[HN Gopher] Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)
___________________________________________________________________
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (2016)
Author : azalemeth
Score : 403 points
Date : 2021-09-05 09:22 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| tomxor wrote:
| It's not pirated if the tax payer paid for it... the copyright is
| invalid. I know it's just semantics, but let's not give evil corp
| words to make their parasitic scheme seem legitimate.
| fouc wrote:
| Remembering Aaron Swartz
| lousken wrote:
| what's the progress on open access in EU? I can't find any
| articles mentioning if it's already required or if/when it will
| be
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| Don't know about EU in general.. but my articles published in
| Springer is open access with the German initiative DEAL. I
| don't know if that counts as open access as the German
| government is the one paying for it.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| So the taxpayer - i.e., you (and 82 million other people) -
| is paying... and your salary was probably already paid by the
| government if you are working at a university?
|
| I can imagine better ways to spend the money than buying open
| access right from publishers - though the current German
| government certainly has found even worse ways to waste
| money...
| bernardv wrote:
| Research results and publications ultimately funded by tax-payers
| should absolutely be freely and openly accessible.
| bborud wrote:
| pretty rich that Elsevier's director of universal access talks
| about theft while working in an entirely parasitic business.
| karxxm wrote:
| I just wrote a paper which got published on Elsevier and my
| university has to pay 2900EUR now, because I clicked ,,open
| access"
| chalst wrote:
| EUR2900 is very high, higher than the Royal Society's open
| access plan. Which journal is it?
| krull10 wrote:
| These fees are highly journal and publisher dependent. Check
| out Nature journals; I believe last I looked Nature
| Communications was $5500!
| karxxm wrote:
| I am very sorry, I mixed it up with another paper.. The
| publisher where the fee came up was Wiley, for the Computer
| Graphics Forum. It's a super duper golden access.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| We need to come up with a way to disrupt this extortion and put
| these jokers out of the money.
|
| Note that I deliberately avoid calling the publishing racket a
| business, because these criminals-in-spirit and their empires
| produce nothing of value: they are lining their pockets by
| exploiting other people's work, while those being exploited
| have no choice but to play into the publishers' hand; enabling
| the publishers' power brokerage further their encroachment on
| public information by gifting them the most precious fruits of
| their labor.
| Bostonian wrote:
| I requested a published paper in statistics from my local public
| library, and they sent it to me the next business day, I think
| from the University of Massachusetts library system. So going
| through a public library may be an alternative to downloading an
| illicit copy.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| how long before scihub takes the front seat of publishing papers
| originally so all you have to do is search and its there. if that
| model works for everyone and everyone is happy, where does
| dinosaurs like elsevier stand? i think in the history books
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| The one thing that's obvious to me now from these comments is
| that the angriest people have the least insight into what
| publishing is, why it exists, and why the system continues to
| work the way it does. Nobody ever explains in these comments to
| these angry people, so HN just becomes a machine that takes in
| ignorance and churns out outrage.
|
| First off, just because a tax payer paid for research does not
| mean publishing should be free. That's like saying just because
| the government pays workers to use pencils, that pencils used by
| government workers should be free. The company is still doing
| work, whether it's for a taxpayer or not. It still needs
| compensation for the cost of doing business.
|
| Secondly, commercial publishers perform a vital role, which is
| why they still exist. If they didn't serve a necessary role
| people would have stopped using them. This is obvious, because
| nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying you have to
| publish your research in X place. But nobody wants to think of
| _why_ these commercial journals are necessary, because it might
| be the fault of single other than the publishers, so people
| intentionally stop thinking to avoid the realization.
|
| The only name of a publisher that anyone here knows is Elsevier,
| which further demonstrates ignorance. They're not the biggest
| publisher, they're not the most expensive publisher, and they
| aren't the only organization that pursues legal challenges when
| their content is pirated. But since it's the only name anyone on
| here has ever heard, they treat them like The Great Satan. That
| image further polarizes and enforces ignorance of publishing.
|
| Payment models vary widely depending on the circumstances and
| organizations (or individuals). Mostly publishers are trying to
| find sustainable models to pay for the jobs they perform, which
| includes hosting, indexing, referencing, editing, proofing, and
| facilitating peer review, as well as publishing the journals as a
| whole. If you don't want to pay for any of that, liked over said
| before, the whole research community would need to do those jobs
| for free. But even in OSS, companies pay OSS developers to work
| on code. So _somebody_ has to pay for it. If you 're so outraged
| at the profits of publishers, then get off your ass and build the
| replacement. But people just like to complain, not fix things.
