[HN Gopher] Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
___________________________________________________________________
Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
Author : Cream-Corn-11
Score : 626 points
Date : 2021-07-04 16:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chronicle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chronicle.com)
| bambam24 wrote:
| Why scammy website like this which ask people to pay is allowed ?
| fserb wrote:
| I can't think of anyone who has done more for the scientific
| development of mankind in the last 10 years than Alexandra.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Clickbaity title, there's nothing new or timely in this article
| about her "trouble". It's recounting how she's under no new
| trouble actually.
| unixhero wrote:
| How might we help her?
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Legal gofundme.
|
| Congress people or local representatives.
|
| Talk about it.
| unixhero wrote:
| They will win the court battles. There should be other
| strategies she can take.
| pizza wrote:
| Is there some way to replicate sci-hub thousands of times in a
| distributed fashion, Hydra-style?
| unixhero wrote:
| The https://reddit.com/r/datahoarder community is working on
| it
| Anunayj wrote:
| yes and no, Scihub relies on logins for retrieving new
| research papers, which would be hard to get more of. Though
| you can contribute by making a copy of part of libgen
| archives and seed it, if someday libgen goes down.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222
| mrtksn wrote:
| I think persistence will win this one because the moral dilemma
| is pretty weak here. Unlike with the software and arts, we
| don't need to seek a funding model for the researchers when we
| take their work for free.
|
| It's my impression that it's a matter of adaptation before the
| free access becomes the norm. Therefore technical help and
| civil disobedience should eventually do the job.
|
| In this case, we are stealing from the CD company without
| actually stealing the CDs. With a path adjustment we should be
| able to stop stealing CDs without any monetary impact on the
| content creators.
| martin1975 wrote:
| free is a flawed concept - energy and time went into
| publishing each paper meaning someone paid. If the authors
| want to give permission, then she ought to seek it for each
| paper she's put on her website or seek permission from
| whomever owns the copyright. Otherwise it's theft. And no
| amount of civil disobedience can justify theft.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| That "ownership" didnt change hands freely. Its a
| protection racket people are forced into.
|
| It is very simple, i have to publish if i want to get my
| phd. And due to years of corruption those publications have
| to be in certain journals.
|
| My work isnt financed by the publishers. Neither is the
| review process, my doctoral supervisor gets nothing out of
| doing reviews like these. I also pay to attend the
| conference, which is mandatory to get published.
|
| I am coerced into signing away my (publicly funded)
| research to then see it put behind a pay wall. Preventing
| me from sharing it freely robbing me of the feedback from
| my peers.
|
| Elsevier are a cancer and only function through forced
| labor. Not only are they rentseeking on somebody elses
| work, they are creating a worse situation for everyone
| involved. Including Science itself.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Abusive copyright is a theft from the public. I shrug about
| violations to the property rights of the corrupt.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The situation is closer to the people who pay for AOL dial-
| up in 2021 because they don't know that they don't need it
| for the broadband.
|
| Definitely some effort goes to running these companies just
| like keeping the dial-up lines operational. Totally not
| cool to steal the dial-up, what we should do is to cancel
| it.
| Comevius wrote:
| The authors of these often publicly funded research works
| don't actually make money, publishing companies like
| Elsevier do.
|
| Elsevier is basically a rent-seeking monopoly. They also
| publish fake journals, and manipulate the impact factor of
| their journals by coercing citations.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Academic_practices
| unixhero wrote:
| Well dude, information wants to be free.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Not theft bro
|
| Taxes paid for the research, taxes pay for access to
| journals (institutional subscriptions by libraries and
| universities) so the whole paywall thing just feels like
| taxpayers are getting fleeced.
|
| Make access to journals free and save us all the penny.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| It's not even about someone charging for their work.
|
| It's about the mediator overcharging for the littlest work
| they do.
|
| Also about taxpayer funded research being available to
| everyone, why should tax money go into the pockets of the
| publishing racket?
| crumbshot wrote:
| It's copying, not theft.
|
| The latter deprives someone of an item, the former
| increases its availability. An important distinction when
| considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > It's copying, not theft.
|
| > The latter deprives someone of an item ...
|
| It's depriving people of money, which is not a trivial
| asset.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's not depriving authors or the reviewers of money,
| since they don't get any money anyway from publishers or
| readers. It is depriving publishers of money by replacing
| them, doing the same thing they do (intermediary between
| author+reviewer and reader) better and cheaper i.e. for
| free - but that's essentially just outcompeting them in
| their own business. Copyright is there to protect
| incentives for authors, but it should not grant an
| artificial monopoly to useless middlemen.
| pjerem wrote:
| It's depriving journals from money they could make from
| publications when they have already charged the authors
| to publish them.
|
| There is no moral dilemma here : accessing an article
| thru Sci-Hub deprives nobody from getting its due money.
| Scientists unfortunately continues not being paid for the
| paper, journals continues being paid by universities to
| review the paper, but nobody wants to pay just to read a
| paper from the journal when it already has been paid for.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| So you agree that it is theft from publishers?
| pjerem wrote:
| No, I disagree on the fact that they are << publishers >>
| at all. Reviewers, for sure, and they still get paid for
| that.
|
| But being a publisher means being an intermediate between
| the author and the reader, which they are not since when
| I buy the right to read a publication, 0% of my money
| goes to author.
|
| And even, I could be ok to pay them to compensate access
| fees (lol !) but I prefer using their concurrent (Sci-
| Hub)
|
| I call this a mafia. The fact it is legal don't change my
| view on it.
| krastanov wrote:
| Some people (me included) consider "intellectual property"
| an oxymoron. But you do not need to go that far in the
| extreme to be supportive of scihub and similar entities: I
| am a scientist. I am paid from research grants, this is
| what makes it possible for me to write a paper. I am also
| involved in reviewing papers, but that I do for free. Then
| I pay a journal to store my paper (the journal did not pay
| the paper reviewers). Usually I even do most of the
| typesetting for the paper I write. Then I also pay the
| journal to get access to the paper.
|
| In this story, I do not feel any guilt "stealing" from a
| journal that did not contribute anything but prestige to
| the creation of that paper (and was already paid twice for
| it, before I even tried to read the paper).
| refurb wrote:
| "Didnt contribute anything but prestige"? If that's such
| a minor contribution, then instead of publishing with a
| journal you hate, publish with an open source journal?
| Put your money where your mouth is.
| krastanov wrote:
| It is not really money at that point, is it ;) Also, why
| do assume I have not done that yet?
|
| But you can not expect this all to happen overnight, as
| people's scientific careers are on the line. Thankfully,
| it is slowly happening, with or without Scihub.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Thats not an option. I need some publications in "highly
| scored" journals to get my Phd. I dont have the option to
| publish in open access instead. Its not a matter of
| having a worse resume with less prestige but one of not
| getting my dissertation accepted. Its something forced
| onto me through a process created through corruption.
| golergka wrote:
| But do you not make a decision (however rational), to
| grant rights for your article, as an author, and your
| labour as a reviewer, to the journal?
|
| I'm not a scientist, and I don't know how this works, so
| this is an honest question. But as an outsider, it seems
| that the most important intellectual property of these
| publishers are not articles themselves, but famous
| journals that scientists all over the world are so eager
| to publish for. And if this suggestion is right, that
| don't those scientists actually get paid, although
| indirectly through eyballs instead of cash? Which they
| then convert into Hirsch index, and then, through grants
| and programs and tenures, into cash?
| krastanov wrote:
| Yes, but there are a few more facts you should be aware
| of while forming your opinion:
|
| - The most prestigious journals (at least in my field)
| are not ridiculous prestige rackets like Elsevier. And
| they are (slowly) moving to open-access models. In these
| situations the authors of a paper are expected to pay
| processing fees ($1000 to $5000), but after that the
| paper is free to access by anyone.
|
| - A pretty standard workaround is to put your paper on a
| pre-print server before even submitting to a journal.
| Then some draft version of the paper is trivial to access
| even if the peer-reviewed version is behind a paywall.
|
| - The majority of scientists and paper writers are not
| tenured and do not have job security. Currently, their
| career growth depends on having done "good science" and
| regrettably the only trivially easy measure of "good
| science" is the prestige of journals you have published
| in. While pretty much all scientists agree that the
| system is bad, it is difficult to fight the system while
| your career depends on it.
|
| - Slowly, fields are switching to open-access journals.
| Their prestige is growing and soon the previous bullet
| point will not be an issue.
|
| - It really depends on the field as well. I rarely
| stumbled upon a physics paper that does not have some
| legal open-access option. Not so much with Engineering.
| So while I truly have no problem acting the way you
| expect me to act in your comment, my engineering
| colleagues would have much harder time, given that their
| community does not have as many prestigious open-access
| options or a habit of using preprint servers.
|
| - It is frustratingly slow, but it is very visible how
| the "prestige" currency is indeed switching from
| traditional journals to open-access journals (either ones
| that are free and community driven or paid, but paid only
| on submission, not on download)
| mbil wrote:
| You can send a contribution to the Sci-Hub Bitcoin address:
| 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
|
| via https://sci-hub.st/
| sneak wrote:
| Send money to the bitcoin donation address on the site.
|
| Verify it for yourself as well, but I believe the address is
| 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
| henearkr wrote:
| One concern that I have is: what if her wallet has already
| been confiscated by the authorities? Then all the donations
| would directly go to the government, which is why it matters.
| henearkr wrote:
| Thanks to the Archive link I could at last read the full
| article
|
| Seems like she is not _that_ in trouble, so my concern does
| not hold.
| leephillips wrote:
| Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she
| learned of an article1 on my site that describes several methods
| to acquire free copies of scientific articles, including Sci-Hub.
| I tried to get her to tell me why she thought it was terrible of
| me to mention any non-Sci-Hub pathways, but her replies made less
| sense with each iteration. So I think that Sci-Hub has been a
| valuable resource, but I have concerns about its stability.
|
| [1] https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
| fabbari wrote:
| I am confused.
|
| This is your tweet about the article [0] - it's from 18 hours
| ago. The last tweet from Alexandra [1] is from the 9th of May.
|
| Am I missing something?
|
| [0]
| https://mobile.twitter.com/lpfeed/status/1411543135944073217
| [1]
| https://mobile.twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/139160709025538...
| leephillips wrote:
| No. Our last tweets are not the ones I was referring to.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| IT seems obtuse not to link directly and expect people to
| figure out what you are referring to. I suggest you
| resubmit your comment with additional context.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter
|
| The article is not the most relevant link when claiming you
| were attacked "hysterically" on Twitter. If a link to the
| latter does not exist, preventing neutral parties from
| evaluating the situation, I do not see the point in leaving
| this comment.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| > Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter
|
| Interestingly you have shared a link to your article, but not
| to the Twitter thread you referenced. Which raises suspicions
| about you telling the truth and the full truth.
|
| > but I have concerns about its stability
|
| Just set up a mirror then.
| leephillips wrote:
| The account from which she attacked me is suspended, and the
| tweets do not show. If I linked to the thread, which I can if
| you insist, it will only have my side of the conversation.
| Those who know me also know that I am telling the truth. If
| you prefer to disregard what I say, that's fine with me.
| [deleted]
| Caylio wrote:
| If you don't link to the thread, everyone will prefer to
| disregard what you say.
| leephillips wrote:
| See up above, where someone found it in the Archive.
| crumbshot wrote:
| > _Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when
| she learned of an article on my site that describes several
| methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles,_
|
| Just looks like an emphatic disagreement to me: https://web.arc
| hive.org/web/20200928010251/https://twitter.c...,
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200928011503/https://twitter.c...
|
| Also, considering the etymology ("of the womb"), your criticism
| of her replies comes across as quite sexist.
| leephillips wrote:
| Thanks for digging that up, I appreciate it; I didn't think
| of looking in the Archive.
|
| We'll have to disagree about whether her reaction was
| hysterical. She called my article "ridiculous" and compared
| it to recommending that people use horse-and-buggy
| transportation. I was pretty mystified by the tenor of her
| remarks. One of my points was that Sci-Hub could become
| unavailable, either globally or locally, so it's good to know
| about other ways to get one's hands on articles. Just
| mentioning alternatives was offensive to her. We see now that
| this was not an unrealistic consideration.
