “reputation and attention”. Sounds like a raw deal.
Many researchers are abandoning Elsevier and for-profit journals, but unfortunately two of the major non-profit technical societies in our field - ACM and IEEE - still seem to view digital libraries as a cash cow that can milk as much as possible to pay for unrelated activities, and they also still charge fees to authors for open access. These societies are hard to escape since they actually organize some of the best and biggest conferences.
USENIX is open access I believe, which is great, and I even think some of ACM's SIGs - SIGCOMM for example - make their publications, such as CCR and conference proceedings, available immediately via open access. (I think they are no longer published in print format, so that may save money.)
Hopefully many other SIGs (as well as IEEE societies) will follow suit, and hopefully government open access requirements will improve the situation as well. It doesn't make sense for taxpayer-funded research publications to be locked behind a third-party paywall.
I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with "thriving internet status economies" or "reputation and attention." The problem is the "exclusivity" where people have to pay e.g. $45 to read an article often partially or completely funded by taxpayers and with absolutely no value-add other than "reputation and attention," in order to discover it is irrelevant to what they're researching.
In my view, it would be ideal if in an open-access world some editors and/or organizations endorsed and vouched for particular papers, and academics competed intensely for those endorsements, if those endorsements were career-making or career-killing, and those editors/organizations made a living from charging scientists for their consideration and review.
That's not the bad part. If the output is available to everyone to read, I don't see the tragedy.
They don't literally hold anyone at gunpoint, but they do figuratively. If you stop paying a publisher then you don't get access to the papers your researchers need to read in order to perform their work.
Because by copyright law they hold the keys to the kingdom (of scientific literature)
Change is hard, common knowledge attacks are easy, publishers are like dictators, defectors are punished (publishing in a worse journal, basically only a minority of researchers can even flirt with the idea), and even if the global optimum is not a dictatorship it's hard to get there.
That is indeed a fair point: Why do people go to some Elsevier journal to look for an article instead of just going to the corresponding arxiv.org section? Because there is trust in the curation of those articles.
The problem with scientific publications is that there has not been a Spotify, Steam or Netflix disrupting company that provides the same service in a better way.
EDIT: Thinking more about it, I think such a service would be fair to say have a raw collection of journal articles (it could even be based on Arxiv) and charge for the "curation" layer on top of it. Now the only question is how to kickstart that curation layer in a matter that is trusted by scientists. Maybe it could be something more distributed where also curators (reviewers) and writers get some profit.
A reasonable request is not to shut all prestigious publishing monopolies down, but to ask/beg/fight them to be less greedy. As you mentioned, publishers run market places and sell distribution channels. They do not need that high margins to run the business. Where the profit goes to? Not the science community, but heir owners and executives high up on the rank who do not contribute much but get the most cash rewards. I believe this is what worth fighting for.
This! What the journals are selling is reputation.
The authors can choose to publish wherever they want - but there is value in publishing in Science, Nature. And their academic overlords acknowledge it too. Who gives a shit if a professor publishes a dozen papers in some obscure journal no one reads?
If you want to solve this issue stop violating the journals copyrights and start attacking the academic leaders who demand professors publish in them.
I'm on the fence about Sci-hub. Every time I read about it, I remember this article about how they operate.
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the same thing.
That link is transparently pushing something, and what it's pushing definitely isn't "the truth."
The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.
Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.
What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"
I sure hope so. Relying on credential donations would be a great way to make Elsevier's anti-piracy efforts much easier while landing more academic activists in jail / suicide.
[+] [-] giomasce|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xkeysc0re|5 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying...
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
[+] [-] jerheinze|5 years ago|reply
For IPFS have a look at https://libgen.fun/ and https://freeread.org/ipfs/
Also see the HN thread on those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
[+] [-] j-james|5 years ago|reply
And while the paper collection software isn't FOSS, it's really the idea behind article sourcing that's important.
[+] [-] slt2021|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|5 years ago|reply
actually kind of surprised I haven't heard this yet
[+] [-] crumbshot|5 years ago|reply
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
[+] [-] tasogare|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colejohnson66|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baali|5 years ago|reply
https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_s...