| jackhodkinson wrote:
| I like where you are going with this. What would that business
| look like?
|
| Would this be a new journal with a different way of making
| money or some kind of aggregator service?
|
| Seems like an aggregator service would be the most appealing
| way to access the data for the end user.
|
| I'd say these entrenched journals are being very cautious with
| an aggregator because the raw text data would be super valuable
| to companies, so they are probably going to try their hardest
| to limit usage of the data for individual access and bulk
| access. That's not to say an aggregator is not going to happen.
| ta988 wrote:
| Arxiv and allies are good. But many journals still do not allow
| you to pulish a preprint. So if you send to arxiv or other, they
| will reject your paper because it is not "new anymore". Seen that
| recently (chemistry).
| leobg wrote:
| "View all available purchase options and get full access to this
| article." LOL
| qsort wrote:
| Behind a paywall. The irony is delightful.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Obligatory link: https://sci-
| hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
| colonwqbang wrote:
| _Science_ publishers are tone deaf beyond belief.
| pointbazaar wrote:
| funny that the article is behind a paywall...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Before any reader accepts this article's premise as accurate, I
| suggest they visit /scimag/recent which is a list of the most
| recently added (requested) papers. From what I have seen the
| papers requested/added seem consistently skewed toward certain
| categories of users, e.g., persons interested in
| computing/neuroscience/psychology or persons interested in
| social/political issues. Also, browsing major scientific journals
| such as Science and Nature through /scimag/journals/[journal-no]
| reveals large portions of the archives for these publications are
| missing. It could be that the readership of these journals
| already has access through university/company sucbscriptions, and
| that readership has not expanded much into the rest of the
| population despite being potentially available through Sci-Hub.
| axegon_ wrote:
| A few takes on this:
|
| * Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through
| insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely
| unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population.
|
| * Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely
| accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts
| of censorship.
|
| * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy
| affects the overall situation very little. People who need those
| papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be
| forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies
| and so on.
|
| * On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than
| Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one
| notable example involving a medical paper which was published in
| another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it,
| even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work
| related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I
| could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like
| supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from
| it - I bought several books that the authors published for free
| online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy
| affects the overall situation very little. People who need
| those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them
| will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to
| software, movies and so on.
|
| Why? I can cite any paper I want in my paper, who checks where
| and how I read it? People don't even check if I read something
| at all. Are you implying that it's unethical to cite papers
| without buying them? Because then you fundamentally disagree
| with the whole thing. Papers are researched by authors and
| mostly funded by governments or private grants. These journals
| are just mooching off the whole thing.
| auggierose wrote:
| That is like the most clueless comment on that topic ever. You
| are either trolling or working for one of the publishers ;-)
|
| a) Of course people who need to read the paper professionally
| will just pirate it (if they don't have access through their
| institution). After all, citing a paper doesn't imply that you
| "own" it.
|
| b) None of the authors saw any of your 250 euros.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > I bought several books that the authors published for free
| online, just to support them.
|
| You are right to do that. However books are different from
| papers in that you assume some of the money you pay will go to
| the actual author.
| tempay wrote:
| > it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only
| seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work
|
| FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it
| all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made
| for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-
| review process is unpaid work.
|
| If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies
| for free and most are happy to do so.
| axegon_ wrote:
| I've never bothered publishing anything, just
| circumstantially gave a hand several people that have(I don't
| want my name to pop up in papers for a million and one
| reasons). I assumed they were since otherwise I saw no
| logical reason to go for anything other than Arxiv and
| publish them for free.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Universities, especially in Europe, base hiring and tenure
| decisions in part on _where_ a researcher 's papers are
| published. A paper published on arxiv has less value to
| advancing one's career than one published in a journal run
| by a well-known academic publisher.
|
| This also makes it hard for researchers to organize their
| own journals, separate from the publishers. Many
| universities (again, particularly in Europe) use the
| publishing company as a proxy for the quality of a journal,
| rather than letting researchers within a field make that
| determination on their own. Thus researchers are forced to
| stick with the exploitative publishing companies because
| universities demand it, despite spending most of their time
| reading and sharing preprint copies of papers.