|
| EDIT: It's not ideal to add to your comments using the edit
| button without marking them as edits. Let me reply to your
| last sentence by saying I do not think it is sexist to use
| the word "hysterical", which has a well-understood meaning
| apart from its etymology, to someone who happens to be
| female. In fact, I think it would be very silly to police
| one's speech in this way.
| crumbshot wrote:
| > _Let me reply to your last sentence by saying I do not
| think it is sexist to use the word "hysterical", which has
| a well-understood meaning apart from its etymology, to
| someone who happens to be female._
|
| Then do you think maybe you misread Elbakyan's tone from
| her word choices, in a similar way to how I misread yours?
| She even stated in her last reply that she wasn't being
| hostile.
| leephillips wrote:
| Of course that's possible. Everyone can make their own
| judgments. I stand by my characterization.
|
| But no, I was interpreting her remarks based on the
| meanings of the words she used, not their etymologies.
| That's usually more productive.
| nautilius wrote:
| Where is that "uncontrolled extreme emotion" in her
| words, that you refer to? All I see is some guy who is
| still hurt almost a year after someone disagreed with him
| on Twitter. I can't imagine Alexandra has any sleepless
| nights over this, you may want to reflect on who is the
| "hysterical" party in your story.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Calling women who politely contradict you "hysterical" is
| sexist, full stop. When you inadvertently use offensive
| prejudiced language out of ignorance, and people point
| that out, the appropriate action is to apologize and try
| not to do it again, not start making excuses.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
| golergka wrote:
| Honestly, this seems to be a cultural thing. Having been
| exposed to both Russians and Americans, I would never dare
| use those words in a disagreement with American colleague,
| for example. But talking to a Russian one, I would use much
| harder ones for my point to be taken seriously, and would
| not have expected any bad blood over it.
| leephillips wrote:
| Well, then I hope I'm wrong about the vehemence behind
| her remarks. But I'm still puzzled about the reason for
| her objections in the first place. What's so wrong about
| mentioning that there are some ways to get reprints
| besides Sci-Hub?
| [deleted]
| nautilius wrote:
| The fact that _you_ are "still puzzled" should give you a
| hint about who is subject to "uncontrolled extreme
| emotion" in your exchange with Alexandra.
| [deleted]
| nicolas_t wrote:
| > The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria,
| Britain, and France.
|
| I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that
| the current system is preventing scientific development.
| enriquto wrote:
| > I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given
| that the current system is preventing scientific development.
|
| Are you in France? In that case you'll find that french
| academic librarians are extremely open to this stuff. I have
| participated in some proposals to cancel all elsevier+other
| library subscriptions and give all that money directly to
| SciHub, and the librarians were always very receptive to the
| idea. Unfortunately, this sort of initiative inevitably gets
| stuck in the upper echelons of some administrative procedure
| and never materializes. I guess predatory editors have a deeply
| entrenched influence within the academic institutions,
| otherwise I don't understand how that happens...
| easton wrote:
| It probably eventually reaches the ears of someone who's
| heard of the concept of a lawsuit, and is deeply afraid of
| Elsevier making an example of a school by suing it into the
| stone-age, something they desperately want to do to scare
| every other school away from Sci-Hub.
| amelius wrote:
| Scientists should put Scihub in the acknowledgements section of
| their papers. As in "this research would not have been possible
| without Scihub".
| breck wrote:
| I did this! I encourage _everyone_ to do it! Include the Sci
| hub link with the DOI.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| That is a genius hack. ("Genius" might be redundant.)
| kergonath wrote:
| That is a huge problem if you acknowledge using an illegal
| platform in your professional work, including for your co-
| authors. Almost the opposite of genius, actually.
| mcguire wrote:
| How so? Might not want to mention it in the same footnote
| as the grant number.
| userbinator wrote:
| That reminds me of a phrase I've heard in relation to
| file sharing and such: "if everyone runs the red light
| together, there is nothing to be afraid of".
| kergonath wrote:
| Doing it and claiming to have done it in a professional
| setting are quite different though. I am perfectly
| willing to believe that a lot of researchers use Sci-Hub
| (though from my experience they tend to use Researchgate
| more); I am certain that the number of people who would
| shout about doing it on the rooftops is nowhere near even
| a small minority.
| enriquto wrote:
| What you say does not correspond to my personal
| experience. As a single data point, in my research group
| _all_ twelve phd students and five postdocs use SciHub
| regularly. Some of the faculty don 't know it even
| exists, others do.
| kzrdude wrote:
| That metaphor backfirews pretty hard IMO, is that
| intentional?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| How so? Everyone running a light together is the expected
| behavior if you change the color of the light. In other
| words, it describes nothing that isn't occurring
| constantly everywhere. Where does the metaphor backfire?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Imagine an intersection with 3 independent entrances.
| Normally 1 is green and 2 red. If everyone runs red
| lights, then we have cars entering from 3 ways instead of
| the normal 1. The result is collisions in the middle of
| the intersection.
|
| "Running a red light" does not just mean "go when it's
| red" but it explicitly means "transgressing a stop
| signal". That there can be stop signals on multiple
| entrances also is complicating and sets up the crash.
| [deleted]
| mb7733 wrote:
| The metaphor backfires because if everyone runs red
| lights they will collide with one another, as well as
| with those going through green lights.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > if everyone runs red lights they will collide with one
| another
|
| In the same way that if everyone runs green lights,
| they'll collide with one another? How do you go through
| intersections?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Red lights rarely exist in the middle of a road just to
| slow down traffic, they mainly exist at intersections to
| allow people on different roads to take turns. It's
| really not a useful metaphor in this context.
| mb7733 wrote:
| Green lights... are synchronized to avoid collisions.
| samatman wrote:
| Can't tell if it's intentional (some variation on Poe's
| law applies here), but this is a near-perfect
| illustration of the difference between a rivalrous (space
| in an intersection) and non-rivalrous (copies of a
| digital file) good.
|
| I will allow that there may be some harms which can
| result from unlimited copying of anything you want-- but
| they bear no resemblance to the collision of automobiles
| in the midst of a busy intersection.
| drewmol wrote:
| I assume an open intersection or clear path is implied in
| which case the intersection space becomes non-rivalrous.
| Automated enforcement w red light cameras change the
| outcomes however
| samatman wrote:
| Probably! If I had to offer a definitive opinion on the
| author's intention I would agree with this
| interpretation.
|
| But physical space is inherently rivalrous, and a policy
| of "everyone runs a red light if they think they can get
| away with it" is going to have people being disastrously
| wrong sometimes.
|
| I've actually ridden a scooter in places in SE Asia which
| basically work this way and it's... different. Less
| insane than it sounds, or looks like, but the rates of
| traffic fatality are objectively much higher.
|
| This is why I thought it was interesting enough to
| comment upon.
| breck wrote:
| Courageous, I would say. More important than genius.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes, that would fit better.
| amelius wrote:
| If you don't have the courage, you can also do it
| indirectly: simply reference a paper that states that it
| would not be possible without Scihub. Then, your paper
| would not be possible without Scihub either :)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Ah, but Sci-Hub isn't illegal. There's nothing wrong with
| visiting the Sci-Hub home page, nor with using it as a
| convenient way to access open-access papers.
| kergonath wrote:
| Right* (depending on jurisdiction, ymmv). Getting from it
| articles that you cannot have otherwise is (except for
| the vanishingly few articles in the public domain, which
| are not really likely to be found on Sci-Hub anyway. I
| tried).
|
| Saying that the work could not have been done without it
| is basically admitting that you got papers outside the
| subscriptions of your institution. It is also against the
| policy of all the institutions I know, so could be
| grounds for termination. And again, this could apply to
| your co-authors as well.
|
| I am really not endorsing the subscription model, but
| putting something like that in your articles'
| acknowledgments really is not smart.
| amelius wrote:
| > Saying that the work could not have been done without
| it is basically admitting that you got papers outside the
| subscriptions of your institution.
|
| Not really. It could also mean: Scihub offers an
| efficient way to explore scientific articles, and without
| it, I (the scientist) wouldn't have bothered with all the
| different paywalls to even check if papers were worth
| reading. And as such, I would not have reached the same
| results.
| kergonath wrote:
| It does not make the work possible, though. Just more
| convenient.
| amelius wrote:
| No because a scientist can only deal with so much
| bureaucracy.
|
| After a certain limit, they will go into "I will invent
| it myself" mode.
|
| And here is a different argument. Scientists often have
| brilliant moments while e.g. showering. So they could
| have written: "this work would not have been possible
| without showers". The statement itself does not imply
| anything about whether they paid for the water or not. Or
| even if they took a shower. Perhaps the thought of a
| shower triggered the eureka moment.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Saying that the work could not have been done without
| it is basically admitting that you got papers outside the
| subscriptions of your institution.
|
| Isn't that exactly the point? How is it not hindering
| scientific progress if you do not have access to research
| that you don't pay for.
|
| It's not like the journals themselves fund the research,
| they're just getting a free ride.
| amelius wrote:
| > if you do not have access to research that you don't
| pay for.
|
| The situation is worse as most of the research is already
| paid for by tax money.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I had a snarky remark about Galileo and Copernicus, but
| it's probably not relevant.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Interestingly, when I was still in university, I never used
| Sci-hub at all. I can download almost any paper using
| school's network (or VPN) since the library have
| subscriptions for basically all the major publishers.
|
| I only started to use it occasionally once I've graduated
| (but I didn't really do any formal research any more.)
| VortexDream wrote:
| Interestingly, every student I know uses sci-hub.
| chakkepolja wrote:
| Interestingly it's almost necessary in third world.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| perhaps you're aware of this but sci-hub solves a second
| problem in addition to simply access - ease of use. Using a
| library's system requires a proxy or VPN or a credential
| verification of some sort.
|
| Sci-hub requires the title of the paper. that's it.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| You do need to enable VPN if you're off campus, yes, but
| that's it. It's super simple, you don't need to go though
| library's website or anything.
|
| I use Google Scholar search exclusively to find papers
| and you can directly click the link to open the paper
| (and then download). Constantly copying pasting title,
| URL or DOI into sci-hub is actually a hassle in this
| respect when you're just browsing around (I guess there
| must be extensions or userscripts to make it better,
| though).
