[HN Gopher] Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over "...
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Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over "Counterfeit"
Content
Author : prvc
Score : 446 points
Date : 2021-01-08 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| musicale wrote:
| Researchers usually want visibility and impact, and paywalls are
| in opposition to both.
|
| Moreover, most academic research in the US is government funded,
| so citizens deserve access to publications.
| hagibborim wrote:
| How can Sci-Hub and LibGen be mirrored? When I last looked into
| it, it was closed source.
| notriddle wrote:
| Sci-Hub is closed source. LibGen is open source, but published
| as code drops rather than using an actual VCS.
|
| Download the web app from
| http://gen.lib.rus.ec/code/libgen_legacy_catalog_20190831.ra...
|
| Download the database from http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/
| j-james wrote:
| Sci-Hub is also mirrored to Library Genesis.
| kaba0 wrote:
| The important part is not the source code but the content. As
| for libgen, they provide torrents per 1000 (I think) books, so
| maybe downloading and seeding those could be helpful? (But I
| heard they recently created IPFS mirros as well)
| hagibborim wrote:
| Both are important here. When I was looking into it, the data
| was useless without the source code. The names are obfuscated
| and impossible to query without the application source plus
| the map of file names to document metadata.
|
| I would be unable to mirror LibGen and Sci-Hub with what is
| currently available. I would be ECSTATIC to be proven wrong.
| f430 wrote:
| I wish there was a decentralized scalable version of Twitter,
| Facebook, Youtube.
|
| It would run off our mobile devices and PC sort of like
| bitorrent.
|
| I am aware of webtorrent (web based torrenting p2p) for videos
| and such but still nothing in production.
|
| IMHO, the next person that comes up with a highly scalable,
| decentralized, widely distributed mesh network of devices to
| securely transfer files between peers will not be a rich man but
| he would be a hero, I personally would donate a large chunk of
| money just to keep it afloat for others.
|
| Sort of like a "public funded public utility" software.
| luto wrote:
| twitter: https://joinmastodon.org/
|
| youtube: https://joinpeertube.org/
|
| The fediverse checks many of the boxes you mentioned. While I
| personally enjoy using it, it still lacks usability for many
| people, I think.
| j-james wrote:
| facebook: https://pleroma.social/
|
| instagram: https://pixelfed.org/
|
| blogger: https://write.as/
|
| soundcloud: https://funkwhale.audio/
|
| At the end of the day, though, the Fediverse is just like any
| other social network - most people join because their friends
| or people they know have.
| hagibborim wrote:
| I donated ~$300 to SciHub and encourage you all to donate as
| well. Please give what you can, her bitcoin address can be found
| at the bottom of the homepage.
|
| https://sci-hub.do/
| breck wrote:
| Also please post somewhere your support of her with your real
| name, and reach out with kind words. Every PhD I know relies on
| this site, but more importantly 10x+ more people I know who are
| otherwise "outside" academia rely on this site. How many of the
| world's best researchers in 30 years will have turned out to
| get their start in research not thanks to Academia but thanks
| to SciHub? My guess is most of them.
|
| And make no mistake, people are trying to have her killed.
|
| "Elbakyan may be working with Russian military intelligence.
| The story says she may have been stealing US military secrets
| from defense contractors"
|
| I just copy/pasted this horseshit from Elsevier's website right
| now.
|
| Let's provide her with the support and strength to win this
| war.
| mariuolo wrote:
| > "Elbakyan may be working with Russian military
| intelligence. The story says she may have been stealing US
| military secrets from defense contractors"
|
| And how is sci-hub connected to that?
| hedora wrote:
| The same way the false [1] allegations against Julian
| Assange are related to Wikileaks.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22201381
| rarefied_tomato wrote:
| I'm not aware of any facts supporting Elsevier's
| accusation, and I would characterize it as intentional
| disinformation.
|
| Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub.
| _Wintermute wrote:
| I mentioned Elbakyan and sci-hub in my PhD thesis
| acknowledgements. Hardly anyone will see it but it still felt
| like a little two-fingers to academic publishing.
| vslira wrote:
| Citing
|
| _" Sci-hub", Elbakyan A. et al_
|
| is definitely an academic trend I'd support :)
| chpill wrote:
| The page from elsevier website for those who want to check
|
| https://www.elsevier.com/connect/allegations-linking-sci-
| hub...
| hagibborim wrote:
| Very good point, and I didn't know that bit of slander
| against her.
| mncharity wrote:
| Is there an Easy Sci-Hub Donation for Dummies?
|
| scihub.org/donate/ looks scam.
|
| https://sci-hub.tech/donation/ at least has the same bitcoin
| address as sci-hub.do, but as for PayPal et al... ???
| hagibborim wrote:
| .do seems like the canonical domain
| reader345611 wrote:
| I think the Wikipedia's scihub page [0] can always be relied
| upon to know the current canonical URL.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
| Cenk wrote:
| .org is definitely a different site and organization, they
| intentionally blur the lines to make people think they are
| associated with Sci-Hub.
| bra-ket wrote:
| It's https://sci-hub.do/ or https://sci-hub.ren (that .tech
| and .org domains are different organizations)
|
| To be sure try searching for some random paywalled academic
| paper on their site
| bra-ket wrote:
| or http://sci-hub.ren
| mam2 wrote:
| I can't imagine some working on banning sci hub and thinking it's
| "a good thing".
| yoz-y wrote:
| Why? For somebody not familiar with how research publishing
| works it might just look like xeroxing books.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Ironically, xeroxing books is a pretty similar case, in that
| it's commonly done to school and university textbooks,
| because publishers are running similar rackets. It's hard to
| ethically justify fighting that either.
| mam2 wrote:
| > somebody not familiar with how research publishing
|
| Yeah and not able to use google about his own work.. The
| debate is pretty clearly explained everywhere.
|
| That said I have, more controversially, the same opinion
| about movie piracy. In general don't understand how you can
| feel good defending Goliath vs David. (The cinema industry
| never earnt so much money so far, at least pre-covid).
| msandford wrote:
| I'm not sure how that fits within the counterfeit rule. If they
| weren't the real papers at scihub wouldn't it be all OK? The
| issue seems to be that the problem (according to publishers) is
| that the real papers are available not behind a pay wall.
|
| The issue here isn't that the users of scihub are being defrauded
| by thinking they're ordering Prada and instead getting knockoffs.
|
| Not saying I endorse scihub BTW, just that the excuse given
| doesn't jive at all with reality.
| FabHK wrote:
| Interesting point. You could argue that a (good) counterfeit
| Louis Vuitton bag or Rolex provides the same functionality as
| the original, without the 90% tax to the rights holder.
|
| So, maybe the situation is quite analog: The paper you download
| is actually more or less the same as the original, but you
| haven't paid the rights holder, so it's counterfeit.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It isn't. You're getting literally _the same paper_.
|
| It's like I bought a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags and, for
| some reason, decided to sell them off for a fraction of a
| price. If you bought one from me, you'd buy an original bag,
| not a counterfeit one.
| xnyan wrote:
| Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the
| pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier
| to find and more reliable to use than ever before.
|
| If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately
| consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider
| it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone
| downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fraction of a
| fraction because there's 1) YouTube and 2) Spotify et al. You can
| listen to music all day with ads and not pay a cent, or you can
| pay a reasonable fee and get all the HQ music you can eat without
| ads. Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's
| another conversation.
