[HN Gopher] How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub
___________________________________________________________________
How The Chronicle is trying to malign Sci-Hub
Author : boramalper
Score : 383 points
Date : 2021-07-09 08:54 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (engineuring.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (engineuring.wordpress.com)
| ElDji wrote:
| The question the HN community should ask itself is: What can be
| done to improve the sustainability of the scihub project, for
| example to make it more decentralised?
| andyxor wrote:
| There is a rescue mission to save Scihub, you can help by
| seeding the torrents or contributing to related open source
| efforts
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
|
| there are some discussions on using IPFS for decentralized
| storage and indexing of existing 85M Scihub papers
| http://freeread.org/ipfs/
| dqpb wrote:
| Alexandra Elbakyan deserves a Nobel Prize.
| mnd999 wrote:
| As a native English speaker, I take "one-woman show" to mean it's
| just her.
| jannes wrote:
| Probably she didn't say "show" in russian though. Some things
| are getting lost in translation here.
|
| She laments that The Chronicle doesn't credit her as doing
| actual work by describing what she does as a "show" instead.
| (implying that a male is doing the actual devops work behind
| the scenes)
| pwinnski wrote:
| I read her lament, but it seems to be based on a lack of
| understanding of the idiom. In English, the phrase "one-
| person show" implies nothing other than the efforts of a
| single person to produce something great. There is no
| denigration nor implication of anything else in the idiom.
| tallanvor wrote:
| Except that by saying that it's a "one woman show", they are
| giving her all the credit for the site, and that's what a
| fluent English speaker will understand. It's not The
| Chronicle's fault that she misinterpreted the article.
| azernik wrote:
| Translators move things into idiom all the time; "one-man
| show" (gender is easily swappable) is an idiom that comes
| from stage, refers to single-actor plays where one person
| plays multiple roles, and comes with connotations of skill
| versatility and industriousness.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Yes, it sounds like she is misunderstanding it in this case.
| "One-woman show" doesn't imply that it's just a facade, fake
| project (which she seems to take from "show"), it's just an
| idiom to say it's something that one person does (not a team).
| phire wrote:
| And usually has positive connotations.
|
| Most of the time you use the "one-woman show" idiom is when
| you are impressed that one person does this by themselves.
| worik wrote:
| And there is the sexist assumption that there must be a
| bloke some place doing the actual work.
| pwinnski wrote:
| There is not, though. No native speaker of English, which
| the newspaper of record in Houston, Texas, might be
| forgiven for assuming make up its primary readership,
| would ever assume that anything described as a "one-man
| show" must have a woman hidden away doing all of the
| behind-the-scenes work.
|
| The idiom means "the work of a single person," and that's
| it. Nothing else.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| This is the Chronicle of Higher Education, not the
| Houston Chronicle
| pwinnski wrote:
| Doh! Thanks, I missed that.
| eplanit wrote:
| She started off with a decent explanation and defense of her
| work... but then fell off completely with the complaints about
| the photo and the worries about getting 100% credit. I don't know
| if it's due to the pressures she faces, or if that was her
| personality to begin with.
|
| Was gaining fame part of her goal?
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I never see someone speak about it so I'm gonna say it, sci-hub
| is very incomplete both for old papers from other countries and
| for recent papers from occidental countries.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Wait until they invalid any paper that doesn't have an author
| subscribed whatever journals they cite at the time of
| publication. That will be coming..
| amaajemyfren wrote:
| Is there a sort of single sign on reasonably priced service that
| aggregates the many publishers of government funded papers in one
| place?
| jannes wrote:
| No
| amaajemyfren wrote:
| If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue
| happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears.
| Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will
| replicate it.
| j-pb wrote:
| This completely misses the point.
|
| Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper
| publication is done by people paid by universities and in
| turn by taxpayer money.
|
| The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that
| write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even
| not that), they pay the person that does the final
| formatting (which is often already done by the author). So
| it often boils down to having a program add the publishers
| copyright notice.
|
| So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the
| publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a
| fair price?
|
| So universities pay twice. The university library of my
| alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online
| licenses.
|
| That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth
| of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
| amaajemyfren wrote:
| You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect
| there will be some project management (following up on
| peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers,
| etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server
| and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will
| need to collect some money. My view is it should be small
| in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly
| access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in
| the world.
| j-pb wrote:
| This sounds like there is currently a mechanism for
| winnowing the crap, but we currently don't really have
| this either.
|
| On the contrary, because researchers are driven to
| publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper
| over and over again with minor modifications, or just go
| conference shopping until they get an acceptance.
|
| With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up
| automatically.
|
| Watson and Crick published papers only every couple
| years. This wouldn't work today at all.
|
| Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe
| something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.
| kwyjibo12345 wrote:
| The common life cycle of a paper is as follows:
|
| 1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax
| money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax
| money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences
| -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published
| paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays
|
| So university/tax money pays for writing the paper,
| quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to
| finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive
| subscription.
|
| For a rational environment like science this model is
| simply insane.
| petercooper wrote:
| Somewhere between step 3 and 4, I assume the publisher
| gets hold of the paper and acquires a license to resell
| it? How does that part work and why do
| universities/academics support it if they could just
| distribute it for free or via an open journal? Is it
| solely to get the "kudos" of being in particular
| publications?
| rrmm wrote:
| The authors give the rights over to journal when they
| submit the paper. The authors depend on publishing in
| high impact-factor journals for tenure and continued
| funding.
|
| Not all academics support it and several groups have
| opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing
| their own journals and conferences.
| zentiggr wrote:
| I can see a possible future where only a few holdouts
| rely on 'prestige' as a decision criteria, while a
| majority of academic fields/groups have switched to open
| access... and the former get only more and more vocal
| about the decline of science, or some screeching point.
| brazzy wrote:
| It's 100% due to the traditional model of measuring
| academic performance through the number of published
| papers weighted (very, very strongly) by the "reputation"
| of the journal they're published in, justified by the
| importance of curation and peer review to provide quality
| control.
|
| Historically, this model grew because the journal
| publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print
| and distribute copies of the articles.
| worik wrote:
| My impression is that it is a offshoot of the metrics
| mania of the 1990s
|
| I am one person watching the world go by but I think that
| there was, is, far too much emphasis on things that can
| be counted.
|
| People became afraid to make subjective judgements of
| quality. They demanded data. So whatever was the thing
| they counted, it got maximised. Quality is a slippery
| concept and it is harder than counting.