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Publishing papers in journals isn't about scientific
| development, it's about publish-persish. The issue is the
| journals suck-in the papers and then walled-garden them like
| they were _their_ original research when they are simply the
| publisher.
|
| Academia needs to throw away for-profit journal publishers and
| leave it with social co-ops and nonprofits.
| refurb wrote:
| No. This is an example of "have your cake and eat it too".
|
| Scientists want to publicize in a prestigious journal.
| Elsevier is prestigious. Elsevier charges a subscription fee.
| Other scientists can't access it.
|
| So what scientists want is to be able to publish in the most
| prestigious journals and have free access to them.
|
| It's like if I said "i want to be able to attend the most
| prestigious school but I don't want to pay for it".
| kzemek wrote:
| > It's like if I said "i want to be able to attend the most
| prestigious school but I don't want to pay for it".
|
| I think it's interesting to note that in many European
| countries the top schools are free to attend.
| refurb wrote:
| Sure, but it's because the gov't subsidizes the cost of
| schools. Are you suggesting they subsidize the cost of
| journal subscriptions to the point they are free?
| tbabej wrote:
| Except in this case, what makes a journal prestigious is
| not the subscription fees that the school has to pay, but
| the free work of editors and peer reviewers that perform
| selection from the submitted papers.
|
| There are free-access journals out there that charge
| virtually no fees, and still have excellent quality /
| reputation. One such example is Quantum: https://quantum-
| journal.org/
| refurb wrote:
| Then maybe scientists should stop donating their time? Or
| do they get something out of it?
|
| And it's certainly not the peer review that makes it
| prestigious since those are anonymous.
| dkshdkjshdk wrote:
| As a scientist who does not need extra brownie points,
| this is exactly what I'm doing: every single review
| request coming from an Elsevier publication is ignored.
|
| And, yes, it _is_ the quality of peer review (i.e. the
| work done by unpaid editors and reviewers) that makes a
| certain publication prestigious or not.
|
| Elsevier does typesetting and distribution, both of which
| can easily be done otherwise (see LaTeX and Sci-Hub). It
| sure as hell does _not_ do peer review.
| krastanov wrote:
| Scientists are indeed moving slowly in that direction. It
| seems you are under the mistaken belief that they
| complain without doing anything about it. The fact that
| someone is vocally unhappy with a flawed status quo, does
| not mean they are not doing something about it. However,
| the issue with status quos is that it takes time to
| change them. Why are you ranting even after being shown
| examples of scientists doing exactly what you want them
| to do?
|
| Also, it is indeed the presence of very selective peer
| review that is a big part of "prestige". This is why free
| community driven open access journals are slowly
| overtaking the old journals. The price of a journal
| publication does not correlate much with the prestige.
| There are even examples of reverse correlation.
| refurb wrote:
| When Elsevier is trying to strong arm universities with
| high fees and threatening copyright lawsuits, seems like
| a good time to stop helping them entirely? Why on earth
| would you keep donating your time to them?
|
| Oh yeah, you want those juicy prestigious papers still.
| krastanov wrote:
| Your premise is a fantasy. Yes, many people for long time
| have boycotted Elsevier.
|
| I am really confused, why are you assuming people that
| are vocal about this continue reviewing for Elsevier (or
| assuming this about me in particular)? This is simply not
| happening. Is it really that surprising to you that only
| part of a community is working on the social problems in
| the community, while the rest is focusing on their main
| work: science.
|
| This is a general attitude among every naysayer against
| progress: "you can not demand that society changes for
| the better if you are active part of society". Do you not
| see how ridiculous that is?
|
| And you were already given examples of prestigious
| journals that have transitioned to the open access model.
| And universities that boycott elsevier. And grant
| agencies that demand work to be published open access.
| What more do you want? For this to have happened last
| decade? Well, things take time.
| refurb wrote:
| Some people have boycotted Elsevier. The vast majority of
| scientists have not - they continue to get their papers
| published by Elsevier journals, donate their time as
| editors and donate their time for peer review.
|
| Let me be more direct - why? If Elsevier is clearly the
| "bad guy" here?
|
| And if. as your put it, "as decade later" scientists are
| still donating their time for free, why do you think it
| will change? How long does it take?
| krastanov wrote:
| The answer is trivial: because of inertia, they have much
| more important and interesting work to do, so the
| activism is left for the few. But again, in every single
| comment of yours you are neglecting the monumental
| progress that has already happened: open access is a
| fairly standard requirement for top institutions and
| becoming more common. The world you are imagining in your
| complaints does not exist.
| refurb wrote:
| Open access is _not_ fairly standard. In my area
| (chemistry) there is no requirement and people stick to
| the paid journals. Why? Because of the prestige, which
| was my point all along.
|
| Despite all the complaints of being "predatory", people
| still submit to those journals and _volunteer_ their
| time. Why? Stockholm Syndrome? No. "Inertia"? No.
|
| It's because they get something they can't get out of
| open source journals - a publication in a highly
| prestigious journal.
|
| My point is everyone likes to say Elsevier offers
| "nothing" yet, what you call "inertia" (I call it
| "wanting what Elsevier has to offer") keeps them coming
| back to you point - maybe for decades?
| krastanov wrote:
| OK, so you are both negatively affected by the bad status
| quo and at the same time rant against the people that try
| to change it. What is the point of that behavior? Why are
| you yourself not trying to help these people change the
| status quo?
| easytiger wrote:
| > Britain
|
| Not blocked for me at the the original domain
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| It used to be, but recently I've been able to view Sci Hub
| again.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Libgen seems to be blocked in at least some parts of the US as
| well.
|
| I tried to access it while reading this thread, and couldn't.
| Then I remembered I had activated my VPN and I was tunnelling
| through the US.
| serf wrote:
| > Libgen seems to be blocked in at least some parts of the US
| as well.
|
| maybe an ISP or VPN service thing?
|
| I had no problem in so-cal. I tried tunnels in
| NorCal/Oregon/Washington, no problems there either.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Some of the articles on sci-hub are so old that their copyright
| has expired, yet there's often no other source where you can find
| them without having to pay. I get that hosting and bandwidth cost
| money, but not $30 US per article money.
|
| Aaron Swartz died for free access to research. Eight years later,
| Elbakyan continues his work.
| dang wrote:
| Submitted URL was https://archive.ph/huNwk. It's ok to post
| workaround links in the thread, but please don't make them the
| original submission. We want the canonical URL for that.
| ValentineC wrote:
| Can we please change the headline back to the article's?
|
| I had no idea who Alexandra Elbakyan was before this, and
| mostly clicked through out of curiosity. I would have followed
| this more if I knew it was about Sci-Hub from the start.
| dang wrote:
| I hear you, but I think your case may actually be an argument
| for sticking with the title change. The original was baity
| and curiosity is just what we want people to click for.
|
| (" _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait_ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| wrycoder wrote:
| Good to know, thanks.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The irony of needing an unlicensed copy of an article to read
| about a website that publishes unlicensed copies of articles.
| qayxc wrote:
| You can just disable JavaScript and the site works fine.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| Right-click, inspect, delete element with Javascript left
| on also works.
| Aissen wrote:
| It's a nice summary of the current situation, but I was a bit
| disappointed to find no new information.
| Tommek wrote:
| The answer as always to those questions: No.
| asteroidbelt wrote:
| It is called
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
| wydfre wrote:
| All Elsevier has done is slow accelerationsism - proving that
| there are those among us who would rather slow down time to reach
| a predetermined goal, instead of letting a social network
| interact with itself and knowledge at such a fast rate it cannot
| be predicted. There are those who wish for accelerationism at any
| cost, cosmists who believe in a future at any cost, and terrans,
| who want only a future that only their secret committee has
| agreed upon.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Scientific publishing's Napster moment approaches? Although it's
| worth remembering that ultimately Napster is no more and the
| music industry found a new model though another set of
| gatekeepers.
| musicale wrote:
| > "I thought Sci-Hub would become legal in a couple of years,"
| she said. "When the laws are obviously in the way of scientific
| development, they should be canceled."
|
| Pretty much this.
|
| Elbakyan: builds library of Alexandria.
|
| Elsevier et al.: tries to burn it down.
| toto444 wrote:
| When you think about it the legality of Uber or AirBnB was not
| so obvious from the start and still isn't. Maybe she thought
| Sci-Hub would have the same path.
| stared wrote:
| Sadly, it has little to due with public good and a lot with
| funds and lawyers and PR.
| pleaser wrote:
| https://archive.is/huNwk
| kzrdude wrote:
| We can say here that entrepreneurs in Russia - like Alexandra
| Elbakyan - have certain possibilities that other's don't have!
| That's awesome. And SV people have something to be jealous of -
| something they couldn't pull off. I hope she pulls it off.
|
| Different possibilities in different legal spaces. Any others
| like that, that you can think of?
| Naracion wrote:
| I believe Switzerland has been regarded a tax haven for many
| years, allowing financial institutions to do business in ways
| that might be considered unscrupulous otherwise. It is up to
| argument whether this is good or bad for society (personally I
| veer towards bad, but that's because I'm not on the winning
| side and it's a way for the extremely rich to evade taxes).
|
| I also know of several seed boxes to have servers in
| Switzerland, but my knowledge in both of these matters is
| rather dated. If somebody else has updated info on these
| matters I'd love to learn more.
| voldacar wrote:
| Seriously, why would you make your awesome website less useful
| for _everyone_ because a court in India wants you to do
| something?
|
| Are you Indian? Does the Indian government have some kind of
| authority over you? Are you combing through the laws of India to
| make sure you are complying with all of them?
|
| When you're operating this kind of site, why even bother
| acknowledging the existence of Indian courts, or any court that
| can't literally imprison you right now?
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| As I recall, it was part of a strategy with the Indian courts.
| She thought she might win in court ultimately, and this was
| necessary for that outcome. Not sure what the present state of
| things is.
| miguelmurca wrote:
| Read the article!
|
| > The latest lawsuit, filed in India by three academic
| publishers, including Elsevier, asks the High Court of Delhi to
| block access to Sci-Hub throughout the country. While the case
| is pending, the court has instructed Sci-Hub to stop uploading
| papers to its database. The order is not unusual; what's
| surprising is that Elbakyan has complied. She has a history of
| ignoring legal rulings, and the Indian court has no power over
| Sci-Hub's activities in other countries. So why has she chosen,
| at this moment, to give in?
|
| > One reason is that Elbakyan believes she has a shot at
| winning the case, and her odds might improve if she plays by
| the rules. "I want the Indian court to finally support free
| access to science," she said. If that happened, it would mark a
| significant victory for Sci-Hub, with reverberations likely
| beyond India. Victory remains a longshot, but Elbakyan thinks
| it's worth the hassle and expense.
| voldacar wrote:
| Yeah I get that but the what is the upside to winning
| exactly? You continue doing exactly what you did? It just
| seems completely irrational
| pessimizer wrote:
| The upside of winning is that you'll never be banned in
| India, which is the same thing as saying you'll never be
| banned.
| ValentineC wrote:
| I wouldn't say never.
|
| Given that it's only the High Court of Delhi so far,
| there's likely to be another fight in the Supreme Court
| of India after this.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Of specific note is this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
| stereoradonc wrote:
| One straightforward way is to support many private Telegram
| groups popping up to support academicians. SciHub was a juicy
| target. When you scatter the users in other domains, they will
| regroup and be harder to track.
|
| Good luck to the scientific publishers. You can expend any
| resources to track users across the Internet.
| djohnston wrote:
| She is a hero. Brave, outgunned, and fighting to the end.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| How ironic that the news site where this is published does not
| allow me to read it unless I subscribe.
| Anunayj wrote:
| Haha well yup.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| Am I the only one that finds it apropos that this article is
| login-blocked?
| einpoklum wrote:
| So what's the status of the legal case in India? It's been nearly
| a year, right?
|
| It's weird that the reporter did not find that interesting enough
| to discuss.
| oolonthegreat wrote:
| I shudder to think what will happen if sci-hub is blocked
| completely. Someone should put it on the blockhain or something
| :)
| jmcgough wrote:
| Before scihub, I was in a livejournal Neuroscience community
| that was mostly researchers - half the posts were "I don't have
| access to x article, can someone send me the PDF?"
|
| We need a better solution to Elsevier etc but the people who
| most need it (grad students living on a 30k stipend) have
| little power to fight things, and every reason not to stick
| their neck out when their future depends on publishing to paid
| journals.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| I am really grateful for Sci-hub and don't think I would have
| done my MS without it being existed. No university even in the US
| (Except mayb4 levy schools) could have granted me access to all
| the papers I needed.
|
| I hope she will get her first win in the Indian court so that it
| gets back to add new papers and advance science and help students
| as it used to be for the last decade.
| [deleted]
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Anyone here know Indian law and how it operates in real life?
|
| Why is she bullish on potentially winning the case? Is there a
| law in India that she is counting on? Or as I suspect she is
| counting on a sympathetic judge who might rule in her favor by
| finding some precedent from around the world.
|
| If say she does win how would the appeals process work?
| ahiknsr wrote:
| > Why is she bullish on potentially winning the case? Is there
| a law in India that she is counting on? Or as I suspect she is
| counting on a sympathetic judge who might rule in her favor by
| finding some precedent from around the world.
|
| Yes. Indian courts have ruled that photocopying books isn't
| copyright violation, i assume we can expect a similar judgement
| for copying research papers.
|
| from https://www.indialegallive.com/cover-story-articles/il-
| featu...
|
| "Copyright, specially in literary works, is thus not an
| inevitable, divine, or natural right that confers on authors
| the absolute ownership of their creations. It is designed
| rather to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the
| intellectual enrichment of the public. Copyright is intended to
| increase and not to impede the harvest of knowledge. It is
| intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and
| inventors in order to benefit the public."