|
| Just trying to ban pirate sources is a wonderful dream for
| publishers for sure, but there's no way it can work. Scientific
| papers are just too easy to share, the need for them high, and
| the current pricing too insane for it to be otherwise.
| wincy wrote:
| When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening
| condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her
| condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my
| wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a
| particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it,
| one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent
| doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us
| she was going to die. If she's believed to be terminal anyway,
| why not prescribe a relatively well known drug and see if it
| helps?
|
| I'm happy to say our daughters prognosis has improved greatly
| since she started this treatment. Without SciHub she might not
| still be with us.
| kaskakokos wrote:
| Wow! this touched me, it's wonderful and I am happy for you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| SciHub got me out of a bad procedure (serious enough that I'd
| be put fully under), or rather a series of bad procedures.
| Reading all of the papers on my condition gave me another
| effective option that not only 1) avoided the procedure, but
| also 2) if I had gotten the procedure, it's the kind of
| procedure that would have to be repeated every few years when
| the symptoms reoccurred. Turned out that a far cheaper, less
| arduous treatment could hold off symptoms indefinitely. I'm
| grateful to Elbakyan every day, and am also long past when I
| would have probably had a second or third occurance.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Just this one story justifies the existence of SciHub, and I
| don't doubt that there are 1000's to match.
| gmt2027 wrote:
| There was a talk about medikanren which can make deductive
| connections from a database of facts extracted from medical
| research. The speaker used it to find a treatment for his
| son's rare genetic disorder.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yval98eOyZc
|
| http://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper10..
| ..
| andredz wrote:
| I've spent many hours reading Matt Might's website:
| http://matt.might.net/articles/
| breck wrote:
| This is an incredible and inspiring story. Would love to read
| more.
|
| Could I connect you with some journalists? My contact info is
| in my profile.
| wincy wrote:
| Sure, my wife loves talking about her (it was mostly her,
| honestly) struggle to get the best care for our daughter,
| even at a "good" children's hospital, I'll send you an
| email.
| f430 wrote:
| make sure to post the article here when you finish writing
| it or a video.
| reader345611 wrote:
| Wish it's possible to publish user 'eloff' 's story above
| too if he/she has no problem with it.
| eloff wrote:
| Thank you for sharing an inspiring story.
|
| When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured
| over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the
| best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub
| was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and
| challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would
| have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the
| doctors.
|
| My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be sure to
| do your own research and talk to many doctors about your
| findings and treatment options. Do not blindly trust the
| medical community. They are years behind the current state of
| knowledge in their field and just do not have the time and
| energy to spend per patient to get the best outcome.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| > My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be
| sure to do your own research
|
| I would alter this slightly to "have a trusted advocate do
| research and talk to many doctors". The person with the
| life threatening diagnosis may not be in the right frame of
| mind to advocate for the best treatment. Should you ever
| find yourself in the hospital, having a capable ally
| alongside you can make a world of difference.
| orzig wrote:
| Very wise, and it's important to remember that no matter
| how 'in the right frame of mind' you are normally, you
| are basically a different person when coming out from
| general anesthesia.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I had a doctor mis-diagnose a very serious eye infection
| that could have led to blindness on one side as... a stye.
| And recommend I treat it with hot compresses.
|
| Luckily I'm obstinate and finally saw a specialist who
| correctly identified it and treated it, but it's critically
| important to be very active in your own medical treatment.
| Get second (and third, and fourth..) opinions, raise lots
| of questions, push back (politely) against things that
| don't seem to make sense.
| reader345611 wrote:
| That's amazing. Breast cancer is a common killer. Do you
| plan to write about it? Would love to read about. it.
| nemo1618 wrote:
| Is it possible to find, say, a private doctor that is able
| to give more personal care than a GP at a typical hospital?
| Whenever I talk to a doctor about my symptoms it feels like
| they're just doing triage. I can't really blame them for
| that, but I would happily pay $$$ for an experienced
| professional who truly cared about my health. I have no
| idea if such a thing exists though (outside the sphere of
| the very wealthy, of course).
| wincy wrote:
| My wife has the sharp mind of an engineer, but she was
| humble about reading the literature slowly and
| deliberately. She knows she's not a doctor. However she was
| firm in asking the doctors questions about what she read,
| getting clarifications and not being satisfied with answers
| like "this is how it's done" and would keep asking until
| things were explained. The doctors thought she was just
| obstinate against any procedure which was frustrating. She
| used the doctors as a resource, then made the most informed
| decision she felt she could. We got second opinions from
| experts at other children's hospitals.
|
| I feel sort of sick remembering one meeting where they told
| us our daughter would get 24 hour nursing care covered by
| insurance if we got her a tracheotomy, what a weird carrot
| to dangle in front of a parent. I think they thought what
| they were suggesting was the best medical choice but a baby
| with a trach needs 24-hour care because it can't even cry
| when the tube is in its throat.
| TheOperator wrote:
| I'm not quite in that rough shape but I have several medical
| conditions and for years I just stared at summaries and "Pay
| just $40 to read this article" and the article would be a
| freshman level essay about the sociological implications of
| illness. Now that sci-hub exists medicine is accessible.
|
| Anybody who wants to take it down is declaring war on the
| sick and disabled. Shut down Elsevier instead because they're
| an organization of long corrupt middlemen.
| maximente wrote:
| wow, vanilla comment but this is just really inspiring. kudos
| to her and best wishes to y'all going forward.
| wincy wrote:
| Thank you! She's doing great, at six months the doctors
| said she wouldn't make it to a year. But she is two now and
| her retired engineer great grandfather built her a little
| custom wheelchair that affords her a lot more freedom and
| mobility. At first she'd only go on the wood floors but has
| gotten stronger and wheels around the carpet now too. She
| has a five year old sister and they play together all the
| time.
| boogies wrote:
| I've wanted to give comments multiple upvotes before, but
| this story makes me wish HN had some sort of 'super
| favorite'. #PiracySavesLives
| nitrogen wrote:
| There is a "favorite" link which adds a comment to a
| public list of favorite comments on your profile.
| wincy wrote:
| At first blush I laughed at the hashtag, but it's not too
| far from the truth. With the a la carte model of $30 a
| paper there is no way she could have read the literature.
| My wife would read the papers slowly and look up words as
| necessary.
|
| We read about a surgery that could potentially help our
| daughter, which the head of neurosurgery declined to do.
| We then said we'd take her to another children's hospital
| (it turns out our insurance actually wouldn't have
| covered that, but we didn't know we were bluffing) and he
| begrudgingly agreed to perform the surgery. Had to get
| the expert who is a professor at Washington University to
| give a second opinion recommending surgery before it
| happened.
|
| Most of the doctors really didn't like my wife, there are
| notes about her obstinance in our daughters file. But our
| daughter is doing well, and I'm glad I married someone so
| doggedly persistent.
| hndudette2 wrote:
| _> After asking five different doctors about it, one finally
| agreed to prescribe it._
|
| Were the other four too lazy/orthodox to read the papers
| you're referencing? Or they read the papers and still thought
| it wasn't a good idea? I'm going to presume that the former
| is the case, unfortunately.