| bo1024 wrote:
| People publish in journals (etc) because of the peer review
| and reputation. People are much more likely to read, trust,
| cite a paper that's been through peer review. Also people
| are more likely to discover the paper by looking in
| prestigious venues than if it's just in the arxiv flood.
| For promotion and tenure, papers aren't considered unless
| they're published and prestigious venues count much more.
| doliveira wrote:
| Really, you should disclaim your lack of publishing
| experience in your original comment. You made several
| claims that are very misleading.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I
| can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the
| authors published for free online, just to support them. Even
| one I found here on HN.
|
| I don't know how it works in medicine, but, at least in math, I
| benefit not at all financially if someone buys one of my
| papers. (Book purchases earn their authors a pittance.)
|
| I would personally way rather someone download one of my papers
| from the arXiv than that they pay the journal. Journals are
| parasitic vestiges currently used only for status signalling,
| and I can't afford not to play that status game as an author,
| but I don't want you to have to play it as a reader, too.
| (tempay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28423848) made
| the same point slightly earlier, and brought up the important
| point that, also, most authors are willing to send you a copy
| for free if you don't otherwise have access to it.)
| lloda wrote:
| > People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to
| use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
|
| Why?
| betterunix2 wrote:
| "Generally I like supporting people's hard work"
|
| You did not support anyone's hard work. The researchers who
| wrote the paper receive none of the money paid to publishing
| companies, nor do the peer reviewers, and sometimes not even
| the editors (and in my experience, paid editors from Springer
| introduce more errors than they fix).
|
| Before the Internet, before TeX and related tools, those fees
| were needed to cover the cost of printing copies journals and
| shipping them to libraries. Prior to the 1970s academic
| publishers were typically run by universities and charged only
| break-even fees, and few complained because there was no better
| alternative that could effectively spread academic research
| around. Then a bunch of commercial publishers began eyeing
| academic journals (probably because they knew they would never
| have to pay the authors) and from the 1980s onward academic
| publishing has been for-profit. Instead of going away when the
| Internet rendered printed journals obsolete, these companies
| have instead opted to not print most journals and charge fees
| for online access.
| ddevault wrote:
| The cost of journal access does not in any way pay for the
| research itself, and neither the researchers nor the peer
| reviewers ever see a dime. It is money which is stolen from
| science and from the public.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase
| them regardless
|
| Not at all, but, they will review a lot more of them before
| deciding which ones to cite if sci-hub is available. BTW arxiv
| is for physics math and cs, while the closed access problem is
| mainly affecting life sciences which don't use arxiv, and are
| only partially using biorxiv / medrxiv. There's still a very
| archaic culture there, mainly because there's no other easy way
| to ascertain some scientists' value.
| krull10 wrote:
| Keep in mind, in math and other hard sciences it is not
| uncommon to cite 50 year old papers which are still highly
| relevant today (which is less common in biology). Such papers
| are often behind publisher paywalls since they predate arXiv.
| So closed access is very much a problem in these fields too.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| indeed. it happens in life sciences too, but it's usually
| classic historic papers that everybody cites but nobody
| reads. In fact i have been completely unable to find some
| of the most cited works of e.g. Ramon y Cajal from the
| 1900s.
| crote wrote:
| Who are you supporting, though? The scientists won't see a
| single euro of that.
|
| To me, the problem is that the balance is heavily skewed
| towards the publishers. Scientists provide the articles at no
| cost (or even have to pay to be published!), reviewers do their
| work for free, and then you have to pay hundreds of euros for a
| single copy of a single paper?
|
| While I understand that a paper has some overhead costs, the
| current fees are inexcusable. Scientists are forced to publish
| in "high-impact" papers so they can't choose another one, and
| you can't properly do science without reading papers. This
| gives the publishers a virtual monopoly - and they seem to be
| quite happy to squeeze every single euro out of it.
|
| It's just rent-seeking, and I believe it goes against the very
| nature of science itself.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to
| use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless.
|
| No.
| doliveira wrote:
| > People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to
| use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
|
| What? Will they reject your paper if you don't present a
| receipt you paid to access it? I published two articles in
| Physical Review Journals, virtually all papers I cited came
| from Sci-Hub.