|
| Judge scientists by the number of papers they publish,
| and they will publish a lot. A manifestation of the
| quantifying fetish.
| zentiggr wrote:
| Not in academia, but have watched the debates over the
| past decade or so...
|
| It really seems like it's the inertia of existing
| administrators that haven't shifted away from judging
| papers based on the prestige of the journals they get
| published by.
|
| Once the prestige factor goes away, and authors are
| judged primarily on the quality of their work, the
| publishers will lose their stranglehold.
|
| Of course, that means a lot of entrenched interests
| losing revenue streams, so it's going to be a long
| struggle of grassroots change vs regulatory capture
| combined with reactionary pushback.
| mcguire wrote:
| Judging papers based on the prestige of the publishing
| journal is not _necessarily_ a bad thing. Everybody does
| it, consciously or unconsciously.
|
| Having those journals owned by publishers that engage in
| rent-seeking behavior _is._
| j-pb wrote:
| Funding is dostributed based on citation counts and the
| most "prestigious" journals.
|
| "Prestigious" is completely arbitrary and heavily lobbied
| for by the publishers.
| meibo wrote:
| Even if there was a "Netflix" of scientific papers, a few
| years after its prime all of the publishers would notice
| that it's far more lucrative to make their own Netflix and
| take all of their content for themselves again, forcing
| people to go back to Torre- I mean, Sci-Hub.
| agarsev wrote:
| I think that what some outside of academia might miss is
| that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and
| access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish
| is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific
| output by the entities that grant you funding and career
| prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this
| prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not
| the distribution problem.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I have a superstition: I don't see a robust future for Sci-Hub,
| Internet Archive or Wikipedia. The internet relentlessly turns
| everything into worthless trash, so Sci-Hub will die, Internet
| Archive will wind up with Doritos ads and a paywall, and
| Wikipedia will focus on sponsored articles and deprecate, in one
| way or another, articles that aren't commercial.
| worik wrote:
| What is your time frame for this?
|
| Internet Archive has been around since 1996 and Wikipedia 2001
| (ish)
| uniqueid wrote:
| I don't have a time frame for it. I just know that 'this is
| useful' historically doesn't save an online service (Napster,
| Ebay, Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Google Search, etc) from
| disappearing or turning lousy. The fact that millions of
| people love Internet Archive and Wikipedia means there's
| money to made by ruining them.
| [deleted]
| radmuzom wrote:
| I would consider her as one of my heroes.
|
| Having said that, probably she has not faced a genuinely strong
| attempt at malignment yet, like some people tried to pull off on
| Stallman ("he is a defender of Epstein and child rapists") few
| months ago. I hope she has a support system to fall back on when
| that happens.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's what happened a few years ago; the kerfuffle a few
| months ago was much more justified. And I don't really see how
| that's relevant here, anyway.
| radmuzom wrote:
| I was just trying to point out that if she considers this as
| trying to "malign her", then she will have to prepare for
| much worse attacks later for doing the right thing.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Why? Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right
| thing.
|
| The first time you're thinking of, he was attacked over a
| misunderstanding when he wrote about a controversial topic,
| and people's general resentment of him bubbled over and
| made it a big thing. The second (more recent) one, he was
| attacked over _unresigning_ , and because he pushed a lot
| of people away from Free Software.
|
| Alexandra Elbakyan has, to my knowledge, not really pushed
| people away from open access science. She hasn't gone to
| conferences and made pejorative "jokes" about men, or
| deathists, or eaten her toe jam on stage. Why would people
| attack her?
| radmuzom wrote:
| > "Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right
| thing."
|
| He absolutely was. For defending a dead person who was
| being accused of sexual assault. Most people won't even
| take the risk of tarnishing their own reputation given
| that the accused is dead.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| He did that. That's not why he was being attacked
| (certainly not the second time). I like Richard Stallman
| as much as the next person, but don't pretend he's a
| saint. (Although, technically...)
| kwyjibo12345 wrote:
| Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the
| industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works
| currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process
| funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the pockets of
| publishers.
|
| To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and
| music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be
| an equivalent of Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix for scientific
| papers in the near future.
| Tepix wrote:
| These papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer
| reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer
| reviewed for free should be made freely available legally_
|
| There is a legitimate argument in the value added of curating
| research into journals. The publishers don't do this. But
| simply eliminating that curation mode is unlikely to be
| feasible.
| majormajor wrote:
| > These papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer
| reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.
|
| I strongly disagree with this. Labor has value, and we
| shouldn't let capital alone dictate ownership. The people who
| do the research are more important than the bureaucrats who
| signed the checks.
| mcguire wrote:
| The people doing the research don't get paid for
| publications. At all. Ever. It's just part of their job.
| Someone wrote:
| Authors are to blame, too. They can put their publications on
| arXiv. https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing:
|
| _"Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time.
|
| If accepted for publication, we encourage authors to link
| from the preprint to their formal publication via its Digital
| Object Identifier (DOI). Millions of researchers have access
| to the formal publications on ScienceDirect, and so links
| will help your users to find, access, cite, and use the best
| available version.
|
| Authors can update their preprints on arXiv or RePEc with
| their accepted manuscript."_
|
| there still is an issue with older articles that authors
| don't have PDFs of, or whose authors aren't in the field
| anymore (or even died). That problem will stay, but _if_
| authors start putting their publications on arXiv, their
| university server, etc. en masse, also will get smaller over
| time.
| stared wrote:
| Leading journals allow publishing preprints on arXiv only
| as there was considerable pressure. In the quantum physics
| community (where it was expected to post results on arXiv),
| a journal not allowing arXiv was not considered. So either
| their de facto allowed, or even started officially to do
| so.
|
| I don't remember the exact dates, but Nature (who had been
| hesitant for a long time) gave in as well. They resisted a
| long time as they were (and are) considered a badge of
| honor.
| rjmunro wrote:
| I hear they generally are "freely" available, just email the
| authors and ask.
| omega3 wrote:
| Out of my small sample of three, one author sent me a
| journal, one ignored the request and another told me to pay
| him for it.
| subroutine wrote:
| Having to wait for an author to email you a copy isn't a
| viable solution. Even getting authors to post a free copy,
| which is NIH mandate is often overlooked...
|
| https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
| Someone wrote:
| That's not something you can blame the publishers for.
| subroutine wrote:
| Not saying it is.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| You're not wrong but that system only works on a very small
| scale. Do you really think the authors would be amenable to
| answering 10000 emails with the exact same request?