| arp242 wrote:
| Or didn't want to take the risk of using a somewhat
| experimental medicine (perhaps justifiably so, I don't know
| the details), or maybe the evidence is still promising but
| otherwise still very thin. Or they just didn't have the
| time to really research it as they also had dozens of other
| patients.
|
| There could be any number of reasons; without more details,
| I think it's quite a leap to immediately assume they're
| "lazy/orthodox to read the papers".
| hndudette2 wrote:
| I'm going off my experience with doctors that I know
| personally. There's definitely a personality type or an
| attitude there that shuts them off to things that a
| layperson will bring to them even if it's based on good
| science (only they haven't studied it before).
| fakedang wrote:
| Past experience is to blame for that. A lot of doctors
| blame patients for bringing utter bullshit that they
| scraped from Facebook or YouTube as the next Gen therapy.
|
| For instance, I have a background in biochemical
| engineering, my fiancee is a cancer surgeon, 4 cousins
| are doctors, and another 3 cousins married doctors. Yet
| the entire family collectively believes in homeopathy,
| unani medicine (Greek medicine) and other hogwash like
| cupping therapy, save for a select few. The last time I
| visited one of my relatives, they were ingesting some
| ayurvedic (Indian medicine) concoction that was later
| found to contain arsenic. One of my friends is daughter
| to two doctors, yet her Dad (a former Indian Army doctor,
| so not the run-of-the-mill kind) still spouted nonsense
| on Facebook like "burning Turmeric powder and inhaling it
| would prevent COVID".
|
| It's easy to understand, after all this, why doctors tend
| to be generally skeptical of laymen bringing them some
| new "breakthrough". Not much to do with personality than
| with what they see as a daily occurrence. Of course, one
| way to sift the chaff away from the grain would be to
| demand that patients bring in scientifically published
| papers, at which point most patients would scoff at you
| for not supporting their viewpoint.
| wincy wrote:
| The evidence is thin because there's very few children
| with the condition. A good number of them die by holding
| their breath. Very scary. It's a complication of an
| already rare disorder. The medication has been around
| since 1966 though, it's clonidine/catapres. The first
| doctor she mentioned it to just rudely corrected her on
| the pronunciation rather than give any actual feedback on
| whether or not it could help.
|
| I think you're absolutely correct about having dozens of
| other patients. My wife wrote a long email, that was
| forwarded to the doctors, citing various articles with
| links to the medical journals and the doctors couldn't
| thank her enough for it. It wasn't until that happened
| that someone prescribed the medication for her.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It's quite a leap unless you have worked extensively with
| doctors before and seen the behavior first hand too many
| times to count.
|
| I get why it happens: they have to deal directly with
| patients who 99% of the time are not research capable and
| if they claim to be research capable what they really
| mean is that they've been sharing conspiracy theories on
| facebook. Doctors build defense mechanisms against the
| nonsense (authoritative tone, dismissive attitude) that
| grate on academic sensibilities. They can be slow to come
| around but eventually they usually do.
| wincy wrote:
| And you're right, that's exactly what happened. My wife
| wrote up a set of concise notes with citations and asked
| if the social worker could forward it to the doctors. We
| met with the doctors a few days later and they thanked my
| wife over and over again for the document, and the
| conversation totally changed from one that felt
| adversarial to one that felt much more collaborative and
| productive.
|
| As the doctors cycled out though it sort of reverted to
| the mean, back to the authoritarian stance you expect
| from doctors, since NICU doctors were constantly rotating
| out.
| wincy wrote:
| They had "read" them. The first time she mentioned the drug
| to a doctor he just snippily corrected her on the
| pronunciation but nothing else. My wife carefully
| documented everything the paper said in a "Cliff's Notes"
| sort of version with links. The next meeting we had with
| them they were much less hostile, it was like night and
| day. I guess they were impressed by her careful note
| taking. Even so the doctor who did prescribe it sort of
| acted like it was his idea, my wife kind of rolled her eyes
| and just let him keep thinking that.
|
| The way we think about it is a doctor has what, 15 minutes
| (if that) to spare thinking about our daughter languishing
| in the NICU. My wife spent literally all day, all night,
| ruminating and worrying about her. I had just started a new
| job, (I was unemployed when she was born!) and honestly
| poured myself into that position, maybe as a way to avoid
| living at the hospital (I'm not proud of it but that's what
| happened). But it is weird we had to get the pulmonologist
| to prescribe a medication that's something the neurologist
| should probably be prescribing.
| blix wrote:
| Doctor's dislike when patients come in having tried to
| figure out something about their condition or treatment
| on their own. It seems to knock them out of their
| routine.
|
| I have personal experience with this as a patient and a
| family member of physicians. I wish I didn't know what
| docs say and think about their patients. It's a really
| unfortunate characteristic of the US medical system.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Is lazy really the right word? I would assume doctors have
| an incredible amount of stuff to continually read up on and
| a large amount of patients that would all individually
| benifit greatly if the doctor read alot of papers about
| their particular ailment. On top of working large hours. I
| would assume only specialists would be able to really try
| to read everything for a patient like that without
| "skimming"
| absolutelyrad wrote:
| I'm so happy for you!
|
| There's a company that is not public but working in this
| space, I cannot recall it's name. They use NLP to diagnose
| patient condition by ingesting raw information/text from
| medical books/papers. You describe how you feel and any other
| information that you have in an article, and it gives out
| possible conditions and prescription.
|
| AFAIK, they still recommended that you go to the doctor, but
| you could use it as an extra to check the diagnosis yourself.
|
| But their point was they have all the data coming out in new
| papers, and the system studies it constantly and is always
| kept up.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| What's the company?
| [deleted]
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| I myself have used SciHub this very week to understand a
| medical condition that is taking over my life, before seeing
| a very expensive private specialist soon.
|
| SciHub gave me access to valuable information that helped me
| understand my condition and the right questions to ask my
| doctor next week.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe
| something and instead just told us she was going to die. If
| she's believed to be terminal anyway, why not prescribe a
| relatively well known drug and see if it helps?
|
| Because according to EBM nothing exists and nothing works
| unless it's proven with a big RCT.
|
| Yes, it's ridiculous. Especially as in your case.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| EBM: evidence-based medicine?
|
| RCT: randomized controlled trial?
| f430 wrote:
| How is that doctors miss this? Is it because they don't want
| to risk their license?