|
| > Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I
| can't benefit hugely from it
|
| Scientists won't get a penny of the money you're paying, BTW.
| It makes no sense to compare it to books.
| beckman466 wrote:
| Elsevier and other capitalist firms that lock up papers are the
| real pirates in the first place:
|
| _" Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products
| for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge
| capitalists.
|
| Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon.
|
| The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The
| digital "pirates" only use universal commons which have been
| artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so
| they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be
| taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the
| whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as
| "raw" material, which is part of the general intellect of
| humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes
| immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the
| fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the
| traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with
| help of the force of law, universal commons that does not
| exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To
| put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been
| stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is
| morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics
| and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this
| matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of
| digital technology.
|
| In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an
| important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is
| expressed in various ways including the following.
|
| First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and
| believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for
| individual uses. The historical, cultural and political
| significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It
| undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois
| intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday
| life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge
| and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the
| individual on the other.
|
| Second, "pirate" activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge
| and make it available for a global public on the net. A good
| example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was
| created by activists who scanned books.
|
| These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or
| our era's Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes.
| Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online
| and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-
| Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their
| temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of
| digital piracy and digital counterfeiting."_
|
| Source: professor Jakob Rigi,
| https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/487/1146
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The way they compare this literal non-crime to high seas piracy
| pisses me off to no end. I hate how entrenched this word is.
| Can't even talk about this stuff without inadvertently
| reinforcing the propaganda of the copyright monopolists. They
| did the same thing with the word theft.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Beautiful. I like the mention of the economic classes at play
| there. It is convenient for those who can afford all the
| knowledge they can swallow to find it illegitimate for those
| who can't afford any quality bites, to get their hands on some.
| jakecopp wrote:
| > Get full access to this article
|
| > View all available purchase options and get full access to this
| article.
|
| The irony!! I can't access this link!
| josh_fyi wrote:
| Just $30 to view it!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 24 hours only, then you gotta purchase access again!
| II2II wrote:
| Can anyone tell me where I can download a copy? /s
|
| More seriously though, my first attempt to request an article
| for a journal resulted in an article similar to this being
| delivered. The subject matter was different, but it was better
| described as an editorial than research. Even though editorials
| have nearly zero value for academic research, the page fees
| were identical to research papers. The lack of clarity about
| what was being delivered was frustrating. The necessity
| research the articles themselves, prior to purchasing one,
| simply adds to the cost (e.g. through labour).
| unbad505 wrote:
| https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Why would anyone _not_ do this? Do people enjoy enriching
| copyright monopolists by paying hundreds of dollars for 24h
| access to one paper that may or may not have dubious methodology?
| That 's fucking stupid and these paid journals can't go bankrupt
| soon enough.
| AmIDev wrote:
| My employer pays for papers we need on a per-paper basis, and
| recently got subscription for one of the publishers as that was
| cheaper. They simply want to avoid lawsuits.
|
| I'm sure that outside of workplace, every employee uses sci-
| hub.
| capableweb wrote:
| If you talk with non-scientists, you'll realize that most
| people are happy to pay the fees as they don't really
| understand how things work in the background. While they think
| they are supporting science by paying the fees, the reality is
| that everyone is paying the publisher and the publisher takes
| all the fees to themselves.
|
| But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in
| non-belief.
| bo1024 wrote:
| The top comment on this HN submission at the moment has this
| misunderstanding.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Just curious, who are these non-scientists who will pay for
| scientific papers? Journalists?
|
| I can't imagine people whose work do not depend on these
| papers pay the exorbitant fees. And those who need scientific
| papers for work are generally the ones we call scientists.
| ta988 wrote:
| People with a disease and searching for informations about
| it. You can't imagine how many patients I've heard payed
| for those articles. And $30-$60 is a lot for just ten
| pages...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I never considered that. These monopolists will exploit
| even sick people. It's disgusting.
| sircastor wrote:
| I agree with you. I think the monopolists would respond
| that this is research that should be done by the doctor,
| not the patient. Patients doing their own research can be
| dangerous.
| ta988 wrote:
| Yes and if my wife didn't bring articles and did her own
| research to her doctors she would likely be dead by
| now... Patients bringing info to doctors is extremely
| common. It also mean that doctors have to deal with a lot
| of BS unfortunately.