| pmyteh wrote:
| Fortunately(?) most of us will never be in a position
| where even 10 people ask to do that...
| ebiester wrote:
| In general, an averagely successful paper in most
| disciplines will get 200-250 readers. It's only when
| there is outsized media attention that there is any
| issue.
|
| And luckily, for those cases today, sci-hub is available.
| worik wrote:
| A lot more readers than that, surely? In most disciplines
| there are a lot of, er, disciples. What is the definition
| of "moderately successful?"
|
| Perhaps you mean citations?
| pmyteh wrote:
| The modal number of citations for an academic paper is
| ~0. 200 citations is a very successful paper in any
| discipline.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I hear they generally are "freely" available, just email
| the authors and ask._
|
| I didn't downvote you but the way contracts work, the
| researchers are _not allowed to share the final published
| article_ that was professionally edited and typeset by the
| journal. What they can legally share are the _preprints and
| manuscripts_.[1]
|
| Yes, some researchers may ignore the contract they signed
| (wink wink) and share the final published pdf. IME whenever
| I asked for a paper, I got the preprint -- which means the
| author honored their publishing contract. The preprint is
| fine in most cases because it will have the main idea of
| the research. However, it's often missing the pretty graphs
| and illustrations that the journal adds.
|
| [1] https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing
| kleiba wrote:
| Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia (but not
| in the industry), I can not support Sci-Hub. I know it's an
| unpopular opinion but I think it's the wrong approach.
|
| As scientists, I think we should be held to especially high
| moral standards. And there are two questions one should be
| allowed to ask:
|
| 1. Is is right to publish research results funded by tax money
| behind a paywall? 2. Is it right to circumvent a paywall to
| access publicly funded research results?
|
| And to me, the answer to 2. is imply 'no'. I know that most
| people, especially here on HN, do not agree with that view.
| Perhaps they might think that a 'yes' would immediately follow
| from a 'no' to question 1.
|
| But I don't think it does, and I'm not even sure my answer to
| question 1 would be a 'no'. Perhaps one could think about
| another question first: should researchers turn to a
| professional publisher to get their research published, and I
| think at least some years ago there wasn't much else you could
| do. Now, of course, there are digital platforms such as arxiv
| but their acceptance also depends vastly on your field. In any
| event, such platforms can also be thought of as a publisher,
| anyway. The main service provided is organizational: publishers
| don't review the research contents (they're not qualified for
| that) but they organize external reviewers; publishers provide
| discoverability because they are a well-defined source known to
| the community. Are there alternatives to that type of work?
| Sure! But there is an added value in what a publisher does.
|
| So then in a follow-up question, we can ask whether a publisher
| should be compensated for their work. And to me, it is pretty
| clear that they should be. Of course, there are different ways
| this could be implemented but that decision is up to the one
| running the business, ie., the publisher. I can think of more
| customer-friendly ways than to make me pay for every single
| download of a paper. On the other hand, there are lots of other
| businesses where I don't like the way they make money - tough
| luck for me, I guess.
|
| Now, I think this last point is very important, especially
| before you go and hit that downvote button (unless you already
| have): I can think of better ways (for me!) how research
| publishing _should_ be realized. But I don 't think that from
| that it follows that I should be able to or even have the moral
| right to circumvent publisher paywalls.
|
| Perhaps it's wrong to charge for access to publicly funded
| research results but I don't think the second wrong of
| circumventing publisher paywalls makes that right.
|
| Oh, and here's a little subtlety I don't see discussed very
| often: if I do research funded by UK tax money and publish it,
| should that paper be freely available to Americans too, or only
| to UK tax payers?
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is a very large gap between fair compensation and greed
| driven profits, we are currently at the far end of that
| spectrum on the 'profits' side of the scale.
| kleiba wrote:
| That may be true. But I don't think that the perceived
| greed of one actor should serve as a justification of
| circumventing a paywall.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > publishers provide discoverability because they are a well-
| defined source known to the community
|
| Could this not be said about Sci-Hub itself?
|
| The purpose of copyright is to enrich public access to
| creative works. So bypassing of paywalls, regardless of
| whether it was publicly or privately funded, should be judged
| against that measure. It does not seem that researchers will
| stop writing papers just because of a drop in publisher
| revenue, regardless of the source of funding.
| kleiba wrote:
| Of course, I'm not claiming that Sci-Hub has no inherent
| value. But the same could be say for, say, the black market
| for hard drugs.
|
| Bypassing of paywalls could be judged against many
| measures.
|
| I don't understand why the publishers get all the blame
| while no-one talks about the scientists who choose to
| publish their works behind a paywall.
| fdsjgfklsfd wrote:
| > I don't think the second wrong of circumventing publisher
| paywalls makes that right.
|
| What's wrong with "circumventing" paywalls?
|
| 17 U.S.C. SS 107
|
| Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. SS 106
| and 17 U.S.C. SS 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work,
| including such use by reproduction in copies ... for purposes
| such as ... scholarship, or research, is not an infringement
| of copyright.
| berdario wrote:
| > I can think of more customer-friendly ways than to make me
| pay for every single download of a paper. On the other hand
|
| If you're thinking of the scientists and students in your
| society as "customers" and not as scientists and students...
|
| You are optimizing for the wrong thing (i e. You are
| optimizing for the benefit to capital, not for the benefit to
| society)
| kleiba wrote:
| That is a very abstract thought, one that could possibly
| lead to a very interesting philosophical discussion about
| society.
|
| In the mean time, however, we live in a market economy
| where publishers exist, and they are a business. Of course
| they are interested in customers, and yes, they would be
| scientists and students.
|
| Am I saying that that's the best way to organize academic
| publishing? No. What I'm saying is that I don't see any
| justification for circumventing paywalls within a society
| that adheres to certain laws and regulations.
|
| I believe in a system where the people can critically
| assess and evaluate all laws and regulations and has the
| power to get them changed. I don't believe in a system
| where people can just pick the laws and regulations that
| suit them and choose to ignore the other ones.
| berdario wrote:
| > I believe in a system where the people can critically
| assess and evaluate all laws and regulations and has the
| power to get them changed. I don't believe in a system
| where people can just pick the laws and regulations that
| suit them and choose to ignore the other ones.
|
| Fair. For the record, I don't believe in neither of the
| two systems that you describe, or rather... I don't think
| that those descriptions are meaningful.