| akdor1154 wrote:
| > "Copyright, specially in literary works, is thus not an
| inevitable, divine, or natural right that confers on authors
| the absolute ownership of their creations. It is designed
| rather to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the
| intellectual enrichment of the public. Copyright is intended
| to increase and not to impede the harvest of knowledge. It is
| intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and
| inventors in order to benefit the public."
|
| Jesus, what a beautiful opinion from the Delhi High Court. Go
| India.
| ivoras wrote:
| What about China?
|
| It's famously irreverent towards western-style copyright, seems
| like it could (well, it's a difficult "it", granted) score some
| brownie points by making a mirror which is accessible both within
| and without their great firewall.
| manquer wrote:
| Not officially. China is also signatory for various
| intellectual property laws etc.
|
| They just turn a blind eye towards piracy when it suits them.
|
| Indian courts on other hand have in the past taken public
| decisions in the favour of common good, like with
| pharmaceutical parents recently.
|
| A victory here won't solve everything, but it is a start.
| Developing world is where the licensing fees are impossibly
| expensive for even universities. Perhaps an Indian precedent
| would help in other countries.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| This could be a big competitiveness advantage for China in two
| major ways: 1) there is a large contingent of Chinese nationals
| studying abroad, and them having access to SciHub makes it
| easier for them to be accustomed to it should they return to
| China to research there and 2) it would give China metrics on
| what papers are looked up and by who (sometimes down to the
| institution level), which might help them find high impact
| places to build upon research that other people might not have
| thought of.
| Jsone wrote:
| The article is blocked behind a subscription prompt for me, but
| it's implemented in a silly way that's trivially by-passable.
| It's just some js code that checks if you've scrolled past a
| limit and scrolls you back to the top if so. Anything that
| removes js from the content defeats it, including Firefox's
| built-in Reader View.
| schelling42 wrote:
| Like with many other sites, you can also go: right-click,
| Inspect element (Q), and then simply delete the whole <div>
| containing the prompt.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| most paywalls are bypassed with * {overflow: auto; position:
| relative; }
| arp242 wrote:
| Disabling JavaScript often works as well.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Or go to https://archive.ph/huNwk
| einpoklum wrote:
| You can just select-all on the entire text and that seems to
| work too (but I have EFF privacy badger so I might be
| cheating).
| ummonk wrote:
| Yeah, I likewise just switched to Safari reader view.
| dcdc123 wrote:
| Anyone have a non-paywalled link?
| andyxor wrote:
| Help saving Scihub article collection (85M papers, 77TB)
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
| Simulacra wrote:
| FWIW I think she's a folk hero who is doing a lot of good.
| okareaman wrote:
| Someone has a mirror of this site I hope
| [deleted]
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I don't understand how the header follows from the article?
|
| She seems to be fine. She decided to fight the case in India, on
| her own, because she thinks she can win it.
| kirillzubovsky wrote:
| Could someone with knowledge of the matter explain why scientists
| still publish to these journals, and still sign up for access?
|
| It seems like as long as every university in the world can just
| switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot
| of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight.
|
| Why are paid journals still a thing?
| [deleted]
| FabHK wrote:
| It's a coordination problem. A journal is valuable because
| having a publication in it confers prestige and impact, which
| scientists need for jobs and tenure.
|
| Now, if all scientists in a field were to switch to a new
| journal, they could take the prestige with them, get rid of the
| rent seeking publisher, and have the same science, prestige,
| and impact for a fraction of the cost. But if any individual
| scientists switches, they'd carry the full loss (of foregoing
| prestige/impact), while achieving no gain. So, you need to have
| everybody on board simultaneously.
|
| A switch like that can happen [1], but it happens rarely. Often
| it takes the nestor of a field to get sufficiently pissed off
| with a journal and persuade everyone to move on. Great example:
| Don Knuth in 2003 convinced the Editorial Board of the _Journal
| of Algorithms_ (which he had founded) to resign [2], and start
| _ACM Transactions on Algorithms_ with a different, lower-
| priced, not-for-profit publisher. Elsevier kept the old Journal
| going, but gave up and folded 6 years later. Yay.
|
| Wish that would happen more often. But given that the situation
| was basically the same 20 years ago, I am not optimistic. What
| needs to happen to shake the scientific publishing world up??
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
|
| [2] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's probably like Facebook or LinkedIn. Where else do you go
| that has the same audience? It's a lot eaiser just to stay.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Because a high Impact Index value is required to obtain grants
| later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
|
| Therefore is a captive customer case. And captive here has the
| same meaning as slave. If you don't work for free for some
| journals, basically you can't have a scientist career. In
| higher levels articles are not enough and you need to consider
| seriously to write a book for Elsevier or somebody else.
|
| And this cut both ways. Acta Vertebrata, the journal of the
| Donana's Biological Station since 1974, have to be closed in
| 1997 after decades trying unsuccessfully to achieve a higher
| impact index as journal. Low impact index means that you obtain
| less and less of the researchers effort and that interesting
| articles fly away your radar. Researchers deciding to publish
| in Acta Vertebrata had a competitive disadvantage. It was a
| terrific journal, the problem is that they did science in the
| latinosphere, period. Nowadays science means do politics or go
| home
| Beldin wrote:
| Not all journals (and venues) are equal, just like how not all
| canyons are the Grand Canyon.
|
| When planning your holiday, the canyon matters. When submitting
| your paper, the venue matters - is it the right audience, and
| does it maximalise the impact?
|
| Article in Science / Nature is vastly more impressive than in
| most regional journals - which affects your career options.
| krastanov wrote:
| It is slowly happening, but the inertia is a significant
| impediment. Every scientists agrees that open access is the way
| to go. But it takes a decade or two to create the "social
| proof" that your new community journal is indeed one of high
| standards. If you already know that the editors of your goto
| journal have high professional standards, you do not want to
| potentially waste time and risk your reputation on supporting a
| community journal. It is a social problem, not a technical one.
| Usually solved by getting all the luminaries of the field to be
| editors for your new community journal (which is a tall order).
| andi999 wrote:
| One problem is that open access journals get paid by the
| author. So all so called predatory journals (not doing peer
| review, just taking the money and publishing the paper) are
| open access. Recently there was some hysteria about this,
| even if you publish by accident in one of those journals your
| career takes a very big dent.
| krastanov wrote:
| It seems reasonable to me to pay a small one-time
| publication fee for an open access journal, to cover
| clerical and typesetting work (professional typesetting is
| important and expensive). Predatory journals exist and
| would exist independently of what the best practices of
| good journals are.
|
| I have received plenty of emails inviting me to submit work
| to predatory journals, but their low quality and lack of
| peer review and general ethics is pretty obvious and they
| are easy to avoid. They feel more like a spammy annoyance
| than a real threat.
| subroutine wrote:
| In your opinion what would constitute a small fee? $10?
| $100? $3000?
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees
| krastanov wrote:
| In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional
| typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the
| typesetting, then <=500 is what I would expect.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Haha, can I get a few thousand dollars for typesetting my
| paper? That's absurd. Sure you can spend a month setting
| it in your printing press or illustrator or whatever, but
| just using the journal's template along with LaTeX is
| perfectly good nowadays, and the hardest part is getting
| to it to compile.
| krastanov wrote:
| Just using the journal template and looking only for
| compilation errors does not produce particularly good
| results. If I am preparing something for a journal like
| Quantum, where I am in charge of typesetting my work, it
| would take me a day or so to ensure figures are well
| placed and margins are not weird (in other words, not
| simply make it compile, but make it compile without
| warnings (not errors)). Most scientists do not care about
| the warnings latex emits as long as it compiles, and the
| results are ugly papers. I find it reasonable to pay
| $1000 to someone to take care of that processing (if they
| do a good job at it, which APS's and Nature's journals
| do).
| subroutine wrote:
| Roughly how long does it take to typeset a 5 page
| manuscript?
| krastanov wrote:
| If you go for high quality and work on the figures is
| performed, my (unreliable) guess is half a day for a
| professional designer. It takes me much more, because my
| latex skills are limited and because I insist on using
| the most standard and reproducible tools/packages in
| latex.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > reasonable to me to pay a small one-time publication
| fee for an open access journal, to cover clerical and
| typesetting work
|
| In my experience, the author typesets themselves anyway -
| the journal doesn't do this. And the clerical work is
| done by community volunteers - the journal doesn't do
| that either.
| krastanov wrote:
| In my experience with open access journals, if I am
| expected to typeset, I need to pay around 300$ for
| publication. If the journal does their typesetting, I pay
| on the order of thousands. Steep, but not unreasonable.
| And waivers exist.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Don't you just use a LaTeX template? I'm not really sure
| what typesetting there is to do beyond that?
|
| Whenever I publish a paper, I just send them a finished
| PDF. There's nothing more done with it than that I
| believe.
| krastanov wrote:
| LaTeX on its own does not magically solve all layout
| issues, especially if the exact placement of figures is
| pedagogically important or if the math equations are
| complicated. Usually you would end with 20ish compilation
| warnings (not errors) on a first draft. I think it is
| fine for a scientist to not bother with those, but I also
| think it is important for them to be fixed by someone in
| the final product. You can argue that I am snobish about
| typesetting, but that is different from saying that good
| typesetting does not involve an effort.
|
| Also, I have never sent a PDF for publication. I always
| send source files. I do not know of journals that would
| accept a PDF (except for early peer review).
| andi999 wrote:
| That small fee is usually ard 2000$.
| bogwog wrote:
| Probably because they have to in order to get a job or even
| graduate.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Sadly, there's no credible alternative to peer review, and
| nobody has come up with a good system to do that free. Preprint
| repositories are a start, but you then go on to publish so you
| can get citations etc. Alternatives are being built
| (https://science-octopus.org/) but nothing with credibility and
| scale yet
| c0l0 wrote:
| Given that the actual reviewers of scientific works aren't
| paid, I'd say that the publishers like Springer and Elsevier
| came up with a pretty good system (first and foremost good
| for themselves, though) to do just that. ;)
| efitz wrote:
| I really think that every government should pass laws that
| require no-charge access to any research that is paid for in
| whole or part by that government, and FRAND licensing of patents
| resulting from such research. The idea of private companies rent-
| seeking on publicly funded research is one of the worst forms of
| crony capitalism.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria,
| Britain, and France.
|
| In Austria the providers do block it, but it's still reachable
| via the *.st TLD. Not sure if that's an official sci-hub page or
| not, but it works.
| draven wrote:
| It's blocked at the DNS level (at least here in France, it
| simply does not resolve.) I switched to DNS-over-HTTP in
| Firefox and it works.
| pmyteh wrote:
| It is blocked in the UK, but only using the usual 'good enough'
| quasi-voluntary measures that cover the bigger ISPs. It's
| accessible through my more hacker-friendly home broadband.
|
| Hilariously, it's also available through JANET, the British
| universities' networking system. So essentially every student
| and researcher in the country has access from work...
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| The bigger question is: Why promote or condone the gating of
| view access to published research at all? It's not okay.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Copyright is the law of the land.
| tbabej wrote:
| I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who
| don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the
| creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the
| part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for
| fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was
| done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described
| in the article.
|
| As a result, any papers published in 2021 (and some of the rarer,
| older ones, that nobody tried to access in the past) are not
| retrievable by Sci-Hub. The user only gets to see a white screen.
|
| This is meant to be a temporary measure, but it's been going on
| since December of last year (due to various court hearing
| delays), and the desperation in online communities like the
| r/scihub subreddit has been palpable [1,2].