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Gabe Newell was known for taking this stance if I recall
| correctly, describing piracy as usually a service problem and
| not a pricing problem.
|
| "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy.
| Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing
| problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in
| the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your
| personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is
| region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US
| release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store,
| then the pirate's service is more valuable."
| ergocoder wrote:
| It's only true in the first-world country.
|
| Microsoft office is ~$1000, which is 2x higher than average
| month salary in Thailand/Vietnam.
|
| A CD album is $10(?), which is equivalent to 10 meals. A
| cassette is $3, which is 3 meals.
|
| Pirate is the only way to access these things. It's a pricing
| problem.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Prices of software can be adjusted based on the user's
| location. Steam does this. It is of course subject to abuse
| but most people pay the asked price.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the
| pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier
| to find and more reliable to use than ever before.
|
| Maybe I'm just older and have less free time, but public
| trackers seem less and less useful every year. And private
| trackers have a huge barrier to entry.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Pirate Bay is a great tracker of last resort .. and when I
| look for something rare I can't find on a public tracker, it
| usually showed up on Pirate Bay.
| jszymborski wrote:
| This case is unlike movie or music distribution in there has
| been convenient online distribution of papers since arguably
| the dawn of the internet (ok, maybe "convenient" came later).
|
| The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they
| can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the
| competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that
| moved.
|
| Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of
| the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic
| about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and
| precluded any kind of pirate culture.
|
| But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen,
| the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and
| brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of
| momentum for moment.
|
| Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at
| least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted)
| the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit
| them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.
|
| This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to
| send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to
| review papers, but one battle at a time.
| dcomp wrote:
| Also when I was in academia (masters). If my university
| didn't subscribe to a journal (and it wasn't available via an
| inter-library loan (In the UK you can ask for a journal from
| another university)). I would just shoot an email to the
| author asking for a copy
|
| Edit: Actually I usually sent emails even when we did have a
| hard copy but no online access. Just because I couldn't be
| bothered to find the physical copy
| jowsie wrote:
| The issue with this is the authors of some papers either
| don't respond or simply aren't alive anymore.
| daotoad wrote:
| It also scales really badly.
|
| If a paper becomes prominent and many people want to read
| it, is it reasonable for the authors to be inundated with
| hundreds of requests for a copy?
|
| What is the point of journals if we rely on word of mouth
| interactions to share information?
| pradn wrote:
| In the humanities, authors often upload to Academia.EDU.
| It doesn't seem to have as much use among scientists.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's
| another conversation.
|
| Maybe, but part of the reason content creators will keep
| getting screwed is that there's no way to pay them equitably
| with $5/mo subscriptions. Prices would have to rise. So it
| seems that the market alternative to piracy is gross
| exploitation.
| xnyan wrote:
| I'm not saying it's right, in fact I will state the opposite
| - content creators are getting shafted on royalties - but
| it's always been this way for music and books and all
| content. Most content creators got a shitty deal on physical
| media and continue to get a shitty deal on streaming.
|
| I don't accept as a given that my $10 a month subscription
| that I use to stream as few hours of music can't be fairly
| split with the publisher and the creator.
| staplers wrote:
| The value of content creation has dramatically declined
| because the barrier to entry has fallen so low. I find great
| new artists every week and would never have to listen to the
| same song twice (if I chose).
|
| I can write a song, make a movie, and take photographs all
| from a pocket computer and publish globally instantly.
| kleer001 wrote:
| > The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor...
|
| I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and
| politics the same way:
|
| XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-
| ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it
| should be more efficient and productive, people should choose
| it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest
| without coercion or propaganda. But, of course, that never
| happens.
| cratermoon wrote:
| https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/
| kleer001 wrote:
| yea, but no thanks, neo-liberalism is obviously garbage
|
| laisez faire is no way to solve the tragedy of the commons
| pmyteh wrote:
| One problem with this idea is that collective action problems
| exist. I truly want this new world, but my employment and
| promotion decisions are based on the old one (closed journals
| are older, and most of the prestigious journals are old and
| closed, and to get a job that's where I need to publish).
| Critically, the same is also true of all of my colleagues. So
| we all submit to the old journals, which thereby retain their
| prestige. In many ways, it's similar to platform economics,
| with Elsevier in place of WhatsApp.
|
| (I'm also not sure that awesome == efficient + productive,
| but that's a different issue).
| kleer001 wrote:
| yup, awesome will need to include charisma and deep pockets
| to bootstrap. then again I can see a smooth transition from
| an extant system with an oddly benificent CEO, but I can be
| delusional like that.
|
| if awesome = neither effective nor productive then we're
| going to get mass starvation and mass death, or at the very
| least feudalism, and that doesn't sound nice
|
| I know of no competitive natural system that's more
| wasteful than its competitors
| thatcat wrote:
| what's a monopoly?
| dd36 wrote:
| We screwed content makers with mp3s, which allowed publishers
| to follow suit. We changed the paradigm. This is a bit harder
| because schools pay for content not the researchers directly.
| It'll be harder to force change.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Thought they have mirrors?
| jancsika wrote:
| Suppose Bob publicly claims to possess the Sci-Hub db.
|
| Alexandra challenges this publicly by sending a bunch of
| randomized small "slices" of the db to be hashed.
|
| Bob publicly broadcasts the requested hashes, and Alexandra
| publicly claims they all match. (Also, assume the hash-checker is
| publicly available and anyone who dares can use it to check their
| own copy of the db and verify Bob's hashes.)
|
| If this is the extent of Bob's network activity, can Bob get in
| trouble in the U.S.?
| MikusR wrote:
| Isn't Twitter a private organization that can ban anyone they
| want?
| shiado wrote:
| Yes and? Sci-Hub is a resource whose value transcends American
| IP orthodoxy and their contributions to Twitter are a gain for
| humanity. If Twitter can platform totalitarian governments that
| commit crimes against humanity why not a mere IP violator?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Yes and we're private citizens who can criticize it all we want
| for banning people we like. So the world turns.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| What a shame there aren't more decentralised services like
| email, the web and Usenet (which is now pretty much dead).
|
| Twitter can do pretty much what it wants to who it wants, and
| they don't have to give a reason.
|
| Maybe you get banned due to an algorithm mistake. Or an
| individual contracted by Twitter who doesn't like what you
| said. Or maybe they misunderstand what you said due to cultural
| differences.
|
| I found my time on Twitter was fighting against a US-biased
| culture, and what I consider friendly banter with friends can
| be misconstrued as abuse by some random moderator or algorithm.
| djsumdog wrote:
| Start using ActivityPub
| (Mastodon/Pleroma/PeerTube/PixelFed/etc.) If takes people in
| tech using it first to build momentum.
| sneak wrote:
| Yup. Private citizens and organizations can do many shameful,
| reprehensible things, such as engaging in arbitrary (and legal)
| censorship, such as what Twitter does.
|
| Only assholes decide unilaterally for other adults what they're
| allowed to see and read.
| [deleted]
| mariuolo wrote:
| Couldn't they switch to vkontakte?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's a VK account already.
|
| https://vk.com/sci_hub?w=wall-36928352_5896
|
| Obvious global accessibility conerns are obvious.
| mc32 wrote:
| Let's suppose sci-hub distributes unauthorized content. It's
| still not counterfeit. In the physical world I believe this is
| called the grey market.
|
| It's legit, just not via official distribution channels.
|
| Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating content
| and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that Twitter
| HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy. They are not
| beholden to their users or any other oversight.
| ben509 wrote:
| I chceked their counterfeit policy[1] to confirm; it's pretty
| clear and hews to the plain meaning of the word:
|
| > Counterfeit goods are goods, including digital goods, that
| are promoted, sold, or otherwise distributed using a trademark
| or brand that is identical to, or substantially
| indistinguishable from, the registered trademark or brand of
| another, without authorization from the trademark or brand
| owner. Counterfeit goods attempt to deceive consumers into
| believing the counterfeit is a genuine product of the brand
| owner, or to represent themselves as faux, replicas or
| imitations of the genuine product.
|
| An unauthorized copy simply isn't counterfeit unless it is
| promoted as official. There's a legit copyright argument, but
| Twitter's rules (correctly) don't apply unless the copyrighted
| material is on Twitter.
|
| > Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating
| content and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that
| Twitter HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy.