|
| i.e. you describe what "people can" do... you might
| intend "can" to mean: "have the ultimate power to", but
| to me that's obviously untrue (if people had the ultimate
| power to change regulations for the better,
| gerrymandering wouldn't exist, if people had the ultimate
| power to ignore law and regulations, police wouldn't
| exist).
|
| What you describe could be true if you mean "can" to be
| "are allowed to". But obviously people are never allowed
| to do something as a blanket rule... and thus those
| statements are less universal, and much less interesting
| (People can change laws and regulations, as long as they
| have the support of mass media and the establishment.
| People can ignore law, as long as LEA turn a blind eye to
| it)
|
| What is more interesting, is defining what people
| -should- do.
|
| If people can critically assess all laws and regulations,
| should they change them?
|
| Unjust laws are obviously not being repealed. Is that the
| people relinquishing their responsibility, or are there
| roadblocks preventing that? Who has the power to stop
| them? How can we empower the people?
|
| If people think that laws are unjust, should they ignore
| them?
|
| Is that good for society? How do you protect people who
| are doing civil disobedience?
| kleiba wrote:
| Thanks for this nice post.
|
| I certainly mean the first reading of "can", as in "to be
| able to". You are right, though, that in reality, there
| are no absolutes. However, by and large, of course people
| who live in a democracy absolutely have the power to
| cause societal change - it's just that it's not an easy
| process and there are certainly parties who are
| interested in roadblocking this ability for their own
| benefits.
|
| As for your list of questions toward the end, I have
| opinions on a number of them. As I'm sure you might have
| too. A small text box on HN is probably not going to do
| it for a thorough discussion, though, I suggest we take
| ourselves a couple of thousands years of time and enough
| tea to make any progress on them at all.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _So then in a follow-up question, we can ask whether a
| publisher should be compensated for their work. And to me, it
| is pretty clear that they should be._
|
| But... what does a publisher actually do?
| worik wrote:
| They are a filter. They have a reputation to uphold of
| publishing worth while stuff (hard to believe sometimes...)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| But isn't the peer-review process the filter?
| Jolter wrote:
| Nope. Peer review is a kind of quality filter (in theory
| but seldom in practice), but that does nothing to solve
| the question of "is this a paper worthy of publishing".
| That question gets resolved by the publisher/editor of
| the journal long before the paper makes it to peer
| review.
| FabHK wrote:
| And the editors are (like the reviewers) a bunch of
| scientists paid by their respective institutions, aren't
| they? So, what does the publisher do?
| Jolter wrote:
| I thought I just answered that, above?
| IanCal wrote:
| Not necessarily, depends on the journal.
| IanCal wrote:
| Ish. Really depends on the field & journal.
|
| Peer review is _mostly_ a requirement but some have
| professional editors as well, which is a paid position.
| Costs for OA journals are almost always borne by those
| successful at getting through the process which means
| that any costs are related also to the rate of rejection.
| For journals groups like Nature, that may mean an OA cost
| paying ~10-20x the actual cost (plus profit margin) due
| to a high rejection rate.
|
| Broadly the reason this has stuck around so long is that
| what publishers are assigning to journals is a vague
| notion of trust. They are incentivised to keep "high
| quality" articles in their list as that's what people
| want to be listed in. The recent discussions around
| reproducibility tie in with discussions around clickbait
| news, in that the incentive of _citations_ is not
| identical to the incentive of _quality_.
|
| Peer review isn't free to do either despite one part of
| the labour being free, PeerJ increasing their costs is a
| good overview of this.
|
| (disclaimer - work for a company (digital science) that's
| related to publishing in that we analyse and combine the
| data, and we're owned by a larger publishing house
| (holtzbrinck) but I have no horse in this game myself)
| mcguire wrote:
| You have a very principled position, one that I don't
| necessarily disagree with[1]. However, information is, in
| fact, power, and the power disparity in the currently legal
| model, between those with access to a well-funded research
| library and those without, is very great. And like most power
| disparities, it is self-sustaining; it will not change
| without an equally powerful force changing it.
|
| [1] Two provisos: the costs of professional publishing a
| journal is per-issue; perhaps, per-paper. Not per-copy. A
| pay-to-publish model would put incentives in the right place,
| but is fraught with a whole stack of conflicts of interest.
| Which is being actively exploited. So, ... yeah.
|
| Second, the consumer-pays model actively hurts researchers
| themselves, who would like to see their research disseminated
| as widely as possible. " _If I do research funded by UK tax
| money and publish it, should that paper be freely available
| to Americans too, or only to UK tax payers?_ " Want to bet
| what researchers' answer to that question would be?
|
| Fortunately for me, I was a computer scientist. In that
| field, researchers (almost?) universally make their papers
| freely available, often in complete disregard of their
| publishing venue's rules (with no consequences). So, to
| medicine and physics and what-not, I can only say phtththp.
| detaro wrote:
| There is also quite a split between "should be compensated
| for their work" and "asking 30-50EUR for a single paper
| download is a reasonable compensation".
| kleiba wrote:
| That may be true. But I don't think a price that's higher
| than what one is willing to pay then justifies
| circumventing a paywall.
| detaro wrote:
| For me personally that is way past that into "unethical"
| territory, and that justifies it. I'm very much in favor
| of solving the issue through different ways long-term,
| but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
| kleiba wrote:
| I don't think that unethical behavior can simply be
| justified by some other unethical behavior, especially
| when personal opinions are involved.
|
| Analogies are often not very useful but consider this:
| there's this traffic light close to my house and even
| though there's usually not much traffic, the red phase is
| much, much longer than any other light I've ever waited
| at. I don't know what they were thinking but it's crazy
| long. I go there multiple times each day and I don't want
| to know how much of my life I already wasted just waiting
| at that light. For me personally that is into "unethical"
| territory, so I started just running that red light now.
| I make sure, though, that I only do it when there's no
| chance for an accident. I'm very much in favor of solving
| the issue through different ways long-term, but until
| then, meh. But YMMV of course.
|
| Maybe here's a better one: there's this really good
| bakery close to my house. They make everything fresh from
| scratch, and the smell alone when you walk by is
| absolutely amazing. Their croissants especially are to
| die for and there's usually long lines in the morning. I
| love them too, because they're really heavenly but they
| come at a price point. I mean, it's always been a bit
| more than I could/should afford but they're so good! But
| last month, they even raised the price by another pound.