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/o2xb57/how_do_i_eve...
| [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
| jorvi wrote:
| I'm very confused, why would she ever have to comply with
| orders of an Indian (or indeed, US) court if she resides in
| Europe?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's explained in the original article.
| skissane wrote:
| She doesn't have to comply with the Indian court order. She
| chose to because she thinks she has a chance of winning the
| case. To her, a court ruling that SciHub is legal under
| Indian law would be a huge win. Obeying the court order
| increases the odds the court will rule in her favour. It is a
| calculated risk on her part.
| tbabej wrote:
| She did not _have_ to, but she voluntarily chose to, in order
| to have a shot of winning this case. If she didn 't comply
| with the court's orders, I assume the chances of winning
| would plummet. From the article:
|
| > One reason is that Elbakyan believes she has a shot at
| winning the case, and her odds might improve if she plays by
| the rules. "I want the Indian court to finally support free
| access to science," she said. If that happened, it would mark
| a significant victory for Sci-Hub, with reverberations likely
| beyond India. Victory remains a longshot, but Elbakyan thinks
| it's worth the hassle and expense. She didn't even bother to
| contest the two lawsuits in the United States.
| vslira wrote:
| Can third parties (especially foreigners) finance legal
| battles in India? Can we donate?
| manquer wrote:
| You can donate to her directly.
|
| There is no hard restriction on how lawyers are paid .
| Judges may limit something in some specific cases etc,
| also they have paperwork to do for any foreign income for
| tax purposes. That's not unusal in many countries.
|
| There maybe optics problem occasionally if local issue
| gets international funding it can undermine support etc,
| here the other party copyright holders are also
| international and she /libgen is also not local, so
| perhaps not as much a problem her funding comes globally
| lhoff wrote:
| It's explained in the article. She thinks there is a chance
| to win the case in India which would be a useful publicity
| stunt and therefore complies with the court order.
| skissane wrote:
| > win the case in India which would be a useful publicity
| stunt
|
| It isn't just about publicity, it is also about legal
| precedent.
|
| In the English common law system, a judge is allowed to
| cite not just precedent from within their own country's
| legal system, but also precedent from courts in foreign
| common law jurisdictions. Foreign courts are not binding
| precedent, but a judge is allowed to say they are persuaded
| by the foreign court's reasoning. The propriety of citing
| foreign court judgements has become rather controversial in
| the US, but in England and other common law jurisdictions
| it is an accepted practice which few question.
|
| I doubt a legal precedent from India is going to persuade
| the courts of developed countries like UK, US, Canada,
| Australia, New Zealand, etc. Even though most of those are
| technically allowed to consider Indian court decisions (as
| a fellow common law jurisdiction), they rarely give Indian
| courts much heed in practice. But it may be much more
| influential with the courts of developing countries in
| Africa and elsewhere. That's what Elbakyan is trying to do,
| win a case in India and then use that as a springboard to
| winning cases in other countries too.
| lamontcg wrote:
| And a digital safe haven in India would be pretty huge,
| and if it spreads to African nations that could open up
| more DNS registrars at the very least.
| ta988 wrote:
| It would also be a good way for China and Russia to allow
| scihub to operate from their countries, just to send a
| big F#@% you to US (ACS) and Netherlands (Elsevier) who
| have been especially violent against sci-hub.
| nzmsv wrote:
| She doesn't, but many people really really want to change
| this. See this discussion from a week ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662701
|
| The topic of borders and the Internet is a really weird one
| in general. Somehow the very same people who would like
| Alexandra to flout any laws will jump up and down and yell
| "Google should be forced to do what my country tells it".
| Personally I find this baffling.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| You should comply with the laws of the country your
| operating in, yes. Google has different versions of its
| offerings for different countries, as it should be. She
| changed scihub for everyone, though, not just Indians,
| that's the difference.
| trasz wrote:
| Those are completely different situations. Google should
| obey countries they earn money from. Sci-Hub doesn't make
| money.
| viraptor wrote:
| You can recognise some laws are good for everyone and some
| as unethical - it's not an invalid position. For example
| (on an extreme end), I believe murder being illegal is
| right, but pot possession being illegal is not. In the less
| extreme middle, (and more contentious) I believe antitrust
| laws used against google are sometimes good and
| restrictions on access to / use of publicly funded research
| is not.
| bawolff wrote:
| Everyone loves an underdog.
| xtracto wrote:
| I'm pessimistic. Long before sci-hub, library genesis and
| Alexandra there was ebook-club / library.nu and Smiley (its
| creator). When it closed it was described as the burning of the
| library of Alexandria. There were a lot of non-technical books
| on that site and it was amazing. Still, it lost the battle.
|
| Ultimately, sci-hub will unfortunately get the same end. Until
| the Scientific society stops maintaining the leeches that are
| the scientific journals, nothing will change.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If sci-hub goes down it will significantly disrupt nearly
| every scientific researcher, in every field, all over the
| world. After getting used to a world where every paper is
| obtainable, it would be very difficult for people to go back.
|
| I'm not really a scholar or academic per se, but the
| independent research I do (which involves skimming thousands
| of papers per year, 99% of which are irrelevant or useless)
| would be an order of magnitude harder without sci-hub. Most
| paywalled papers I just would never bother to read, unless I
| happened to be sitting in a university library or something.
| IshKebab wrote:
| For researchers in most universities almost every paper is
| obtainable without scihub.
| jacobolus wrote:
| This is not true for most universities around the world.
| Only wealthy ones in first-world countries. All of my
| father's academic colleagues in Mexico use Sci-Hub daily,
| and rely on it for access to literature.
|
| But beyond that, there are paywalled journals which
| Harvard does not subscribe to. There are journals which
| the University of California does not subscribe to. (Or
| pick your favorite university, and there will be some
| paywalled journals it does not subscribe to.) Almost all
| are on Sci-Hub.
|
| Moreover, even in the USA/Europe, there are many
| researchers who are not affiliated with any university,
| and many laypeople who look up scientific literature from
| time to time. For instance a great many paywalled papers
| are directly relevant to working computer programmers,
| but not worth $35/paper + bureaucratic hassle to
| evaluate.
| xtracto wrote:
| Exactly! I had the opportunity to both work in the
| academic field in Mexico and study in the UK and the
| difference of resources is abysmal: Access to Scopus,
| access to Elsevier and other editorials is something most
| researchers in Mexico can only dream about.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| The Journal system is basically academic job protection
| for wealthier countries, but this factor is never talked
| about aloud, as it is a) unscientific and anti-
| enlightenment behavior and b) exposes the hypocrisy that
| is creating loads of competition for unskilled labor,
| while crippling the competition for mental labor.
|
| So why not call the system what is? The guild of
| knowledge.
|
| I still vividly remember when the eastern-block opened,
| and all those excellent Russian mathematicians who went
| into the west, were not recognized when it came to there
| degrees in europe. "The brightest minds of a generation
| work here" in the university brochure? Don't make me
| laugh.
| lmm wrote:
| Are the people whose work will be disrupted people who
| the top-tier scientific community care about?
|
| As a working programmer I'd like to have access to
| scientific papers, but realistically no researcher is
| going to care whether I do. If the pain isn't being felt
| by top-tier researchers and top-tier universities, I
| doubt anyone will be able to change it.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _no researcher is going to care whether I [read their
| papers]_
|
| Researchers absolutely want people to read and use their
| work! That's why they do it! Having some practical impact
| on people making things in industry is super gratifying
| to the researchers I know, much more than just having the
| same tiny circle of known collaborators read and cite
| each-other's papers in theoretical or small-scale
| academic prototype work.
| freshhawk wrote:
| Yes. It includes many members of the top-tier scientific
| community.
|
| For many of them, the reason we get the benefits of these
| top-tier people is because of sci-hub.
| dmos62 wrote:
| It's obscene that scientific literature is walled away
| from the public.
| pell wrote:
| Especially when the public often paid for said research
| at least in part.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| Previously publishers did improve the papers and checked
| them. Those times are long gone and it is questionable
| what their purpose might be today.
|
| IP law has long been abused to stifle development instead
| of protecting it. In this case it might stifle scientific
| research.
| [deleted]
| markus92 wrote:
| I'm a researcher at a first world university. I used sci-
| hub to pirate my own papers cus we did not have a
| subscription to the journal anymore. I'm not paying $39
| to read my own work!
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| As a researcher, I'm not sure why you didn't have a
| preprint copies as all other authors I have met did.
| markus92 wrote:
| Wasn't at home, don't have them in my Dropbox.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If your peers thing that you need to cite the paper X
| because is relevant for the theme, you need to obtain it
| and pay for it. To decide to ignore parts of knowledge
| because you don't like its distribution mode is not an
| option.
|
| The result will be less science, slower science and
| independent scientists being pushed out of the road. They
| would try to recruit them later under the ridiculous
| 'citizen scientists' category ('missionary scientists'
| would be an even better term), but this is what we have.
| Every single people trying to break monopolies or introduce
| changes for the benefit of the entire humanity in the past
| two decades has been laminated as a public warning for
| newcomers.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| Don't have much hope for the legal system on the subcontinent.
| Indian, Pakistani, Deshi courts are all legendary slow. It's
| nearly impossible to win against concerted, deliberate
| extension, and delay tactic against somebody who has more money
| to write legal letters than you.
|
| Unlike the GB legal system, from which they branched out, they
| never got the reformation wave circa 1960-1970 when UK was
| trying to root out the most outrageous flaws of English law.
|
| There was a now legendary legal dispute over land near either
| Multan, or Kohat, can't remember exactly, which began in 19th
| century, outlasted 6, or 7 generations, and ended just few
| years ago.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I would be surprised if Kohat wasn't under FCR when that
| began
| andyxor wrote:
| There is a rescue mission to save Scihub papers, you can help
| seeding the torrents
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
| bushbaba wrote:
| Surprised nobody decided to upload them onto filecoin/ipfs.
| Would be a great test to a real-life use case of the
| decentralized web
| andyxor wrote:
| Yes, see this post on IPFS by /u/shrine (who started the
| SciHub rescue mission on Reddit) http://freeread.org/ipfs/
| enriquto wrote:
| That's great, and easy to do! I have an old NAS around, will
| try to set it up this week.
| ordu wrote:
| The clash of cultures. Russians treat law as something made just
| for a show. It is like "Any adult State must have Law, so Russian
| government learned them letters from alphabet to write Law", but
| no one really bothered with Law, because if government employee
| decided to charge you, he'd find a way. If he decided to not
| charge you, then he wouldn't do it. There are incentives to not
| break law in an obvious and showy manner, because the government
| might see it as an insult, it might provoke it. No point to
| attract an attention of the government. But nevertheless if one
| breaks law without inflicting damages to innocent, he/she is a
| candidate to a title of a national hero. Government structures
| are not innocent by definition, people who exploit proletariat
| also are not innocent (though there might be exceptions).
|
| In a short it is a Soviet mindset rooted in a mindset of serfdom
| before Soviets.
|
| On the other side is European and American culture with the rule
| of law, which (from Russian point of view) naively believes that
| law has something to do with fairness.
|
| If Putin was a president of USA, he'd now made long speeches
| about intervention of wicked Russian culture attacking
| Traditional Western Values and diluting proud Western Academic
| Culture. And something about spirituality. And he'd made laws
| treating students with a prison for using sci-hub. Prison boosts
| spirituality and teaches to prefer spiritual over materialistic.
| Real USA presidents are not much fun in this regard. Even Trump.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Did no one read the article? The answer to the question in the
| title is the same answer for all questions in article titled: No.
| Looks like she's doing just fine and trying to see if she can
| actually win the case in India, and if not she'll still be fine.
| Of course she probably can't leave Russia ever, but it looks like
| she knew that a long time back and nothing about that has
| changed.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| Anyone remember Napster? There were extremely obscure musical
| recordings that were instantly found on Napster that are
| impossible to find even today. It took a long time for anyone to
| rebuild that data to the level of usefulness that Napster had.
|
| If Sci-Hub is forced to shut down due to legal pressure,
| technical problems, running out of money, or the founder losing
| interest, it would take a long time for anyone to duplicate Sci-
| Hub if they started from zero.
|
| I think a good way to keep the cause alive is to backup or mirror
| the 85,483,811 papers hosted on Sci-Hub. That is, if she's
| willing to allow it (maybe it's already being done, but how
| widely?).
|
| In the case of Sci-Hub, you'd need between 85 and 850 TB for each
| backup or mirror depending on whether the average paper size is 1
| MB or 10 MB.
| nvarsj wrote:
| > I think a good way to keep the cause alive is to backup or
| mirror the 85,483,811 papers hosted on Sci-Hub.