|
| The suppression of speech is the symptom here, not the root
| problem. I doubt Twitter is doing this because they have an axe
| to grind against SciHub. Likely, an executive got a call from
| the journals and then told the moderation teams to figure out
| how to ban them.
|
| I think the root issue is that tech/media companies are
| becoming a bit of a shadow-government where people with
| influence can shut down their competitors. And the journals
| probably feel they were entirely justified in "lobbying"
| Twitter, since SciHub is violating their copyright.
|
| This isn't new, businesses have always made private agreements
| to screw each other, and the only reason we don't have smoke-
| filled back rooms these day is people don't smoke much. What's
| new is that big information / infrastructure / financial
| platforms are a far more influential feature of the modern
| political economy.
|
| [1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-
| policies/counterfeit-g...
| mc32 wrote:
| So I can see a copyright angle. I agree.
|
| Nevertheless, the account itself is not distributing either
| fake products or copyrighted products (one could argue the
| service which uses Twitter for comms, violates copyrights,
| but not the Twitter handle itself.)
|
| I mean, why not ban the accounts for all accused criminals?
| There should be a firewall between the content of the Twitter
| account and the entity(ies) behind the accounts.
|
| I really loathe how they are deciding what is permissible to
| say (as well as determining what IRL actions are non-grata
| and affect status of the a Twitter account. (We don't like
| what we heard second hand that person said or did, so we'll
| suspend or terminate account).
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Twitter is a for-profit US corporation. If you have enough
| money they will literally do anything you want, as in this
| case. In my opinion, if they need to update their terms of
| service in order to make that easier they certainly will do so
| either after they take action or immediately before.
|
| I don't think there's any reason to expect Twitter to honor the
| right to free speech as described in the US constitution as
| they aren't associated with the US federal or any US state
| government. Any management of content on the site will be done
| only to the extent that it benefits Twitter monetarily.
|
| In my opinion, there's no good reason to expect anything
| different.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes, I suppose as laws stand this is correct. However, given
| the typical use case of the service, I reluctantly would like
| to see them regulated as a Telco who cannot deny services.
|
| It's become the miss "Goody Two Shoes" bully network,
| unfortunately.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Someone really needs to create an alternative to impact factor
| that doesn't heavily bias in favor of long established paid
| journals. Elsevier and other such journal publishers rely on
| business models that drive up the cost of education, reduce
| access to knowledge, and skew the incentives of researchers - in
| short they make humanity collectively dumber and we all suffer
| for it. It would be in everyone's best interest for researchers
| to switch over to publishing in free journals, we'd be good, but
| that won't happen so long as the free journals are labelled
| inferior to the paid ones, and thus researchers are penalized for
| bucking the system.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Twitter is slowly being more dangerous day by day.
|
| Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level
| researcher who haven't used scihub.
|
| We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to
| those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please
| stop pushing humanity to backward direction.
| mainstreemm wrote:
| Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone
| who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are
| already picking up steam, and have been since the election.
|
| Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the
| devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer
| under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is
| disputed wrongthink?
|
| 0
| https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1321494146989907969?r...
| kahrl wrote:
| Please check the url at the top of your browser. If it begins
| with "news.ycombinator.com" you're in the wrong place. Try
| posting here instead: https://parler.com/
| agiroth wrote:
| This is uncalled for. Pointing out Twitter's political bias
| on a technology forum is relevant, whether you agree with
| the comment or not.
| mainstreemm wrote:
| Wow really, pointing out that Twitter won't ban an open
| Holocaust denier who constantly pushes anti-Semitic
| falsehoods makes me .. what, hard right now?
|
| Fuck you. I am on the wrong website. This website is a
| shithole. Ban me, dang. This website is like a Leftist
| Parler. So's Twitter. So's Reddit. I don't have accounts on
| any of those sites.
|
| Enjoy your filter bubbles. I'll go back to talking to my
| loved ones in private chats.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I've got a weak conspiracy theory that Twitter has to take
| drastic action like this because they're not relevant
| anymore. I don't know a single person who uses Twitter. I
| don't know that there's a single proprietary thing about
| their platform that Parler/Gab couldn't copy. I don't know
| anyone who thinks Twitter is well-designed.
|
| If they aren't centered in the news like they are constantly,
| I'm not sure that they wouldn't just fade away to
| competitors.
| hagibborim wrote:
| What can tech workers do to help this effort? Either through
| supporting this particular project or through other applications
| of their skills?
| type0 wrote:
| Twitter is the counterfeit of Jaiku and should be closed for the
| benefit of all the humanity.
| orange_tee wrote:
| Don't worry Alexandra. Twitter are just jealous because their
| platform is just a toy for imbeciles to shout inanities on the
| internet. Very few websites can claim to have achieved more good
| for the world than sci-hub.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Why do we even allow twitter this power.
|
| Stop using twitter.
| asdff wrote:
| It's their website, they can ultimately do what they please.
| You have this power too, if you wrote your own website. So does
| dang here.
| andrewprock wrote:
| This is certainly the best advice. Personally I find Twitter to
| be the worst of the worst forum formats, and it bugles my mind
| that anyone actually enjoys using it.
| asdff wrote:
| People are addicted to memes and depressing news, cut off the
| head of twitter and two more will take its place scratching
| the same primal itch.
| meekmockmook wrote:
| Our country would not be in this mess if antitrust laws were
| used to bust up Facebook, Google, and Twitter years ago. Our
| leaders were all but bribed by the VCs and their lobbyists to
| look the other way while our social norms and sense of right
| and wrong were destroyed by malicious algorithms.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| I don't see the point of why Twitter or Facebook should even
| exist if they have this amount of power. You're setting
| yourself up to being witch-hunted down like in the middle-ages
| or being the new face of a most wanted poster all over the town
| square if you say or do the wrong thing.
|
| It's only going to get worse if you keep using social media.
| Delete your accounts while you can.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Will the new American administration (I'm not an American and
| should have no bone on American politics, but this is how the
| world works) will significantly enable Twitbookgle to exert
| powers they did not under Trumpism?
| dd36 wrote:
| What limits did Trump admin put on them? They bullied them into
| up weighting Conservative content and down weighting Liberal
| content but I doubt that changes.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jo...
| dd36 wrote:
| Not clear why the downvotes. This is literally what happened
| despite Trump winning in 2016 before this re-adjustment of
| weightings. I am sure the slide deck will come out in FTC,
| congressional or court hearings in the next few years.
| superkuh wrote:
| As someone who was paying attention to the old days of online
| censorship (2000-2010) when the RIAA/MPAA were the big baddies,
| yes, it's going to get worse. Biden unfortunately was/is the
| the MPAA's man in congress for many years.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/joe-bidens-pro-riaa-pro-fbi-tech-v...
|
| http://techrights.org/2020/11/09/biden-riaa-and-mpaa/
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dem-vp-pick-bidens-tech-policy-...
| criddell wrote:
| What powers did they not exert during the Trump administration?
| swebs wrote:
| Trump repeatedly chastised them for their censorship policies
| and the threat of additional legislation was always over
| their head. Now that the politicians in power are the ones
| allied with the tech giants, there's little stopping them
| (the tech giants) from going full 1984.
| prionassembly wrote:
| That's exactly my question: are they going to acquire new
| powers that we didn't know existed?