| It's actually quite ridiculous now - I mean, do they make
| their croissants out of gold? There should be a law
| against such prices! And I know that each day, they have
| to throw out a handful of croissants at the end of the
| day that they couldn't sell, probably because of the high
| price?! For me personally that is into "unethical"
| territory, so now I just started quickly running into the
| bakery, grabbing one of the croissants and booking it.
| That saves me a lot of money, and I can enjoy those
| beautiful goods again, hmm! I'm very much in favor of
| solving the issue through different ways long-term, but
| until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
| detaro wrote:
| Okay, at this point I'm starting to regret that I upvoted
| your comments as bringing a good perspective into the
| discussion if you are just trying to bring ridiculous
| strawman to anyone engaging with arguments. _plonk_
| kleiba wrote:
| Thanks for the upvote.
|
| I had a feeling that the previous comment would possibly
| not be well received. My intention was not to make a
| strawman argument - that's why I added a clear caveat
| about the limited usefulness of analogies.
|
| The point was perhaps a bit childish, I admit, but then
| again, the HN audience is very diverse with many
| different backgrounds. Many may be intimately familiar
| with academic realities, others might not and simply get
| triggered by the old "evil publishing corporation against
| freedom of information" trope.
|
| The two examples were meant to target the latter end of
| the spectrum, and judging from your comment, they
| probably failed at what I had in mind: to allude to the
| fact that there a multiple parties involved here and they
| are coming from different perspectives and they have
| different interests in mind. That's where the analogies
| end, of course.
|
| Sci-Hub is certainly convenient. But convenience does not
| justify everything.
|
| P.S.: A potential evidence that my point about the
| different backgrounds of the HN crowd may have been
| correct is the fact that my "analogies" post is the only
| one that has more upvotes than downvotes.
| fdsjgfklsfd wrote:
| > so now I just started quickly running into the bakery,
| grabbing one of the croissants and booking it.
|
| Sci-hub is more like making a copy of the recipe than
| stealing the croissant. Making a copy doesn't deprive
| anyone of the original.
| mcguire wrote:
| The "Hypothetical Monopolist Test":
|
| " _[T]he question posed is whether a hypothetical
| monopolist can profitably impose a small but significant
| and non-transitory increase in price in the product
| market as defined. If the answer to the question posed is
| yes, and the price increase would be profitable for the
| hypothetical monopolist, then the market is correctly
| defined, and from here the analysis could go forward to
| determining whether antitrust laws are being violated if
| the company at issue has too much market power._ " (https
| ://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/hypothetical_monopolist_test)
| FabHK wrote:
| Of course everyone that does honest and useful work ought to
| be compensated for that work. But note that there is
| extensive research that publishers earn excess returns,
| beyond what is justified by their work and risk taking. In
| other words, they're rent seeking (ie, not creating value,
| but appropriating value).
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Is it right to circumvent a paywall to access publicly
| funded research results? ... no"_
|
| Why not?
| uniqueid wrote:
| Sci-Hub is probably the best thing on the internet, but the
| fact that some rando had to create it doesn't speak well for
| the state of our world. If humanity weren't dysfunctional,
| academic institutions would have beaten Elbakyan to the punch
| back in the 1990s.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Sci-Hub is not especially legal so an actual institution
| isn't really able to create it instead.
| bsenftner wrote:
| That "not being legal" is a corruption, a continued
| acceptance of lobby dollar bribes to maintain the
| situation. Or the lawmakers are so capitalistically
| corrupted they do not see the problem and think paying
| multiple times for publicly funded research's information
| is acceptable.
| stared wrote:
| Atheism was illegal. Homosexual acts were illegal.
| Democrasy was illegal. Studying and voting for women was
| illegal. (And actually all of these are in some places in
| the world.)
|
| Very often to progress, as a civilization, we need to
| change what is legal and what is not.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I expressed myself poorly. The fact that aspects of Sci-Hub
| are illegal is the reason I wrote the comment. In a perfect
| world, academic institutions would have combined their
| efforts to provide a viable equivalent to Sci-Hub
| _legally_. Whether that means buying out publishers, or
| making do with a small selection of existing papers and
| focusing on future publications, I don 't know.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music
| /Spotify/Netflix for scientific papers in the near future._
|
| There is: You can pay Elsevier for an unlimited access
| subscription to ScienceDirect journals. The only problem is
| that it costs about $1700 and you have to buy for a minimum of
| 3 people. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.ncbiotech.org/sites/default/files/inline-
| files/2...
| j-pb wrote:
| I hope that there will never be a "legal-streaming" equivalent.
|
| These papers have been paid for already, through the salary of
| the people that wrote and peer reviewed them.
|
| There is a theft happening, but it's not the way commonly
| portrayed.
|
| It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community,
| universities and tax payers, and the politicians and
| bureaucrats are complicit.
|
| The only reason why people publish with these journals is so
| that they can get funding for their projects, because the
| people in charge of distributing these funds are using "most
| prestigious papers" as the only metric and often have a
| revolving door relationship with publishers.
|
| The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million
| Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-
| institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD
| student positions.
|
| We need to build a better research system, that cuts out the
| leaches, and distributes money to researchers more fairly. And
| as a bonus we'd also get rid of the paper mills.
| indigochill wrote:
| I'm of a separatist mindset in situations like these where
| the entire ecosystem has turned corrupt. It can't be
| legislated because legislators are part of the problem as you
| say.
|
| So you need an independent organization that can fund and
| provide the resources needed by researchers, and which
| disregards publication in the corrupt publications. You also
| need a publication that can support free access.
|
| Something like a hackerspace on steroids, perhaps.
|
| In theory, if you can get enough momentum behind this sort of
| project, then libraries can turn that license money towards
| this project and accelerate the research that can be done,
| where rather than padding publisher's pockets the fees are
| going directly towards supporting research.
| 08-15 wrote:
| > It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community,
| universities and tax payers, and the politicians and
| bureaucrats are complicit.
|
| Not really. The publishers provide hardly any value,
| definitely not commensurate with their prices. So why don't
| the scientists simply walk away? Why not publish on the
| internet, why not simply upload to arxiv.org?
|
| It's because funding through quasi government agencies (NSF,
| NIH, etc.) is tied to your publication record, which is
| evaluated in "impact points", and those are actually tied not
| to your own publications, but to the journals they appear in.
| So your funding as a scientist depends on you publishing in
| these expensive journals.