| sircastor wrote:
| I'm an amateur electrical engineer and I've taken time to
| read research papers about robotics and electronics. I
| learn all kinds of stuff.
|
| I think there's a problem in the world (at least in
| engineering) where research is being done two or more times
| because of lack of information dissemination. Once by the
| university researcher, once by the corporate researcher,
| and many times by the layman who is moving through
| conclusions on his own work.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Doctors came to mind. They depend on scientific evidence
| for their practice but most do not publish scientific
| articles.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > "who are these non-scientists who will pay for scientific
| papers? Journalists?"
|
| Patent researchers. I was one. Except I _never_ paid a fee
| just to look at a paper, purely because I don 't know if
| it's any good until I read it, and there are HUNDREDS of
| papers I have to skim. You can always find it or something
| very similar for free.
|
| Once we know it's an important paper, then our outside law
| firm would pay the fee, and it would disappear in their
| monthly bill.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp
| in non-belief.
|
| They gasp in pure joy.
|
| Back in school I had a professor who _paid out of his own
| pocket_ for access to one particular journal in order to
| bring scientific articles to class. Our library didn 't have
| access to this journal. I was disgusted by how these journals
| were exploiting him. I looked for a way to fix that and
| discovered Sci-Hub for the first time. He was overjoyed when
| I showed him that. Our classes became better, richer. He
| could finally bring whatever material he felt was important.
|
| The damage these copyright monopolists cause cannot be
| quantified.
|
| There's also the usability. When I told my classmates about
| Sci-Hub, they were also very happy because they no longer had
| to go through our library in order to access scientific
| articles. They can just download whatever they want. This is
| how things should be.
| kleiba wrote:
| I work as a scientist, and I never download pirated papers.
| Why? Mostly because I don't have to - almost all relevant
| papers are accessible to me straight up, either because the
| authors / publishers have made the paper available for free
| themselves or because I have access to the publication through
| my university's library.
|
| But I am in Computer Science - I know that the situation is not
| at all the same in other disciplines.
|
| I think if you want to be cited, it is kind of silly to publish
| at a venue where your paper is not immediately accessible -
| there's usually enough other papers to cite, so it's in your
| own interest to be available.
|
| That said, regarding the original question ("why would anyone
| not do this"), I know from previous discussions here on HN that
| I'm part of a small minority, but I wouldn't do it because I
| find it unethical. There's lots of things that I wouldn't mind
| having / owning but I cannot afford them. Just because they
| might be available through non-official channels for free does
| not mean that using that option is the right thing to do.
|
| In this line of thought, I also think it is irrelevant whether
| putting publicly funded research results behind a paywall is
| ethical on the publisher's side: two unethical acts don't make
| an ethical one.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I find it unethical
|
| Why do you think that? I cannot imagine anyone losing one
| second of sleep over it.
|
| In this case, they can't even argue we're depriving creators
| of revenue they're owed. The only point of journals is peer
| review. Experts in the field that filter out the bad articles
| and publish the good ones. Peer review is the only thing that
| separates these glorified journals from a random website.
| Those experts don't see any of this money due to concerns
| over conflicts of interest. These reviewers could get
| together and create a blog and it would be better than these
| journals.
|
| The way I see it, these journals have literally no reason to
| exist. It's unethical to pay them even a single cent for
| access to anything. The ethical and moral thing to do is to
| hasten their demise. It is our duty to society.
| kleiba wrote:
| All of that is true, but it is also irrelevant.
|
| It does not matter what could be, we're talking about what
| _is_. And that is that someone is offering you access to
| this paper under some conditions (to which the authors and
| peer reviewers agreed). You can decide for yourself whether
| you 'd like to accept these conditions or not.
|
| But if the answer is "no", I cannot see how that justifies
| you getting a copy without paying. Where else in life is
| that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but
| I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take
| it." Obviously, there are differences between that example
| and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these
| differences are negligible in my opinion.
| epidemian wrote:
| > But if the answer is "no", I cannot see how that
| justifies you getting a copy without paying. Where else
| in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a
| snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so
| I guess I just take it." Obviously, there are differences
| between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the
| issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
|
| I think the differences are definitely not negligible.