| Bedon292 wrote:
| If anything I feel its more likely that they will face
| additional scrutiny. My understanding is the Democrats want
| more anti-trust laws, and are more likely to break up the
| big tech companies. Not sure how that might affect Twitter,
| but Apple, Google (Alphabet), Facebook, and Amazon are
| probably going to face a lot of additional issues.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/technology-50e69e921c6699a3edbd7
| 3...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This might have been political posturing. The Obama
| administration was very cozy with SV and there's
| significant influence from big tech on Biden's
| administration[1]. Only time will tell.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/21/big-techs-stealth-
| push-to-in...
| joelthelion wrote:
| At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that
| SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix
| laws so that it becomes either legal or useless. That's no easy
| task, but it's much better than having scientists from all over
| the world rely on it while simultaneously pretending they are
| dangerous criminals.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Twitter is a private business and can ban whoever they want at
| their disposal. I have been told repeatedly when asking why we
| don't have due process for this, especially when banning a high
| profile account.
| mncharity wrote:
| > scientists
|
| Not only scientists need sci-hub.
|
| Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or
| trying to understand existing content, steeped in
| misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public.
|
| When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even
| when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on
| reddit, I use google scholar, open access. _and sci-hub_.
|
| And "I'd really like to see paper X" is _not_ my common case.
| Though it does occur when double checking that I 've finally
| understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with
| a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search,
| and I surf, and I find a paper that _might_ have one helpful
| sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40!
| And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it 's not just
| greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not
| infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or
| the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining
| something.
|
| It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with
| Elsevier to make research literature _less_ accessible to the
| public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry
| education content, using words like "incoherent", and as
| leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.
| TheRealSteel wrote:
| Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet
| links to torrents of papers, or similar?
|
| Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this
| point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational
| in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where
| governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking
| protocols?
|
| This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to
| understand the situation.
|
| I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed
| -- not for an academic research problem or business operation,
| but to simply understand _a health condition I personally
| suffer from_.
| eganist wrote:
| Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own
| research and papers for free as part of their standard
| contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links
| make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and
| by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a
| paper with their consent.
|
| And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it
| provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to
| torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own
| research and papers for free as part of their standard
| contracts with the big journals?
|
| Yes.
|
| Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal
| persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but
| they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even
| when it's free on the journal's site.
| mixedmath wrote:
| I give out every paper I've published for free. Well,
| actually every paper I've published is also available in
| essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary
| middleman.
|
| But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't
| make their papers freely available and who don't use the
| arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems
| particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of
| course there is the set of papers published more than 20
| years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse,
| essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub
| is great.
| boogies wrote:
| IIUC the Library Genesis project mirrors SciHub (i.a.), and
| Libgen is mirrored on IPFS and has torrents for every 1000
| files or so.
| notriddle wrote:
| > Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at
| this point?
|
| Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases,
| using credentials that have been secretly donated to them.
|
| Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a
| magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in
| the first place is the tricky part.
| StavrosK wrote:
| IPFS would be perfect for distributing this, if it worked
| well.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Stay tuned. Something's cooking.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Torrents are available here:
| http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/
|
| Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still
| somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple
| people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded.
|
| Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some
| effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's about double that now.
| biggc wrote:
| > 55 TB ... > smallish
|
| What a time to be alive
| wongarsu wrote:
| 55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around
| 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go
| either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using
| that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB
| smallish.
|
| Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| There are 30/50/100 TB SSD's that would fit your coat
| pocket
| generalizations wrote:
| That much storage would still cost somewhere around
| $1500-$2000. Impressively low, but still in the range of
| a very dedicated hobbyist.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Clearly .. tons of people spend more than that on gears
| of way less value (think GPUs for leisure purposes only).
|
| Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full
| sponsorship or half easily.
| Pixionus wrote:
| For most of the lay users I help in the community 4tb is
| immense. For most of my colleagues (I work on Kubernetes
| cluster backbends for large companies running streaming
| services you likely use, among other 'big' data
| companies) 20-50tb is if you run your own all time
| backups (usually with ZFS and the like so divide that by
| 3 for total usable space). The guys that are running IPtv
| or other sketchy video streaming and scraping software
| are hovering around 100TB-200TB in their NAS and none of
| them actually run user grade hardware... I'm honestly
| very surprised to hear it referred to as 'smallish'.. At
| most I'd say 100TB is about middle of the road now days
| for media horders and small for media content producers.
|
| Now my buddy that worked on the CEPH storage backed at
| CERN would laugh at any of these numbers... but that's a
| different ballpark all together..
| pmiller2 wrote:
| You can get more than 8 without going to external
| enclosures. I have a tower case with 15 drive bays in it.
| leephillips wrote:
| SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me.
| But there are other ways to get free copies of articles:
| https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason
| torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not
| everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get
| access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would
| do.
| leephillips wrote:
| I understand that. But isn't it useful to know about other
| avenues, in case SciHub is unavailable to you, or you just
| don't want to use it?
| LockAndLol wrote:
| I see. Indeed, it is useful.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| And having to pay double digit for a paper just to make one
| citation.
| blt wrote:
| I think they meant that people with institutional access
| to journals still use sci-hub because it is more
| straightforward than dealing with all the institutional
| logins, which are especially annyoing when not on the
| institution's network.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Very true. There were many open access initiative but you
| get to jump through hoops and links until you may get a
| functioning embeded pdf viewer (may require registration,
| data input, waiting time..)
|
| sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value".
| Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier
| gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect.
|
| Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead
| fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier
| is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be
| no reason for it to succeed at all.
|
| Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work
| would be required to be publicly available, or at least not
| derive any profit from discouraging public access.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| How about we target the laws that enable this obnoxious
| gatekeeping in the first place? We should simply get rid of
| copyright.
| specialp wrote:
| Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier
| extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a
| year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective,
| indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost
| money. If we had a world where there were a large number of
| people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing
| correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could
| easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions
| or article processing charges.
|
| Currently locking people out of information that is often
| funded with public money is not good for society. So having a
| small publication charge that can be covered in research is a
| good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward
| system of publication with impact factors and citations is
| indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But
| there is a lot more work that is thought of in the
| publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but
| finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of
| interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not
| free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a
| journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost
| you time without a finished product. All of this does not
| cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
| tchalla wrote:
| > Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing
| content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money.
|
| Publishers only archive and index. The rest is done for
| free by scientists.
| specialp wrote:
| If that was true we would not have any physics journals
| and many math journals. We'd just have people peer
| reviewing arXiv. Peer review is a lot more complicated
| than people think to find the right reviewers, minimize
| conflicts of interest, prodding reviewers, reviewing
| their reports. Also having editors read submissions first
| to see if it is even worth sending to peer review. This
| costs money and is not free. And it is why we have not
| seen a free model of this supplant journals.
|
| This could be done not for profit or government funded
| (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher)
| almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in
| a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are
| in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense
| is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
|
| We already have a free tier of publication in
| repositories like arXiv. There is still value in
| curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that
| cost is non zero.
|
| The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing
| with correspondence and selecting referees for further
| review are indeed not working for free. If there were a
| lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day
| doing that we would not have to pay publishers for
| anything.