|
| _It 's actually the politicians and bureaucrats stealing
| from the tax payers, funneling the money to the publishers,
| all the while claiming they are funding science._
|
| As a scientist, you have little leverage in this fouled up
| system, but it is your civic duty to use it: _Please refuse
| to review_ papers for commercial journals without appropriate
| payment. You owe it to your fellow scientists to not
| subsidize predatory business models.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _The publishers provide hardly any value_
|
| Here's an insider's view from having worked the tech side
| at a small scientific publisher. Prices are too high and
| the model is flawed [-1] but your opinion is not accurate,
| the publisher did a tremendous amount of work:
|
| First a distinction, two types of editors: The publisher's
| editors, each of which handled a batch of journals. The
| journal editor, who did not actually work for the
| publisher. The publisher's editors were well educated in
| the fields they covered, though usually not specialists or
| researchers in their own right. The journal editors were
| typically researchers themselves, and being the editor of
| the journal was not their primary work.
|
| -The publisher's editors organized individual journal
| editors, helping to find new ones when one left, keeping
| them on deadline, etc.
|
| -The publisher's editors processed submissions to the
| journal working with criteria set by the journal editor to
| perform an initial review for off-topic, low quality, or
| otherwise flawed submissions.
|
| -The publisher's editors coordinated an enormous network of
| peer reviewers and the logistics of getting them assigned
| to submissions and also staying on top of them for
| deadlines in submitting reviews & feedback.
|
| Other publishing staff:
|
| -performed proof reading & copy editing
|
| -did the layout & type setting
|
| -They used professional color matching labs for all color
| images, which itself was $100/image (tech for this has
| probably changed and made it cheaper) [0]
|
| -They managed every aspect of the actual printing of the
| journal, dealing with printers, reviewing proofs,
| coordinating a final round of review by the journal editor
| and authors.
|
| -warehousing copies for expected distribution over the life
| of the journal, re-prints when something was more popular
| than expected, and all order fulfillments to individuals &
| libraries. [1]
|
| -They handled all of the financial logistics, from
| collecting subscription fees to paying the journal editor
| and handling royalty fees for decades after a journal was
| printed & back copies were purchased.
|
| This setup might seem strange, but consider that for the
| journal itself, the _journal_ editor is often a researcher
| themselves with very little interest in the mechanics of
| putting together a publication. They handle reviewing which
| articles that published and coordinate on the peer review
| process, and a bit more, but the lion 's share of the work
| of actually turning raw, non-peer reviewed submissions into
| a printable journal was either coordinated by or directly
| done by the publisher. All of this cost a lot of money.
| (Incidentally, the publisher I worked for was ultimately
| purchased by Elsevier a while after I left, but then
| Elsevier had to take over all of this.) [2]
|
| [-1] My own opinion is that research funded by the public
| in some way should have part of the grant dedicated to
| publication costs. This would keep subscription costs to a
| minimum and also ensure that not just positive results were
| published.
|
| [0] Of course this would only apply to printed journals. If
| you were viewing them online you had to deal with whatever
| combination of monitor idiosyncrasies and color profiles
| available, and the difference could be large. It was
| obvious why they went through the trouble of paying for
| color matching on print versions.
|
| [1] This was before print on demand was much of a thing.
| These days it's probably easier to manage
|
| [2] This isn't _always_ how it works. It was where I
| worked, but for a large publisher like Elsevier there are
| different models. It 's definitely how it works for
| journals owned by Elsevier. More independent journals may
| do more of the work themselves, but they may also contract
| Elsevier to do it. Elsevier may simply license the rights
| to distribute a journals. But _someone_ has to do the work
| outlined above.
| 08-15 wrote:
| Clearly, publishers do a lot of work. But what is the
| _value_ they provide?
| ineedasername wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the question: is there not
| value in managing every single logistic detail of a
| complex process?
| mcguire wrote:
| And all for the low, low price of $660/issue. (https://or
| dering.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/Lite/Subs.aspx?doi=...)
|
| " _This isn 't always how it works._"
|
| In my experience, " _Other publishing staff: performed
| proof reading & copy editing, did the layout & type
| setting_" was not done by the publisher.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Whether it was done by the publisher or someone else, the
| work has to be done. If not by the publisher, then it's
| reflected in a lower share of the sub fees for the
| publisher.
|
| But my point wasn't to say the high sub fees are okay, it
| was to rebut the idea that publishers add no value, when
| that is often (though not always) incorrect.
|
| IIRC, the small publisher I worked for had net profits of
| about 10% on $5 million in revenue. Not unreasonable for
| handling pretty much every aspect of the process apart
| from final decisions on article inclusion and a few other
| high level details.
|
| Even when I worked at the small company though, we hated
| Elsevier. Elsevier are little better than extortionists
| saying "nice library collection you have there. Shame is
| something happened to it. How about you pay us double
| this year?"
| qwertox wrote:
| We're kind of lucky for having so many precise SDK-, Framework-
| and Language documentations freely available.
|
| Just imagine how painful it would be if you'd need some kind of
| subscription from some centralized companies only to find out
| which methods a class has and what exactly they do.
|
| Does it feel like this to not have access to papers in the
| scientific community? I can't tell, because I don't read papers.
| All I need to know is available either freely on the web or in
| books.
|
| I mean, just look at the level of detail in this PDF:
| https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Does it feel like this to not have access to papers in the
| scientific community?_
|
| Yes, it's very frustrating read a paper and see a citation to
| something that would be useful only to see that your library
| doesn't subscribe to it. At least if it's a book you can get it
| by inter-library loan, so that's a little better than journal
| articles.
| 31758329051230 wrote:
| Both of these complaints are very superficial given how positive
| the article actually is.
| dash2 wrote:
| Yeah, it's easy to get jumpy when you are written about in
| public.
|
| The bigger picture is that she is absolutely doing God's work.
| As an academic: screw Elsevier. Those guys, once at the
| forefront of the printing revolution, are now greedy rent-
| extracting parasites holding back another communications
| revolution. The sooner they go out of business, the happier I
| will be.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _' She said that while she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains
| pretty much a one-woman show (it's "mainly me," she said)' -- The
| Chronicle of Higher Education_
|
| " _So they lie to their readers that Sci-Hub run by a woman is
| some kind of not a real thing but a 'show',..._ "
|
| I'd like to point out that "...a one-woman show" is an expression
| in American English that does not carry any extra connotations of
| "show" such as fictional or a falsehood.
| rauhallinen wrote:
| So no new articles have been uploaded this year.