| There are similarities on the surface, yes, but one can
| distinguish between the two cases by asking "would it be
| OK if everyone did this?"
|
| Basically Kant's categorical imperative:
|
| > Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at
| the same time, will that it should become a universal law
|
| In the case of stealing snickers, we can imagine that if
| everyone did so, then making or selling snickers would no
| longer be a profitable business, so in the end snickers
| would no longer be produced, and we would all be worse
| for it :(
|
| On the other hand, if everyone were to pirate scientific
| papers, no economic harm would come to the scientists
| doing the research for those papers. Only the journals
| would risk going out of business if they don't adapt, and
| that would be (or could be; i'm not entirely sure) a good
| outcome, as it would incentivize a more open approach to
| science distribution and access :)
|
| So, one can conclude that, despite the surface
| similarities, stealing snickers is morally wrong, while
| pirating scientific papers is not.
| kleiba wrote:
| Like I said, I'm aware of the differences.
|
| Interestingly, though, no-one who answered to my point
| has yet commented on the similarities. To me, no-one has
| yet made a convincing argument to justify why offering
| for free what others have the right to monetize should be
| considered okay.
| epidemian wrote:
| > why offering for free what others have the right to
| monetize should be considered okay.
|
| Because having the possibility to monetize something
| doesn't make it inherently right to do so. People have
| monetized things that we would now consider abhorrent to
| do, like human lives in the form of slaves, wives as
| property, and countless examples of human rights
| violations.
|
| Heck, even today in many places of the world people
| monetize access to education or health care for example,
| prohibiting some people from accessing things that are
| considered basic human rights. That they have a "right"
| to monetize it doesn't make it okay to do so.
|
| I guess the underlying questions here is: should we
| consider access to scientific publications a right that
| anyone should be able to exercise? I personally think
| that yes, freedom of information is a laudable goal, and
| is definitely worth the inconvenience of losing some
| antiquated journals.
|
| If you don't agree, what do you think would be the issue
| with having universal access to scientific papers?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We're not morally obligated to accept the status quo just
| because things always worked this way. Just because some
| entrenched monopolists that provide negative value to
| society managed to find a comfortable rent seeking
| position, we're morally obligated to pay tribute? Hell
| no. It boggles my mind that anyone could look at this and
| accept it.
|
| > Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to
| have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for
| it, so I guess I just take it."
|
| Don't compare physical things to artificially scarce
| data. They are not the same. Physical things can't be
| copied infinitely and distributed worldwide at negligible
| costs.
|
| With data, there is no economy. Economies arise when
| things are scarce. Data isn't. There is nothing to
| economize.
|
| > Obviously, there are differences between that example
| and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these
| differences are negligible in my opinion.
|
| These differences are not negligible. Quite the opposite,
| they are key. The fact is once created data is worth
| nothing. It's infinitely abundant. Scientists and peer
| reviewers are the truly scarce resources here and they
| don't depend on journals to exist.
|
| These monopolists try to make scientific articles
| artificially scarce but unlike the entertainment industry
| they don't actually provide any value whatsoever. They're
| just a brand name.
| kleiba wrote:
| Your first paragraph is a nice example for a strawman
| argument: where have I claimed that we have to "pay
| tribute" or that I'm in favor of the status quo?
|
| About copying vs. physical things - that's one of the
| aspects I had in mind when I wrote that I'm aware of the
| differences between that example and the scihub
| situation, but that I also think that they are not at the
| heart of the issue. Hence I don't subscribe to your
| argument against that.
|
| Nor do I to your last sentence. Where's the scarcity?
| crazy_horse wrote:
| You are not the only academic that feels this way.
| OvidNaso wrote:
| This is the "you were born a slave, and maybe slavery is
| unethical, but for you thats the way it is, therefore
| it's unethical for you not to do anything but serve the
| master".
|
| I guess thats something of a stance.
| [deleted]
| retrac wrote:
| > Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to
| have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for
| it, so I guess I just take it."
|
| If you were starving, and society was so misallocated in
| its resources that Snickers bars were in profound
| abundance, and political activism wasn't getting you
| anywhere, I would say you actually have every right,
| morally speaking, to take that Snickers bar.