| lokar wrote:
| IME, the publisher provides extremely limited support to
| the academics who do this work (filter/select papers,
| recruit reviewers, organize reviews, etc). The professors
| involved are generally doing it as a public service to
| their field. The publisher provides modest amount of
| support and support staff, totally out of proportion to
| what they then charge for access.
| tchalla wrote:
| > This costs money and is not free
|
| I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of
| this journals for a better of the decade. I personally
| know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM,
| Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their
| time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for
| free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not
| do anything more than it.
| im3w1l wrote:
| My fear is that after the big for profit journals are
| smashed, they will be replaced by ideologues working for
| pennies because of the influence they get to wield. A few
| billions is a small price to pay imo.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier
| extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a
| year in profits.
|
| Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| That's a lot smaller than I expected, means they're
| spending a lot of money on something
| dagw wrote:
| Elsevier have a lot of businesses and services outside of
| journal publishing that they no doubt sink a lot of money
| into. I'm guessing they also see the writing on the wall
| for their old business model and are funneling a lot of
| cash into trying to find new, more future proof, revenue
| streams
| pessimizer wrote:
| Executive salaries.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Do stock buy backs count as profits or are they taken out
| before that calculation?
| owenversteeg wrote:
| This isn't intended as personal criticism of your
| comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal
| experience in business often overestimate margins and
| don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is
| crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a
| handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you
| hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard,
| that collect a percentage of most transactions that its
| 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high
| margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of
| the businesses people interact with in their daily life
| have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%,
| restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned
| by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%),
| gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines
| etc are all very low margin.
|
| My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high
| margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism
| not working right. Occasionally margins are high because
| of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in
| most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top
| handful of most profitable businesses in the world,
| making basically all their money on interchange. As a
| result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're
| eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the
| bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in
| return, right? Fraud protection and security and support
| and all these important things - what would we do without
| them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do
| fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2%
| in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since.
| Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting
| the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and
| Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add
| zero value. And even if you like those businesses,
| there's an even more compelling case for regulating away
| Elsevier in its entirety.
| beardyw wrote:
| I interviewed for a job at Elsevier near Camden Lock
| (London) years ago. I said the location was great if I
| decided to get a tattoo. Didn't get the job. Thank you
| Lord.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Do many Elsevier journals provide copyediting on the part
| of the corporation? Many of the big scholarly publishers
| today expect the burden of copyediting and even typesetting
| to fall on the author or unpaid editors, and then the
| unpaid authors or editors are expected to provide camera-
| ready output to the publisher.
| emidln wrote:
| > Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing
| content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money.
|
| Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-
| review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of
| a paywalled work), without being selective, and without
| copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do
| it much more cheaply than Elsevier.
| specialp wrote:
| I agree arXiv and Sci-Hub are useful. In the case of
| arXiv it does indeed cost money to run but not much as
| they are taking in PDFs and storing them without review,
| copy editing or curation. And that is fine. But arXiv has
| not replaced journals still. Getting work disseminated
| has not been an issue since the dawn of the internet. And
| that is not expensive either.
|
| The service Elsevier provides albeit at a high margin and
| predatory business tactics is more than just archiving
| and displaying a PDF. And Sci-Hub is stealing the extra
| value they provide by curation, and peer review
| facilitation. We might agree with it since they aren't a
| nice company but the costs of copy editing, curating and
| reviewing those papers is not being done by Sci-Hub they
| are just doing the cheapest part of the process by being
| a repository for paywalled papers. They aren't being more
| efficient publishers by getting the value add part for
| free. Someone has to pay for that part. And if Sci-Hub
| just hosted non pirated work that was not reviewed or
| copy-edited it would be just as laudable as arXiv.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person
| get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place
| (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!).
|
| SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier
| has.
|
| SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this
| comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| ArXiv and a long list of other free repositories are way
| better than SciHub for legally sharing free-gratis access
| to scientific papers.
|
| Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed
| e.g. by Google Scholar.
| TheTrotters wrote:
| Why are they better than one place that has everything?
| (Asking in good faith)
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Why don't we have one single webpage where all
| journalists write all their articles without any
| organization other than a search box?
|
| Content organization is key. And different research
| disciplines have different practices, different artifacts
| related to the article, different readership.
|
| We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the
| same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc;
| biology; medicine. Then you have several national and
| institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of
| those groups. Etc. etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Content organization is key._
|
| It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong
| taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social
| media platforms is built directly on this fact.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a
| paper, you can click an authors name and see their other
| papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a
| paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv
| and not by Sci-Hub.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was
| legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the
| same as it is now, and that it would have no popular
| competitors/alternatives?
| ballenf wrote:
| If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good
| (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero
| value... that will be news to a bunch of people here.
|
| And also Netflix.
| RenThraysk wrote:
| You mean like public libraries?
| throww223232423 wrote:
| Twitter tries to cancel the Library of Alexandra. We should
| discuss a bit about Twitter as well, I think.
|
| In other comments I saw the resonable demand to express support
| for Elbakyan. Recall that we discuss about the biggest free
| library of research works.
|
| I tried this here:
| https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-...
| stevespang wrote:
| We need an better alternative to Twitter - - DUMP TWITTER !
| pera wrote:
| An official Sci-Hub Mastodon instance could be pretty interesting
| :)
| temac wrote:
| Digital copyright questions have nothing to do with
| counterfeing...
| illustriousbear wrote:
| Hackernews comments were generally onboard with Twitter banning
| Trump for controversial tweets that can be considered as
| incitement.
|
| As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that
| disregards and breaches copyright.
|
| If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer
| areas (Trump), you shouldn't be surprised when they do the same
| for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub).
|
| It scares me that these big tech companies are becoming
| arbitrators for what many people see. The worst part is that it
| is allowing the US oligarchy to further influence the rest of the
| world too.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Twitter has said on a number of occasions [1] that Trump has
| violated their ToS, but allowed him to stay because it was
| important for the public to see. That's not a grey area.
|
| In the case of Sci-Hub what part of the ToS do they violate?
| The message cites counterfeiting, which doesn't seem to apply
| (unless that's a translation issue?). And if Piracy is a
| violation of their terms then why are there plenty of piracy
| torrent websites with Twitter presences still [2]? At least
| apply it evenly.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1266267447838949378
| https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1323868590047744000
|
| [2] Not linking directly, just search for the pirate bay, eztv,
| or any other torrent site. There are at least one or more
| handles claiming to be them.
| illustriousbear wrote:
| Those are certainly fair points but I think getting bogged
| down in the ToS and details is side stepping the real issue
| here.
|
| At the end of the day Twitter moderates its own service,
| which is just their managers and random team members. Twitter
| sets the rules and can find any justification to ban whoever
| they want. Do you really think Twitter constrains themselves
| by their rules? I don't, they will change those rules if they
| want.
|
| As a major source of information, is that what you want? Is
| getting bogged down in ToS details really the important issue
| here?
|
| If we yell at Twitter and demand them to ban certain content,
| they are also going to exercise that power when it serves
| their interests too. You can't have it both ways.
| Bedon292 wrote:
| I don't feel like its getting bogged down in the ToS, but I
| think I get your point.
|
| My main concern is about even application of their policies
| across the board. If they say something is against their
| ToS and want to ban it, fine, that's on them. But apply
| that same thing to everyone. I don't like banning one
| piracy site but not another. Or banning random folks but
| not the President. I understand why it happens, just feels
| more wrong to me than any singular policy decision.