|
| While I have relatively good access options through my
| university, roughly half of the publications appearing in my
| Google Scholar alerts are unaccessible. As they are also in
| fields were use of preprint services isn't common, it really
| interferes with me being up to date with ongoing research.
|
| As the use of sci-hub is so common, I wonder about the wider
| implications of the newest articles being inaccessible. Could
| bibliometric methods be used to quantify this? Missed citations?
| Less citations for articles published in more obscure journals?
|
| Interesting that no new solutions have come out yet. I'm seeing
| people getting back to use #ICanHazPDF - not the best way to
| conduct research when an article is often just a gateway to more
| finding more relevant articles to read.
| inciampati wrote:
| This is purportedly related to a lawsuit in India. The thought
| is that Alexandra is intentionally being as cooperative as
| possible because there is a possibility of a legal victory in
| that jurisdiction. The court had asked her to cease adding new
| material.
|
| She has shown us the way. We can always recreate sci-hub,
| should the current system cease to function. We even know what
| kind of budget it takes to set up and operate for a decade:
| $100k!
| oefrha wrote:
| > We can always recreate sci-hub, should the current system
| cease to function.
|
| The problem is she has also shown us that recreating it may
| require great personal sacrifice of _someone_. Would you be
| that someone? I certainly wouldn't.
| Phenomenit wrote:
| Wasn't it $100k in total from the beginning of the project in
| 2011? That's how I perceived it anyways.
| Jolter wrote:
| Yes. Which is more or less a decade.
| Rels wrote:
| You both seem to be saying the same thing to me? I'm not a
| English native, but I'm pretty sure a decade refers to a
| period of 10 years.
| mbauman wrote:
| How much it cost to operate for its first decade of life
| is certainly not representative of how much it'll cost
| for the next given how its archive and usage have grown
| significantly.
|
| The grandparent implied that'd be the cost to run the
| site, the parent suggested it's not representative now.
| lovasoa wrote:
| The original article presents her in a very bright light, as a
| smart and brave woman who is engaged in a legal battle against
| large greedy corporations. And I find the photo quite cool.
|
| I think she is just overly susceptible, and maybe a little bit
| paranoid (which is understandable for a person with enemies as
| powerful as hers).
|
| This reminds me of the time when a russian entomologist named a
| new wasp species he discovered after her in her honor, and she
| took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked
| sci-hub in Russia for a few days in retaliation !
|
| edit: sci-hub was blocked only a few days, not months, my memory
| failed me.
| nix23 wrote:
| >and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species,
| and blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation
|
| Sounds like shes the wrong person in charge of sci-hub.
| Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended is
| probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators no?
|
| And Russia is probably her only protection not being assange'd
| already.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Feel free to run your own Sci-Hub, then. It's not like this
| is a massively collaborative project that she's the executive
| decision-maker of; it's largely just her.
| Karunamon wrote:
| A lot of the benefit of a site like this is moot if entire
| countries are banned for petty reasons. Imagine if the US
| was blocked because she didn't like the former president.
|
| And, quite honestly, speaking about rights in the context
| of what amounts to a piracy site is kinda ironic.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It was less than a week, and I don't think it's happened
| more than once. If you just consider uptime, Sci-Hub is
| doing pretty well.
| nix23 wrote:
| Don't you see a problem here?
|
| >>Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is
| offended
|
| >it's largely just her
|
| Yeah and that's the problem, with all dictatorships.
|
| >It's not like this is a massively collaborative project
|
| Who then uploads the content? Her alone?
| pessimizer wrote:
| She's the one delivering that access. And if you want to
| define sole decisionmaking power as dictatorship, I'm the
| dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday, too. You're
| free to provide access to the papers yourself.
| nix23 wrote:
| >I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday
|
| Your cookies are not important for the scientific world,
| and she is NOT the baker of the Scientific papers, just a
| publisher, and since it's not her content she has even
| less rights to block a country from partially self made
| work.
|
| Don't you see the irony in it?
|
| >...to remove all barriers in the way of science (but
| don't name insects after me)
| babyblueblanket wrote:
| If she's just a publisher, feel free to publish it
| yourself.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I think you're side-stepping the point: It is valid to
| point out her self-contradiction of her ideals.
|
| I can even understand her anger: she's been harassed with
| lawsuits in multiple countries and companies have
| probably had her personally investigated in those
| efforts. Paranoia isn't really even the appropriate word
| in that case.
|
| But it's still an extreme overreaction and contradiction
| of her ideals to block an entire country over one
| person's insult.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Imagine your stated mission was to provide cookies for
| everyone in town because the local cookie factory charged
| $100 each. Then one kid said they didn't like the cookie,
| so you banned all kids from eating them.
|
| You'd be within your rights, sure. But you would also be
| a going back and violating your own ideals.
|
| So, sure, it's her site, her rules, but I think it's fair
| to expect someone to uphold their principals and be
| disappointed when they don't.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Who then uploads the content? Her alone?_
|
| Not lately, but usually she does a fair share of it. And
| she's the sole curator.
| nix23 wrote:
| Yeah...when Fan's overlook the downsides.
|
| Why do you block access (for a whole country) when
| someone gave your name to a wasp?
| [deleted]
| aj3 wrote:
| She's not a native English speaker, fine. That doesn't seem
| like a disqualifier to me.
| nix23 wrote:
| I wrote that:
|
| >Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended
| is probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators
| no?
|
| What has that todo with language? Is Wikipedia blocking you
| (or your country) from access because you called an insect
| after Jimmy Wales?
| vimacs2 wrote:
| I agree that it was petty of her but unless if anybody
| else steps up in her place in a substantial way and fight
| the major publishers, I think we should be a little
| lenient on her idiosyncracities. I don't know what the
| real story behind the block is but something tells me
| there was a lot of other baggage on her mind prior to
| hearing about the wasp.
| nix23 wrote:
| Look, i think she makes a great job. But i hate it when
| those fanboys cannot see the irony of what she did...i
| would be proud like hell if a scientist would name a slug
| after me.
| vimacs2 wrote:
| I do not disagree here. That being said, I fucking hate
| wasps so while I wouldn't hold a grudge over it, I'd
| definitely have mixed feelings about having a wasp named
| after me myself.
| tokai wrote:
| It is getting a bit embarrassing. Wished she disregarded things
| about her person. All kind of stuff is going to be said and
| written about you when your a globally known person. Better,
| and healthier, to focus on defending the cause and not
| yourself.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > All kind of stuff is going to be said and written about you
| when your a globally known person.