|
| There's already an effort where the data is broken up into
| 100GB chunks [1]. Looks like the entire database is duplicated
| now at least 10 times. [2]
|
| > Anyone remember Napster? There were extremely obscure musical
| recordings that were instantly found on Napster that are
| impossible to find even today.
|
| That existed (and still exists) - there was oink.cd, then
| what.cd, and now RED. But each incarnation has lost things.
| Each time you burn down the library, you're bound to lose
| something. It's disappointing there isn't a legal way of
| cultural preservation. We need something like a crowd sourced
| digital library.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
|
| [2] https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-filtered-
| ta...
| nxpnsv wrote:
| For me soulseek was amazing to find obscure recordings.
| andyxor wrote:
| There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000
| scientific articles, to a total of 85M articles (77TB)
| http://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/
|
| index for all the papers in these torrents (SQL db):
| https://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz
|
| also see
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| But are they searchable, by users with little technical
| ability? Will they be updated with new papers if Sci-Hub
| shuts down?
| aabaker99 wrote:
| It's not too hard to find the article's doi
| (programatically) for newer articles. Once you have the doi
| you have all the important article metadata like author,
| publish date, etc. I imagine this is all that's required to
| make the articles searchable.
|
| However, this is certainly more challenging for older
| articles.
| pjerem wrote:
| Nope, but at least, they aren't lost. They are just there,
| ready to be made available by the potential successor of
| Sci-Hub. That's what matters.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Isn't there a torrent available? I thought I had heard that
| scihub is immortal because of torrented copies.
| [deleted]
| mkl wrote:
| Only the existing bits. New publications wouldn't be
| included, so eventually the archive would become less
| relevant and stop being shared. There's significant cost for
| the required storage (currently 77TB according to andyxor's
| comment).
| jacquesm wrote:
| 108T 104T 3,9T 97% /home/scihub
| qiqitori wrote:
| 77TB (or 104 TB) sounds expensive, but many people reading
| this could buy that kind of storage with just one month's
| salary. (SeaGate IronWolf Pro 16 TB, currently $521 on
| Amazon)
| Naracion wrote:
| You can get amazing deals on storage at different points
| in the year. I have a Seagate 16TB external hard disk
| that I bought during Black Friday sales of 2020 for about
| $270, half of your quoted price. Currently, it is $450
| new.
|
| At the reduced cost, we'd only need 7 of those for 112TB
| of storage, and that's $1890 + taxes, close to $2000. Not
| a lot of money for a backup of humanity's knowledge.
| dkarp wrote:
| you could do it for about $2300 by shucking external hard
| drives. I picked up a couple 10TB WD drives last year for
| $210 each for my NAS.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Off topic but I didn't realize you could save that much!
| Why are externals less expensive?
| dkarp wrote:
| There's a bit on the r/DataHoarder subreddit about it[0].
| They say it comes down to a shorter warranty, more demand
| and "Binning of performance parts".
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/wiki/hardware#wi
| ki_shuc...
| capableweb wrote:
| 77 / 16 = 5.5 (6 disks) at $521 per disk turns into
| $3126. Seems only 11 countries in the world has a higher
| salary than $3126[1], and probably people wouldn't buy
| something like that with their entire monthly salary, so
| at least $5000 a month is required to be able to just
| dispose $3126 for some drives. That leaves 5 countries
| with a average salary higher than $5000.
|
| Granted, the source might not be the best, nor using
| average salaries as a signal either, but to say that many
| people can spend something like that on a whim seems
| ignorant at best.
|
| - [1] https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
| dkarp wrote:
| They said "many people reading this" and HN's biggest
| audience is US tech workers. It wouldn't be ignorant to
| say that many US tech workers can afford that.
| matsemann wrote:
| The table doesn't list the same as the map. For instance
| Norway and Sweden is included in the map, but not in the
| table. And I don't think the average reader here should
| be compared to the average income around the world.
| Rather a top single digit percent.
| advael wrote:
| This is why broad averages aren't always the most useful
| statistic. The number of complete mirrors required to
| make the data trove fairly robust is much lower than the
| number of people in the world, and the prior commentor's
| qualifier was "people reading this", which is likely a
| biased sample and includes many people working in
| technology in the richest countries in the world. It's
| unlikely that said population's income is clustered
| around overall national averages, and only a relatively
| small number of outliers are required to set up adequate
| mirroring.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Yes p2p really had the largest catalog and still surpasses
| what's available on Spotify or Apple Music. You could get
| obscure live recordings, the smallest bands, everything was
| there. If you consider bootleg recordings, the volume of music
| produced is many times larger than what any one centralized
| service could offer.
| vb6sp6 wrote:
| Napster was ok. Oink on the other hand...
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Or its spiritual successor, What.cd
| omega3 wrote:
| The closure of what.cd should be up there with the burning
| of the library of Alexandria.
| hobom wrote:
| I think there was some reddit data hoarder initiative that did
| that a few months ago.
| wtmt wrote:
| No, she's not in real trouble this time. What seems to be in
| trouble is getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a
| little bit less relevant over time.
|
| The courts here in India are notoriously slow on many cases.
| Depending on luck, the hearings don't even start for a long time
| after an initial notice is sent to defendants. If the publishers
| are able to push the court for an earlier hearing, we'll know how
| soon Sci-Hub can get back on track (surely she's not going to
| stop maintaining the site and stop uploading new papers
| regardless of how the case turns out). I don't think the
| publishers would be content with just new papers not being
| uploaded. If the case drags on, the backlog of newer papers to
| upload may become an immense effort that may create some "holes"
| in the data archive.
|
| I just hope the court decides sooner and we can get on with Sci-
| Hub growing.
|
| P.S.: This link shared in another comment worked for me without
| any CAPTCHA prompts - https://archive.ph/huNwk
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _getting new papers on to Sci-Hub and it becoming a little
| bit less relevant over time_
|
| Sci-Hub is just as relevant as ever. What has happened is that
| paywalled papers published in 2021 are losing a substantial
| proportion of their readers and potential citations, and their
| future impact will be depressed compared to papers from
| previous years. Even when Sci-Hub starts adding papers again,
| there may be a significant permanent effect.
|
| Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career
| papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career
| papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed.
|
| I'm always amazed at the lack of will to change what everyone
| agrees is a problem.
| slx26 wrote:
| It's always lack and coordination and power, not lack of
| will. There might be around a thousand scientists in the
| world that are relevant enough to be able to contact other
| big names and try to get the whole scientific community on
| board, not only with a massive effort to make the problem
| well known to the general public and try to gather enough
| attention to it, but also making some specific proposals on
| how this can be solved, and proposing some rather drastic
| measures if laws are not changed, like getting scientists
| to agree to ignore any paper that's not released freely and
| publicly online, and trying to get the media and everyone
| else on board. But those big names are usually very busy
| already, and doing useful things. Not more useful than
| this, but translating from will to coordination is one of
| the biggest problems preventing humanity from making the
| world a better place. Some essays like "meditations on
| moloch" have discussed this problem in more detail if you
| are interested, but the key idea is that existing power
| dynamics and the interests and willingness to cheat or be
| "cleverer" of a minority can deeply compromise the game for
| everyone else, moving the individual "rational" decision
| (low risk) very far away from the collective optimal.
| Beldin wrote:
| It has little to do with will, and much more with building
| a scientific career.
|
| Unless you meant that the way academia is structured is the
| problem here. Because it is and it leads to these excesses.
| Publishing, itself an acknowledged problem, is being
| addressed. But slowly, very slowly. Because the incentives
| in academia do not point to risk taking.
| ajb wrote:
| Given how beneficial sci-hub is, there ought to be some way that
| the scientific community can formally recognise this, as a way of
| legitimizing her cause.
|
| Some ways I can think of:
|
| * Get her elected as rector of a university. Contraversial
| figures are sometimes elected as Rector, at least in the UK,
| because students are the electorate. However for the same reason
| this isn't considered especially prestigious by people who know
| this.
|
| * Fund and create an academic post specifically for her (Ptolomy
| II Professor of the ethics of copyright strikes me a a suitably
| biting title [1])
|
| * Nominate her to some well known prize
|
| [1] Ptolomy II decreed that any book found in a ship in the port
| of Alexandria should be copied by the scribes of his library -
| with or without the permission of the owner. The UK actually has
| a similar law in that publishers are required to send copies of
| any book published in the UK to the British Library
| danohuiginn wrote:
| Book prefaces commonly acknowledge the libraries where the
| author has done research; sci-hub deserves to go there if they
| have been using it.
|
| It's a shame Elbakyan hasn't written a paper about sci-hub that
| people can cite. Many software packages do that, to give
| academics an obvious way to cite them.
|
| On nominations: the Nobel nomination process is very open
| (iirc, any relevant professor can make a nomination). For that
| reason it is also largely meaningless, but that doesn't stop
| many people boasting about it, and chunks of the media enabling
| them. So this is leaning a long way towards fake news, but is
| also something a single person could do.
| danohuiginn wrote:
| From the article:
|
| [Publishers claim sites like Sci-Hub] "have no incentive to
| ensure the accuracy of scientific articles, no incentive to
| ensure published papers meet ethical standards, and no
| incentive to retract or correct articles if issues arise."
|
| The correct response to this should be to always note in
| citations when a paper was accessed through sci-hub. Then the
| reader is warned, and can compare against the canonical version
| if they are worried.
| miohtama wrote:
| Publishers have little incentive to ensure the accuracy of
| papers as well...
|
| The science has changed to fake paper mill to advance the
| careers of people in the countries with weak institutions.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5
| ajb wrote:
| Also: Those of you in academia, please have a think about
| whether you, personally, could kick off one of these, or one of
| the suggestions in replies.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Honorary doctorate, maybe?
| pieter_mj wrote:
| Elbakyan's contribution to humanity is way bigger than that
| and cannot be overstated. An honorary doctorate from many
| major international universities, maybe.
|
| Her effort deserves to be rewarded with the nobel peace
| prize, imsvho.
| kzrdude wrote:
| It would be neat if she was awarded 1/2 or 1/3 of the
| medicine or chemistry prize for example
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What will happen to research outside wealthy institutions if Sci-
| Hub shuts down? Are there alternatives?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Almost all papers are legally available from the researchers'
| websites anyway. I'm not sure it's the big deal everyone makes
| it out to be in the first place. I very very rarely find a
| paper I want is paywalled in the first place.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Many people work at home now, even if they work at wealthy
| institutions
| frostburg wrote:
| That's not really the issue. You would set up a proxy, log
| with your institutional account... actually even with access
| the sci-hub UX is vastly superior.
| dasudasu wrote:
| Lots of people upload their research to ResearchGate (even
| though I really dislike the site for other reasons), make it
| available from their research group's web page, or in some
| fields upload it to ArXiv or BioRxiv. It's usually not against
| the terms of paywalled journals to do any of these things.
| Google Scholar or even the regular Google search engine can be
| decent at finding these PDF links. As a last resort, if you're
| serious about wanting to read a paper, you can contact the
| corresponding author, who will usually email you a copy and be
| glad you are interested in his/her work, though this becomes a
| bit impractical if you need access to multiple references.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Good points, but there is another use case: AFAIK (and in my
| limited experience), much of research involves reviewing many
| papers, to find the right one and to glean information here
| and there. It's not always a hunt for one specific special
| paper.
|
| How is that use case addressed when the cost of finding each
| paper seems to be so much higher?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Is injecting malware into PDFs still a thing? If so, it could be
| a national security matter to give people access via a trusted
| source so they don't have to go to a grey market to get their
| research papers.
|
| And I'll just +1 here that even when I did have access through
| university, the flow for logging into elsevier was like 8 clicks,
| and then after finding the paper, the button to download and read
| it was hidden on the side as an image-button, no alt or title
| text. Just an image with the word "download pdf"
|
| So yeah, I went to sci-hub every time.
| matsemann wrote:
| Or it was configured to only allow IPs from library computers.
| Or one had to use VPN if working from one's dorm room and not
| campus to get access. Just all around a big hassle.
|
| Reminds me of being a kid living in a small town in the
| mountains of Norway. The only music I could buy was the Top10
| CDs on display at the kiosk. Being rotated only a few times a
| year and not at all my taste. But with p2p filesharing I could
| listen to all kinds of music. Often times the illegal way is
| just so much more convenient, not because it's free, but
| because it doesn't have lots of artificial hurdles.
| lima wrote:
| > Is injecting malware into PDFs still a thing?
|
| Nope. Most people read PDFs inside the browser, with the same
| sandbox protections as other web content.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| IIRC Firefox uses a JavaScript based PDF reader (pdf.js), but
| Chrome/Chromium uses a native library (PDFium).
|
| Both have had exploits in the past, but I would trust the
| pdf.js approach more.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Sandboxes can be escaped from.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| You can only get guaranteed protection from malware
| infections through the internet if you turn off your
| machine.
|
| Even then there might be some remote management exploits
| which would work on turned off machines, so unplug the
| cables aswell.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Thats not a reason to fudge with the definitions. The
| existence of sandboxes doesnt mean there are no more pdf
| exploits. There still are and sandboxes dont mitigate it
| entirely.
|
| There is also more ways then just turning off your
| machine. Its needlessly oversimplifying complex topics.
| Topics that are very interesting and have severe
| implications. Especially if we are talking about state
| level espionage.
|
| So in short, no you are wrong. PDF exploits are still a
| thing. You made unjustified assumptions.
|
| Reading my post it sounds confrontational. Thats not my
| intent.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I only confirmed what you said.
|
| The best way to reduce the number of bugs (exploits) in a
| system is to get rid of it.
|
| Since you've brought up state level espionage, this might
| be the reason why states are run by hordes of bureocrats
| processing physical paperwork (this is an
| oversimplification of course).