|
| But the other commenter is right. Comparing physical
| objects to duplicating intangible information is
| extremely misleading. If you take that Snickers bar,
| someone else can't eat it. That doesn't apply to
| duplication.
| kleiba wrote:
| I anticipated that argument, it's what I meant when I
| wrote that I think there are difference but they are
| neglibile: whereever a Snickers bar is sold, there's
| usually more than one and taking one of them rarely
| impacts someone else who wants one (because there are
| usually plenty of others).
| commoner wrote:
| Exactly! When you download a copy of an article, there's
| an infinite number of copies available, and taking one of
| those copies almost never impacts someone else who wants
| one.
|
| Many Sci-Hub users believe it is ethical to download
| copies of journal articles there, because they find the
| consequences of not paying for the article to be more
| beneficial to society than the consequences of paying:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
|
| In their view, closed access journal publishers are
| stifling academic discourse with extortionate fees
| (especially considering that they do not financially
| compensate the authors and reviewers), which means it
| would be most ethical to limit the closed access journal
| publishers' revenue in order to reduce their power and
| importance, and disrupt their business model to pave the
| way for open access journals. Not paying publishers for
| copies of articles is how Sci-Hub users help achieve
| this.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > In this line of thought, I also think it is irrelevant
| whether putting publicly funded research results behind a
| paywall is ethical on the publisher's side: two unethical
| acts don't make an ethical one.
|
| I think taking public money, and using it specifically to
| enrich a private company, and not providing value back to the
| public who paid for both sides of the transaction is actually
| unethical. Moreso, I think there is regulatory capture going
| on, and manipulation of our political leaders through
| strategic donations [1]
|
| If, by opposing an unjust system, you are doing something
| that may be in name "illegal or contrary" to the law, but
| morally that is sterling, then you are in the right.
|
| By your same argument, you could claim that doing any member
| of the Underground Railroad that helped blacks escape from an
| unjust, oppressive system was also doing something unethical.
| Despite the legal definitions of property at the time. Do you
| see where this argument heads?
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-
| science/2018/j...
| a1369209993 wrote:
| If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it,
| he is obligated to do so. - Thomas Jefferson
| ipaddr wrote:
| I find it unethical to pay these journals. You are enabling a
| system that doesn't reward the creator only the middleman.
| When the author gives you a copy you have to wonder who are
| you supporting?
| kleiba wrote:
| You don't have to pay the journals.
|
| My point is that it is always your choice, but to me, the
| ethical choice is not between paying for the journal or
| getting the paper off scihub. It is between paying the
| journal or not getting access to the paper.
| bordercases wrote:
| The money you were paying the journal could be donated to
| the lab, if it was a matter of keeping a clear
| conscience. At that point no one loses except the rent
| extractor.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| It is unethical to paywall knowledge, especially when the
| ones doing the paywalling have done _absolutely nothing_ to
| actually help in the discovery of that knowledge.
|
| FWIW, I am an academic computer scientist too, have published
| in top-tier venues, and fully support pirating papers.
| Retr0spectrum wrote:
| I used to have access to papers via my university, but I
| never used that access. The UX of scihub is infinitely
| better. Anything else just added unnecessary friction to my
| research process.
| kleiba wrote:
| That must be quite the convoluted interface at your
| university then - at my university, access is given
| automatically based on my being part of the university
| network. It is absolutely transparent, I only notice when
| I'm at home and forgot the turn on the VPN to be part of
| the university network.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Many of us spent a good chunk of the past 18 months
| outside of our University network. Sci-Hub turns out to
| be faster than the University VPN.
| kleiba wrote:
| So "it' faster" is the argument? Please.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Yes. It's faster. I'm a scientist who authors papers and
| needs to read an enormous number of them. My ability to
| easily search and access dozens of papers per day is what
| makes my job possible. The purpose of the scientific
| publishing industry is to support that activity and the
| general dissemination of knowledge. The fact that a
| random website in Eastern Europe is able to simplify that
| task is a good thing, and reflects negatively on the
| existing publishing industry. (As the author of some of
| those papers publishers are charging to access, I can
| assure you that the scientists involved don't mind that
| people are bypassing journals and their terrible web UX
| in order to read and cite scientific work.) The fact that
| my University already pays for all these journals and
| _it's still_ more efficient to access them via Sci-Hub
| only makes the publishing industry look worse, since it
| means they're not accomplishing their core purpose, the
| one that's supposed to justify their continued existence
| in this world.