|
| There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison or
| kill her. It's weird to call a revolutionary who is in the
| spotlight paranoid. A couple of administration changes and a
| sex or bribery scandal in some place she's never even visited
| could set off a series of events where she ends up like
| Assange or worse.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That is already in the works. Sweden has a woman who have
| already made false statements that she has withdrawn but
| they are using the rape charges to get her to the US.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Yeah but it feels is neither weird to be called or be
| paranoid in that situation. Some things that Assange has
| said definitely comes off as paranoid and perhaps
| completely off but he also has had more reasons than almost
| anyone to be paranoid.
|
| When you have powerful enemies and know it you're probably
| not better at recognizing where they are lurking about than
| anyone else. So you end up lashing out at shadows. Who can
| blame you.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison
| or kill her.
|
| Imprison? Sure. I'll even grant you "financially ruined"
| from lawsuits, but who wants her dead?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| It may be my personal bias, but I'd imagine anyone whose
| role makes her their enemy would lack the moral fibre to
| care about the distinction.
| duiker101 wrote:
| Way easier said than done. Especially for someone that maybe
| wasn't searching to be fully in the spotlight or that is not
| used to it.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Yeah, she's doing God's work and sci-hub is amazing but
| Elbakyan is an odd person who gets extremely paranoid and
| defensive, holds weird beliefs and often does things that are
| over the top.
| swiley wrote:
| It might not be possible to run a site like sci hub without
| being extremely paranoid all the time.
| blagie wrote:
| Being attacked leads to paranoid-like behavior. Your Bayesian
| filters go all wonky when you know they're actually out to
| get you.
|
| It pollutes everything in your life; you need to be
| suspicious of everyone and everything.
|
| The other thing about a constant series of attacks -- without
| support to field them -- is that you DO misidentify things,
| and sometimes respond imperfectly. There are 24 hours in a
| day. Sometimes you'll miss something, and other times, you'll
| overreact, or just react inappropriately.
|
| Talk to anyone with a stalker.
|
| Now imagine that stalker has a billion dollar war chest, and
| can hire a PI to trail you on a whim, corrupt government
| officials, or wield more-or-less infinite resources compared
| to you.
|
| In terms of weird beliefs, we all got 'em. The difference is
| mostly with regards to whether others find out about them.
|
| I haven't been in the same position as Elbakyan, but I've
| been in a sufficiently analogous one that I don't see what
| she's doing as anything other than human.
| teddyh wrote:
| "Paranoia strikes deep:
|
| Into your life it will creep.
|
| It starts when you're always afraid.
|
| You step out of line, the man come and take you away. "
|
| _For What It 's Worth_, Buffalo Springfield, 1967
| azalemeth wrote:
| Honestly, I'm very close to sending her a few btc. Although
| my employer would hate me for using it, sci hub is just an
| absolutely brilliant, internationally known godsend.
|
| One of the things that publishers have started doing of
| late is just linking the "pdf" button to things that are
| not pdfs. I have legal access to basically every journal
| article I could ever want, but sci-hub provides a _much_
| better product: you _actually_ just get the pdf with one
| button, and no telemetry crap either.
|
| There's even an awesome grease/tampermonkey script to
| provide (small, inobtrusive) inline links to sci-hub here:
| https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button.
|
| She really is a saint. I hope we realise that....
| vixen99 wrote:
| Spot on! Thank you for that. Some work I do would be sunk
| without her and we know there are countless independent
| researchers who could say the same thing.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| I'm not sure about the entomologist issue but for this article,
| I feel that some of the issue might be language barrier and
| cultural misunderstanding.
|
| For example, she mentions this paragraph: > She said that while
| she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains pretty much a one-woman
| show (it's "mainly me," she said) The Chronicle of Higher
| Education
|
| And criticises it by saying: > So they lie to their readers
| that Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing
| but a 'show' , and to support this, they seize upon a word
| 'mainly' that I have used to describe my work, as a proof that
| I am not doing this myself, but getting helped instead.
|
| The use of show in this context is normal and typical language
| usage, but she instead tries to ascribe the literal meaning to
| the word 'show' and is offended by it. No native English
| speaker would interpret "one-woman show" as meaning "Sci-Hub
| run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a 'show' ".
|
| So combine a thin skin due to numerous attack, a good command
| of English but no mastery of the subtleties of certain words
| and expressions and you have a recipe for her to seem overly
| susceptible.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| I recall reading about an incident where a journalist with
| access to North Korea was detained for a while over a phrase
| that said a guard "barked" orders, as the locals deemed a
| comparison to a dog rather unflattering.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36200530
| platz wrote:
| Maybe the connotations that you are used to subconsciously
| ignoring are actually still there after all.
|
| btw, if I find a new species of donkey, I will name it
| after you.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| and in turn, if I find a new species of invisible pink
| unicorn, the honor shall be thine.
|
| that is to say, neither of us will do either of these
| things; what are you even talking about?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| You are so generous. If I discover a pink unicorn, I'm
| totally naming it after myself.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation !
|
| It's been blocked for four days. (5th to 9th of September
| 2017). This is indeed an overreaction, no need to inflate the
| figures.
| lovasoa wrote:
| Ooops, you are right, I should have checked ! I updated my
| comment.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| TBF, having a parasitic wasp named after you is a kind of
| "Thanks.... I think?" moment at best.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| I was surprised reading the Chronicle article after her own
| post. If it hadn't been from the archive.org link I would have
| been certain they went back and added "Elbakyan, who is
| originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor's degree in computer
| science and coded Sci-Hub herself." after she complained but
| nope, there all the time.
|
| Also "Pirate Queen"? "beloved outlaw"? They couldn't have made
| her sound cooler if they tried.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| > "Pirate Queen"? "beloved outlaw"?
|
| Cool titles, but I can see why she might not want to be
| lumped in with the general file sharing community. I don't
| think open access science should be in the same category as
| pirating Hollywood movies and cracking videogames.
| salawat wrote:
| I don't think pirating video games and Hollywood movies
| deserve a separate category from "replicating information"
| to be fair, but facilitated information asymmetry is the
| quintessemce of most businesses... So ... Yeah. To each
| their own.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| I think she is trying hard to be respectable, i don't think
| she is trying to be just cool.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The author of Sci-Hub doesn't need to try hard to be
| respectable.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| Which does not imply that she is not trying.
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