[+] [-] ficklepickle|5 years ago|reply
Relevant quote:
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
[+] [-] dilawar|5 years ago|reply
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
[+] [-] xvilka|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.authorea.com/
[2] https://www.pubpub.org/
[+] [-] Fomite|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oli5679|5 years ago|reply
https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neatze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatever1|5 years ago|reply
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
[+] [-] dutchmartin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielyaa5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neatze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lou1306|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TT3351|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
1) They restrict access to research with paywalls.
2) The research they publish is usually funded with public funds. Governments do not get money from journals.
3) The work being published is produced by researchers. Researchers do not get any money from the journals.
4) Journals rarely verify what they publish.
So, in short, Sci-Hub is a necessary disobedience movement that aims to end with the most pointless institution in academia: paid journals.
This is not the same as Napster.
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|5 years ago|reply
In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass that review.
If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank goodness for journals.
[+] [-] kikokikokiko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crumbshot|5 years ago|reply
This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector, in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many other things that would be better run through public provision: housing, medical care, etc.
[+] [-] diebeforei485|5 years ago|reply
The only real criticism of them IMO is that they're cyclical with the economy. They tend to build during good times, but the most cost-effective time to build housing is during bad times (now) because construction costs are also low.
[+] [-] juskrey|5 years ago|reply
That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
[+] [-] MrPatan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someguydave|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of Vogue for a fashionista.
When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub they don't compete with the core business model of publishers, they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities and status.
So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|5 years ago|reply
That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state.
In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field.
But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
[+] [-] jhbadger|5 years ago|reply
As for why people keep paying, the answer is industry lobbyists. Whenever there is a movement to require open access of research, industry lobbyists shut it down. Although in many fields like physics and mathematics, people are bypassing journals (closed or open) in favor of preprints.
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|5 years ago|reply
If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.) For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the corporation could perform more high-quality editing, proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically.
Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF.
So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned societies managed to do just fine) and a vague “reputation and attention”. Sounds like a raw deal.
[+] [-] musicale|5 years ago|reply
USENIX is open access I believe, which is great, and I even think some of ACM's SIGs - SIGCOMM for example - make their publications, such as CCR and conference proceedings, available immediately via open access. (I think they are no longer published in print format, so that may save money.)
Hopefully many other SIGs (as well as IEEE societies) will follow suit, and hopefully government open access requirements will improve the situation as well. It doesn't make sense for taxpayer-funded research publications to be locked behind a third-party paywall.
[+] [-] pessimizer|5 years ago|reply
In my view, it would be ideal if in an open-access world some editors and/or organizations endorsed and vouched for particular papers, and academics competed intensely for those endorsements, if those endorsements were career-making or career-killing, and those editors/organizations made a living from charging scientists for their consideration and review.
That's not the bad part. If the output is available to everyone to read, I don't see the tragedy.
[+] [-] ethanwillis|5 years ago|reply
Because by copyright law they hold the keys to the kingdom (of scientific literature)
[+] [-] visarga|5 years ago|reply
In a world where scientists careers didn't depend on publications, you'd be right.
[+] [-] pas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|5 years ago|reply
The problem with scientific publications is that there has not been a Spotify, Steam or Netflix disrupting company that provides the same service in a better way.
EDIT: Thinking more about it, I think such a service would be fair to say have a raw collection of journal articles (it could even be based on Arxiv) and charge for the "curation" layer on top of it. Now the only question is how to kickstart that curation layer in a matter that is trusted by scientists. Maybe it could be something more distributed where also curators (reviewers) and writers get some profit.
[+] [-] helixc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
The authors can choose to publish wherever they want - but there is value in publishing in Science, Nature. And their academic overlords acknowledge it too. Who gives a shit if a professor publishes a dozen papers in some obscure journal no one reads?
If you want to solve this issue stop violating the journals copyrights and start attacking the academic leaders who demand professors publish in them.
[+] [-] sodality2|5 years ago|reply
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the same thing.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
[+] [-] kick|5 years ago|reply
The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.
Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.
What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"
They aren't even trying at this point.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|5 years ago|reply
Right, because Aaron Swartz is famous for negotiating deals to legally license and pay for PDFs.
> They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking
I sure hope so. Relying on credential donations would be a great way to make Elsevier's anti-piracy efforts much easier while landing more academic activists in jail / suicide.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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