|
| In my opinion: Should they ban misinformation? Yes. Should
| they ban piracy? I want to say no, but if I am really
| thinking about it they probably should when actually
| compared with the other things I say yes to. Makes me
| wonder what kind of ethics theory there is around these
| kinds of situations. Probably some good reading out there.
| Anyone know of any good things to read on the subject?
| Method-X wrote:
| This doesn't negate your comment but I would like to add that I
| support Sci-Hub because I think charging for publicly funded
| content is just wrong on so many levels. Simply put, the laws
| need to change; and when/if they do, Twitter won't have to do
| this sort of thing.
| illustriousbear wrote:
| I agree 100%.
|
| Social media also needs to be completely reformed so
| moderation policy and enforcement isn't up to a small
| collection of individuals living in the United States.
| screye wrote:
| In my experience, those applauding twitter for banning Trump
| are a different demographic than those who are criticizing the
| ban on Scihub.
|
| I find both to be an abuse of power by Twitter. Sec. 230
| protects Twitter from being accountable for content produced by
| its users. At the same time, it wants to engage in political
| activism at an organizational level.
|
| Twitter wants to be the all-powerful Editor-in-chief with power
| to censor the world's headlines. But, they also want to be
| unaccountable for the content produced by its platform. That is
| blatantly hypocritical.
|
| A corporate entity with pure profit motives and without the
| people's mandate, should not have the power to control speech
| without accountability.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I can get behind the sentiment of your post, but could you
| detail how the Sci-Hub twitter account has breached Twitter
| TOS?
|
| Contrast that with Trump who has been very clearly violating
| twitter TOS on a daily basis.
| djsumdog wrote:
| > Trump who has been very clearly violating twitter TOS on a
| daily basis
|
| How has Trump violated Twitter's TOS on a daily basis? It
| feels like every policy that has been put up is typically put
| up specifically for Trump.
|
| I don't see how people can post photos of Kathy Griffin
| showing a decapitated Trump head as being kosher, or CNN's
| Como saying violent protest is constitutionally protected,
| and claim Trump is violating TOS. It's hypocrisy.
| boredumb wrote:
| hypocrisy is the new honesty
| Bedon292 wrote:
| Posting election misinformation violates Twitter ToS, and
| since the election he has posted something violating that
| policy (in their judgment) if not every day, very close to
| it. These policies have been around since before the
| election [1].
|
| These examples don't appear to be hypocritical to me on the
| surface, but I am certainly open to more information. Many
| people are not happy with Kathy Griffin doing that, on both
| sides. And I am honestly not sure how Cuomo saying that
| violates anything, could you explain? Or point me in the
| direction of it? I had not heard about it. If it does
| violate their ToS, then he should have received a
| suspension or at least warning too.
|
| [1]
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/civic-
| int... https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2
| 020-elec...
| illustriousbear wrote:
| My only problem with this is who determines what is
| election misinformation?
|
| If Russian authorities call another dubious election in
| favor of Putin, do we just accept that now and ban any
| dissenting opinions?
|
| I mean after all their authorities have set the official
| narrative, isn't anything else misinformation now?
| Bedon292 wrote:
| While I think the comparison is a bit unfair, it does
| raise an interesting dilemma. I really don't know what
| you do in that situation. I don't think their government
| would be considered the trusted authorities on the
| matter, but who would be? At the same time Twitter is not
| a Russian company and does not have a large Russian
| presence that I know of. Are they under any moral
| obligation to help maintain free and fair elections
| there? Where they may feel like they are for the US.
| illustriousbear wrote:
| Yeah I just used a more extreme example to make the
| point.
|
| Twitter is US based but they purposefully operate in a
| multi-national manner serving users across the world, so
| it's easy to argue that there is some responsibility.
|
| If Twitter wants to play arbitrator and set that
| expectation to the international community, what happens
| when they don't remove "misinformation" in other
| countries?
| illustriousbear wrote:
| Sci-hub by its own admission is a service that breaks the law
| by providing unauthorised access to copyright materials.
|
| I don't know whether Sci-hub has violated Twitter ToS (on the
| platform) but it doesn't surprise me that Twitter would want
| to distance itself from an organization that is committed to
| breaking the law. A more dramatic/extreme example would be
| whether we would think it is ok for other illegal
| organisations/services (e.g terrorists) to be on Twitter if
| they weren't breaking ToS on the platform, I suspect many
| would say no.
|
| On Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if he broke Twitter ToS on
| the platform but you would have to admit that his ban would
| involve greyer interpretation of his tweets than a black-
| white ban of a service that aims to break the law.
|
| And I say this as a big support of sci-hub too.
|
| Generally speaking delete Facebook/Twitter/etc, I did and it
| has been a big improvement to my life.
| djsumdog wrote:
| I agree that HN comments were completely and totally wrong to
| be onboard with banning Trump AND I also do not agree with
| banning Sci-Hub...
|
| but the solution isn't screaming at Twitter. The solution is
| using our freedom of speech and expression to start creating
| and supporting other services. I know that's hard, but at least
| in your personal life, try to use ActivityPub services and
| encourage everyone else to do so. Set up a Mastodon and Pleroma
| server and give invites to all your friends.
|
| Now I have done this and on my personal server, like 20+
| friends have created accounts and to day .. only one still uses
| them. It will take time, and really only you can take care of
| yourself.
|
| Also, long-from blog. Follow any friends that blog with and RSS
| reader. Encourage everyone else to use an RSS reader. Why the
| hell are we using Twitter when you can follow the blogs and
| news sites with RSS? You can see which news sites have new
| articles, rather that letting Facebook and Twitter decide the
| order and type of information your receive.
| illustriousbear wrote:
| I agree mate, I've deleted all my social media and it has
| been great since day one.
|
| My consumption of information is so much better now that I
| have had to seek out reliable sources.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Twitter and Facebook and Youtube were argued as the
| alternatives to the previous generation of gatekeepers.
|
| Ungated media such as Usenet of various moderation-free zones
| online _also_ fail.
|
| There's an inherent cconflict between complete freedom of
| access -- a sort of full-body local contact or intimacy, and
| and of distance, time, and/or scale.
|
| Distribution and scale presume a gating function _somewhere_.
| The only remaining question is what the channel biases for.
| bra-ket wrote:
| Long overdue but going to donate to Sci-hub today, first time
| since I started using in 2014, it's an invaluable resource for
| independent research.
| meekmockmook wrote:
| The US Government and Big Tech oligarchs learned nothing from the
| death of Aaron Swartz. Horrific.
| TimMurnaghan wrote:
| In the end this could work out well. People go where the stuff
| that they want is. I occasionally dust off an old twitter account
| when I want to reach an org which is otherwise hiding any means
| of human contact. So if scihub does manage to make a meaningful
| presence somewhere like mastodon that's all for the good - and
| just hastens the decline of twitter.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Is there any reason to believe mastodon is "better" than
| twitter though? I don't have a whole lot of nice things to say
| about twitter and I'm neither a twitter nor mastodon user but I
| don't really understand how "decentralized federation" solves
| any of twitter's major issues? And it seems like it would come
| with its own set of issues when it isn't centralized.
| 0goel0 wrote:
| Compare that to Trump's 12-hour ban after causing real-world
| violence and sedition.
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