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| >this might be the reason why states are run by hordes of
| bureocrats processing physical paperwork (this is an
| oversimplification of course).
|
| Nice point, thanks for bringing it up. Reminded me of
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/russia-
| reverts... >Russian guard service reverts to typewriters
| after NSA leaks
| chaps wrote:
| It's ironic and frustrating that the site requires you to sign in
| to read the article...
| smsm42 wrote:
| It kinda does but kinda doesn't. It puts up a banner to block
| you reading without registering, but it's pretty easy to remove
| it from the page if you're comfortable with Chrome's DevTools.
|
| Also, https://archive.ph/huNwk
| hirundo wrote:
| Prometheus, Titan god of fire, was sentenced by Zeus to eternal
| torture. An eagle ate his liver every day and it grew back
| overnight to be eaten again. The Modern Prometheus, Victor
| Frankenstein, didn't end well either, dying of the arctic cold
| while chasing his monster. I wish Ms Elbakyan, our Even More
| Modern Prometheus, a kinder fate. But clearly it's a high risk
| job.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| I also enjoyed the implication in the article that she is an
| avatar of Saraswati.
|
| But you're right, she faces risk, which the Prometheus story,
| while overused, better captures.
|
| Her name Alexandra also brings to mind the Library of
| Alexandria, which is a happy coincidence.
|
| And as for risk, we also remember her predecessor, Aaron
| Swartz.
| sepin4 wrote:
| Knowledge is power and no one entity powerful enought likes to
| have it flowing freely. It would become free at about the same
| time the monetary system becomes obsolete, in other words
| never. That doesn't mean that the opposition to the powerful
| should stop and that is what Sci-Hub is.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| > flowing freely
|
| Another reference to Saraswati.
| esrh wrote:
| Something I've always wondered is why Alexandra put her name and
| identity out there. Would it not have been easier to remain
| anonymous?
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Because Alexandra created sci-hub to open access to science. It
| was a political act. She was not ashamed, she wanted people to
| pay attention. Perhaps she was naive in thinking that removing
| barriers to science and knowledge would trump middle-men's
| greed and profit.
| crumbshot wrote:
| Was her identity well-known before the Elsevier court case,
| where she was named?
|
| I thought the publicity for her efforts was made after this, in
| English language media anyway. Though perhaps I am
| misremembering the order of events.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| According to pushshift, her name first appears in a reddit
| comment in December 2014: https://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/com
| ments/2m2m1p/libgen_needs... The Sci-Hub wikipedia article
| first appeared in October 2015, already mentioning her name.
| The Elsevier complaint in NY is from June 2015:
| https://torrentfreak.com/images/elsevier-complaint.pdf
| [deleted]
| eplanit wrote:
| Off topic, but she looks like a close cousin to Greta Thunberg.
| Related in ideology if not genetically.
| eruci wrote:
| The article about the pirate queen is behind a paywall. The
| irony.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Not really. One can support paying for journalism but not
| scientific articles (because the latter are typically funded
| other than by journal access fees, meaning journals are engaged
| in pure rent-seeking).
| enriquto wrote:
| This is extremely infuriating. Alexandra Elbakyan has done a huge
| positive contribution to human civilization, even knowing that it
| was putting herself at personal risk. She's just 32 years old.
| How can we help her? Does she need money, public support, vpns in
| every country? Whatever she needs, mankind is indebted to her and
| we should help if we can.
|
| Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or
| Library Genesis) should consider helping back. I certainly do,
| but I don't know how to best support her. Any suggestions?
|
| She's not very communicative lately:
| https://twitter.com/ringo_ring
| breck wrote:
| We need to start organizing and go on the offensive: abolish
| copyright and patents through a constitutional amendment--
| http://www.breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendmen...
|
| If you're wondering how to get the public to support it, we
| need to start spreading the truth. The opioid crisis kicked off
| by Purdue? Wouldn't have happened without USPTO. Big tech
| monopolists? They get their monopoly power from IS laws. The
| list goes and on. IS laws choke the flow of information through
| the nervous system of the world and we feel it's consequences
| all over the place.
| nhooyr wrote:
| What is IS law?
| greyface- wrote:
| It seems to stand for "Intellectual Slavery": https://hn.al
| golia.com/?q=by%3Abreck%20%22intellectual%20sla...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Linking to your own website is fine and all, but not exactly
| a reference.
|
| And it's hilariously short sighted. Without patent and
| copywrite protections, you'll instantly see innovation come
| out of places where people are paid for their work. US
| offloading it's manufacturing in a short sighted move to
| cheap labor and head-in-sand environmental outlook - sure,
| let's kill the design industries too now too.
|
| There is a problem with how papers are shared and the orgs
| that control archiving and release. That doesn't mean all
| patents must be thrown out.
| mbar84 wrote:
| The balance of cost and benefits is not as clear as you may
| think.
|
| https://questioncopyright.org/
| http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| If going patent-free is good enough for the transistor...
|
| Do you have any rebuttal to parent's points on Purdue and
| tech monopolies?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes, of course.
|
| Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO? Or that
| the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the
| opioids had been generics?
|
| Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is alcohol
| addition a huge problem, or not?
|
| Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on
| _patents_ and not on massive spending power, political
| leverage, and other influencing mechanisms?
|
| Do you not understand that if you have the spending
| power, you can open-source your code and IP without even
| remotely endangering that monopoly?
|
| The reality is that patents are a relatively tiny element
| in cost of entry to markets.
|
| It's honestly baffling why the anti-copyright crowd
| believes removing patents and copyright will be some kind
| of magic bus ride to utopia, when there is no rational
| reason whatsoever to believe that.
|
| And none of this has much to do with making scientific
| papers public domain - because that isn't even the same
| class of issue.
| breck wrote:
| > Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO?
|
| The legal ones do, absolutely.
|
| > Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have
| happened if the opioids had been generics?
|
| "get an audience for our patent infringement suits so
| that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and
| balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that
| OxyContin Tablets is the way to go." Richard Sackler in a
| 1996 email. I do not see OxyContin situations in a world
| with intellectual freedom, no. No government enforced
| monopoly profits, no massive incentive to overprescribe
| and lie. No copyright, and you get far more honest media,
| education, and healthcare industries.
|
| > Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is
| alcohol addition a huge problem, or not?
|
| Maybe it's far more of a problem that is generally known,
| but that truth is not made apparent because we don't have
| true freedom of the press b/c of copyright laws.
|
| > Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on
| patents
|
| On patents _and copyrights_. If we were to declare
| tomorrow that search engines did not have to respect
| copyright law, we would see far better search engines
| than Google in a year or less.
|
| > The reality is that patents are a relatively tiny
| element in cost of entry to markets.
|
| Patents deter a huge number of startups from forming.
| Nearly every successful startup I know of gets targetted
| by patent trolls, and must decide to play that game and
| go along with the system. This is very discouraging to a
| huge number of innovators, especially in critical fields
| like chip design.
|
| > It's honestly baffling why the anti-copyright crowd
| believes removing patents and copyright will be some kind
| of magic bus ride to utopia, when there is no rational
| reason whatsoever to believe that.
|
| Not a magical bus ride to utopia, but a doubling to
| perhaps 10x increase in human productivity and equality,
| yes.
| shagie wrote:
| > On patents and copyrights. If we were to declare
| tomorrow that search engines did not have to respect
| copyright law, we would see far better search engines
| than Google in a year or less.
|
| If copyright was abolished, the GPL and all open source
| would lose all its teeth.
|
| The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all
| rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me
| seeing a dime.
|
| The people who write books on here (and then have to
| fight to keep people from doing on demand pirating of
| them) would be given a big shrug when they try to go
| after them in court for copyright infringement.
|
| ---
|
| Its possible to argue about the term of the copyrights on
| different media or the threshold for what is novel for a
| patent... but trying to remove copyrights _completely_
| disincentives people who are creating material that is
| protected with copyright from sharing their material.
|
| And let's face it... you'd have to rewrite the
| constitution to get rid of them. Article 1, Section 8,
| Clause 8.
|
| > [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
| limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
| Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
|
| And they're right.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| As much as I disagree with the notion of intellectual
| property, I think arguing about the meaning of the phrase
| "securing for limited times" is the strongest ticket we
| have, thanks for the tip.
| TheDong wrote:
| > The people who write books on here (and then have to
| fight to keep people from doing on demand pirating of
| them) would be given a big shrug when they try to go
| after them in court for copyright infringement
|
| Do any authors of books actually manage to prosecute
| piracy in a way that makes them money? As best I can
| tell, artists lose money paying for lawyers to litigate
| supposedly lost sales, but whether they actually lose
| sales is very questionable.
|
| > The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all
| rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me
| seeing a dime.
|
| Yup, which is good! You put them up on the web without
| expectation of making a dime, right? Cool. Your
| expectations are fulfilled, and someone gets a cool image
| too.
|
| > trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives
| people who are creating material that is protected with
| copyright from sharing their material
|
| And yet, the majority of people who post instagram images
| and tik-tok videos don't even realize their work is
| protected by copyright I'd wager, but they're still happy
| to share their material.
|
| People who write open source code apply such a license
| specifically because they want to share the material more
| broadly than copyright would normally allow.
|
| If removing copyright means that we end up with fewer
| people who are seeking a profit producing content and
| then praying on others who share and remix it, that seems
| good to me. We have plenty of people who are willing to
| produce content and be happy when other people enjoy it,
| use it, and share it.
|
| If I wrote a book, I would be overjoyed to have people
| read it and copy it to share with their friends. It seems
| like a very dark mindset to think that a profit-motive is
| the primary reason someone might produce anything.
| syshum wrote:
| For the US, the fast path would be to push for all Federally
| Funded Research to be published under a Public Domain
| License, no different than NASA Images, recordings, or other
| public agency created research.
|
| We need to extend those provisions to include all research
| that gets federal tax money
| [deleted]
| ta988 wrote:
| Thod is already true for NIH funded research after a one
| year embargo. But yes I would support that. Authors have to
| sign away the rights to their own texts and pictures to
| publishers! not just sharing rights like you do when
| putting a.picture on twitter, no... giving your full
| rights...
| Iv wrote:
| I feel that her case is exactly what presidential pardons are
| about.
|
| Otherwise, write to whatever lawmaker represents you to talk
| about it, to ask for a change of law and to support asylum for
| her if she ever asks it. But for now Russia seems to protect
| her.
| Iv wrote:
| How about that: starting a campaign to nominate her to a nobel
| prize. I am not sure at which she would qualify the most, but I
| am sure there are no shortage of academics to sing her praises
| (this is a condition for nomination)
| VortexDream wrote:
| The world is infinitely worse if she or sci-hub are taken out.
| There's no way to quantify how incredibly useful it is to
| humanity as a whole, and it's probably the single best creation
| of the past 100 years, with no exaggeration. It's delivering
| what we always envisioned for the internet. The free exchange
| of information and ideas, no matter your nationality, your
| wealth, color of skin, etc.
| Sr_developer wrote:
| These are my predictions:
|
| 1. She will be destroyed, one way or the other. Since she is
| eastern European the possibilities are vastless: Russian asset/
| Spy/ Dangerous Hacker/ Covert Operation/ Putin enabler, etc,
| etc
|
| 2. Expect hundreds of "insightful" comments on here how she was
| actually wrong because X, Y, Z, the same points produced by
| mainstream media and the establishment politicians.
|
| 3. She will be shunned, forgotten and even jailed if she puts a
| foot in a "wrong" country, and by that I mean 80% of earth,
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| It's well known that she's illiberal, in favour of a "strong
| state" like those of Russia and her native Kazakhstan, and
| probably had the usual views you expect from such people on
| matters like electing one's leaders in free elections, LGBT
| rights, Stalin, etc. If I were trying to discredit her, I'd
| dig in that direction.
| slim wrote:
| I think if you are a researcher, you should publish directly on
| sci-hub (is that even possible?) Make sci-hub the greatest and
| most prestigious scientific publication
| smt88 wrote:
| This would be wonderfully altruistic, but it would be career
| suicide as well.
| enriquto wrote:
| This is simply not true. The world has changed a lot the
| last 10 years. In many scientific fields, you are actually
| _expected_ to publish your "preprint" in the open and also
| your source code.
| 542458 wrote:
| In what fields are you expected to publish your source
| code? In the fields I've interacted with it was always an
| "above and beyond" thing that nobody would raise an eye
| at you not doing.
| enriquto wrote:
| i was thinking about image processing or machine
| learning, but i'm sure this is the case in other fields
| as well. Reproducible research is a "hot topic" in many
| places, and for good reasons.
| ta988 wrote:
| ecology, more and more biology, chemistry...
| smt88 wrote:
| That's not at all the same as the proposal I was replying
| to.
|
| They seemed to be saying that people should _only_
| publish in Sci-Hub, making it a prestigious publication
| (that would appear in press releases, one assumes)
| instead of just a mirror.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't believe you can publish on Sci-Hub, but you can join
| the open access movement by publishing your work on sites
| such as Arxiv where anyone can read your work.
|
| If every scientist published their work on open access
| platforms, Sci-Hub wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
| stavros wrote:
| Why do people not do that? As far as I know, publishing in
| Arxiv is as simple as uploading the PDF, so I'm wondering
| why scientists don't do that themselves by default.
|
| Does anyone know?
| spindle wrote:
| FWIW, I once backed off publishing on Arxiv because their
| requirements for the exact format of my PDF were too
| restrictive. At the time I didn't feel stronly about it
| one way or the other, and if I was in the same situation
| maybe I'd persevere. But it would have taken an enormous
| amount of time to reformat my large and complicated PDF.
| I've heard the same complaint from others.
| Fomite wrote:
| In medicine/public health/etc. there are two reasons:
|
| 1) medRxiv was relatively new, and while the COVID-19
| pandemic was its moment, there are a lot of concerns
| about pre-peer review stuff, and the public, press, etc.
| not treating it with appropriate caution.
|
| 2) Some journals heavily penalize or won't consider
| preprints, and some of these journals are quite good.
| This has gotten a little pushback recently as well.
| aabaker99 wrote:
| Some journals rules prohibit submitting to arxiv.
| Researchers still want to submit their research to these
| journals because they are prestigious. One of the main
| goals of researchers is prestige (for their work to be
| widely read, for getting grants, for attracting grad
| students and post doc laborers, etc.).
| prawn wrote:
| Are there any efforts to work against journals doing
| that?
| aabaker99 wrote:
| TFA links to http://thecostofknowledge.com/
|
| which is an attempt to organize researchers to boycott
| Elsevier due to its practices. Elsevier is one of the
| journal publishers that has (or had) issues with
| preprints like arvix. I do think efforts like this are
| gaining traction, such as the agreement between the UC
| system and Elsevier mentioned at
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/california-
| universit...
| ta988 wrote:
| to not publish, review for them or be part of their
| editorial board anymore. really easy. and there are
| always other venues.
| ivalm wrote:
| You need to upload the original tex and somehow it always
| took some tweaking to get it to compile relative to my
| local setup. But yes, it's a low barrier.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| Speaking as a biologist working in Australia:
|
| 1) Older collaborators with more power are being 'scared'
| of getting scooped when they post preprints. They're
| slowly coming around as the argument makes no real sense,
| preprint = published to the younger generation.
|
| 2) Funding bodies, i.e. the people who pay our bills and
| have all the power. The Australian Research Council, the
| biggest non-medical funding body here, does not allow
| mentions of preprints in grant applications. They give no
| reason for that rule.
|
| 3) Again, money. You want your research to go into the
| journal with the highest impact factor since that mostly
| decides whether you get to keep your job, get that new
| position, or get that grant. Some journals still don't
| allow preprints. You also get no feedback when a top
| journal rejects your paper, could the rejection be
| because others have seen your preprint, published papers
| built on top of the preprint, and now your paper
| submitted to the journal is not so novel any more? You
| have no way of telling.
|
| 4) Fear. Sometimes, after your paper has undergone peer
| review it's a little bit better. A few select people see
| the embarrassing errors in your paper and help you fix
| them before the paper is widely accessible. If you post a
| preprint the world sees your glaring errors.
| stavros wrote:
| When you say journals don't allow preprint, do you mean
| they don't let you publish if you've published on Arxiv?
| Can you not post the preprint _and_ submit to a journal
| for peer review? Isn 't that the best of both worlds?
|
| If there are changes to your paper due to peer review,
| can you post the changes to Arxiv too later?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > most prestigious
|
| The existing "prestigious" journals are prestigious because
| of the peer-reviewing process. How do we solve this problem
| with Sci-hub? I mean, you can publish your research anywhere
| (like your homepage) already if you choose to.
| 542458 wrote:
| It's not _really_ the peer review process that makes them
| prestigious. The peer review process employed by world-
| class journals doesn't guarantee good science (see: all
| sorts of high profile retractions). And it's not really a
| complicated system - it's easy to clone, as the procedures
| are all public and the important players are all
| volunteers.
|
| But cloning the top journals' peer review process wouldn't
| make you a top journal. Many mid and low tier publications
| use the same peer review process as the high tier ones.
|
| It's more of a bit of a tautology: the most prestigious
| journals are the most prestigious because they're seen as
| the most prestigious - which means they get all the best
| submissions, the best people volunteer to be organizers,
| speakers, reviewers, and people pay attention to their
| proceedings increasing their citation numbers.
|
| This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also
| makes it hard to break into. It's no coincidence that the
| "best" publications also tend to be the oldest.
| slim wrote:
| That's why I think there's a chance for sci-hub to
| disrupt this. It's already doing great marketing-wise and
| attracting a lot of great researchers. If some of those
| researchers donate their research and their time to peer
| review - in protest against the current monopoly - it
| could be disrupted.
| cinquemb wrote:
| > This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also
| makes it hard to break into. It's no coincidence that the
| "best" publications also tend to be the oldest.
|
| I think that this is also means that it will be slow
| moving and very fragile to a new system that could
| incentivize people to undertake all the listed actions
| above that don't go thru/reliant upon the traditional
| process.
|
| Not saying that we are there yet, nor do I think
| willingly choosing to submit to any particular
| jurisdiction in hopes of a favorable outcome will have
| much effect in the long run (I think systems really
| change when old systems that served similar functions in
| some capacity are made obsolete), but as long as tech
| becomes cheaper, more people become knowledge able about
| the system as a whole and the incentives involved, more
| ways of pursuing research will emerge that will be more
| resilient than hoping for nation state judiciary
| approval.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Point taken.
|
| I think ultimately _the_ problem of academia publication
| isn 't the openness of access (which obviously is good if
| we can have), but the whole system as you mentioned.
| aritmo wrote:
| You can just publish to a relevant journal, and make the PDF
| available easily to Sci-Hub. As in, put the PDF on your
| homepage along with the DOI so that Sci-Hub can easily pick
| up.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _How can we help her? Does she need money, public support,
| vpns in every country? Whatever she needs, mankind is indebted
| to her and we should help if we can._
|
| Pool money with everybody you know and hire a lobbyist.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > She's just 32 years old.
|
| Weird thing to say - like you think 32 is a child or something?
| That's someone well into their second decade of adulthood.
| revscat wrote:
| It is important up understand that the laws are such that
| "justice" is equated with "maximizing capital", as cynical as
| it is to say, and as such any financial support given to those
| who fight such a system will inevitably prove to be gestures
| without much effect. She may attempt to better humanity, but
| the neoliberal capitalism that permeates all governments, west
| to east, will stand against her for the primary reason that she
| interferes with increasing capital. She has no allies with any
| political power, however we may wish differently.
| acomar wrote:
| it's one industry while others stand to reduce costs if she
| succeeds. the relatively warm welcome she receives here
| should indicate how willing other bourgeois segments are to
| support her platform. free access to information is not by
| itself anticapitalist, though it sure does make it easier.
| but recuperation is ever a threat (free software vs open
| source for a topical example).
| revscat wrote:
| When she fails -- and she will -- ask yourself why she
| failed. The answer will be couched in legal tenets, but the
| underlying fact remains that the intent of the law is to
| protect existing capital, at all costs. This is true from
| Washington to Beijing, from London to Johannesburg.
| danuker wrote:
| > I don't know how to best support her. Any suggestions?
|
| My guess would be to donate to her. Near the bottom of the page
| is a BTC address (please check it yourself):
|
| https://sci-hub.do/ https://sci-hub.st/ https://sci-hub.se/
|
| All the domains have the same address for me:
| 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
|
| Money (and Bitcoin is among the freest money) can be used on
| whatever she needs.
| exikyut wrote:
| I was idly curious about the account state, so went digging
| for visualization tools. Most of them have nice designs and
| not very much info :) but
|
| - https://mempool.space/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2
| m... shows a presumably-USD$ amount next to each transaction
|
| - https://explorer.bitquery.io/bitcoin/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vg
| S... (select "Sankey", slide "Detail level" all the way to
| the right) shows how the money's mostly going elsewhere
| ipaddr wrote:
| All together she made 250,000 over the lifetime of that
| address.
| FabHK wrote:
| At today's BTC price, or price at the time of receiving
| it? (The latter would be the most appropriate measure,
| I'd think. Or maybe use the price at the price when she
| spent it, though that would incorporate the result of her
| speculating on BTC, in a sense.)
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| She only has $40k of BTC in her account :(
|
| I know it's a lot, but legal fees eat up so much. Hopefully
| she can win the case without sacrificing her entire savings
| too.
| glenneroo wrote:
| Just donated, thanks for the tip! (and for anyone wondering,
| yes that BTC address is correct, I triple-checked).
| jers wrote:
| Thanks for checking but probably best if everyone double
| checks for themselves too.
| enriquto wrote:
| Cool! Never used bitcoin, but that may be the first time if I
| figure out how to do it.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Me either. I took this opportunity to take the plunge.
|
| I had a Coinbase account already from years ago but never
| linked it to any payment source. At the time the only
| options were my bank account, which didn't sit well with
| me.
|
| Now PayPal is an option, which is also linked to my bank
| account, but the one level of indirection made me a bit
| less hesitant. Also, the combination of Coinbase and PayPal
| seems low(er) risk to me.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| Just FYI coinbase will ban you for "illegal" transactions
| which may include "copyright infringement"
| maroonblazer wrote:
| ISPs make the same claim.
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| What do you think about this?
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/push-copyright-aside.en.html
| juanani wrote:
| Yeah, there's this stain of an empire that we just can't easily
| scrub off the planet. Just don't worry about it and keep
| feeding it.
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