| maleldil wrote:
| How so? Did you have to go through your uni library website
| to search the paper? I usually find the paper through
| Google Scholar, log in to the website using my uni account
| and download the PDF from there directly.
|
| I love SciHub. I used it a lot when I was in a small
| college that did not have that type of access, but after I
| moved, I never used it again.
| cmg111 wrote:
| I'd still be afraid of PDF exploits when downloading papers
| from Belarus, where the government apparently tolerates the
| operation.
|
| Many scientists are juicy targets.
| White_Wolf wrote:
| The same would apply to any country with a surveilance
| program.
| NavinF wrote:
| PDF parsing and rendering has been sandboxed for over a
| decade: https://chrome.googleblog.com/2010/11/pdf-goodness-
| in-chrome...
|
| The idea of depending on your government to protect you from
| exploits is insane. Anyone in the world can upload a shady
| PDF to a website hosted in any country and suffer zero
| consequences.
| flayy wrote:
| Using Chrome in the pursuit of privacy is a joke, right?
|
| Regarding PDF specifically:
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-chrome-zero-day-used-
| in...
|
| https://windowsreport.com/google-chrome-pdf-security-bug/
|
| Who said anything about "depending on the government" or
| uploading PDFs? This subthread is about downloading from
| Elsevier directly vs. downloading from SciHub.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > This subthread is about downloading from Elsevier
| directly vs. downloading from SciHub.
|
| The reply was to a comment about downloading from Belarus
| "where the government apparently tolerates the operation"
| "of PDF exploits" according to the commenter.
| Saris wrote:
| To be fair security and privacy can be different things.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Ironic, to read this article, you have to pay.
| pacman2 wrote:
| Link to the complete article: https://sci-
| hub.se/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
| n3k5 wrote:
| Those 2015/2016 numbers are tiny! I guess a lot of that is no
| longer representative; e.g. Iran having more downloads than
| China.
|
| Wikipedia has more up-to-date stats about total download numbers:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Usage_and_content_stat...
| ofou wrote:
| Even this article is paywalled. What a shame!
|
| Thank god we have SciHub.
|
| https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.352.6285.508
| zucker42 wrote:
| Anyone find it ironic that this article is apparently under a
| paywall? Does anyone have a scihub link?
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| The irony of needing to use sci-hub to read an article about sci-
| hub.
| yummypaint wrote:
| A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is
| across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints
| to the web/arXiv and leave them up indefinitely. Their scientific
| content is identical to the journal formatted version and they
| show up in search often before the paid version. This is true
| even for the historically worst offenders (i.e. Elsevier)
|
| Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely
| different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped
| college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal
| subscriptions.
| [deleted]
| cozzyd wrote:
| I had dinner with the arXiv creator once
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg). What I
| understood is is that before the arXiv, all "good" universities
| would each mail each other copies of preprints, and so
| researchers there would have access to the newest research
| developments. Eventually, they'd get published, but that takes
| a while, so anybody not in this circle would be far behind and
| have a hard time being relevant in his field (theoretical
| particle physics).
|
| So the arXiv was a more modern, scalable, democratic
| replacement of what was already popular within the culture of
| the field.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles
| in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact
| factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and
| demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all
| the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper).
|
| Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are
| ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer
| papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters.
| Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different.
| Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting
| looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have
| "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a
| data supplement increasingly _needs_ to be hosted by someone
| else the further down that train you go. You or I would be
| happy slapping something up on a static University-run website
| or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get.
| Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my
| experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved
| about particle physics was that _everyone_ helps.
| Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their
| contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways.
| That 's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I
| hear a lot of in my world.
|
| Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on
| diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the
| "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good
| enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise --
| the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to
| take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study"
| and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally
| in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their
| competition is more about _validation_ and they explicitly pool
| resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my
| masters ' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook
| chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's
| friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was
| too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical
| problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make
| progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is
| much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a
| particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot).
|
| The net result is that publication practices are _cultural_
| more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really
| the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls
| to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow
| suit, but there are a _lot_ of vested interests trying to
| prevent that.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I agree; I get the impression that physics and math still do
| things in The Old Way of science; if we still communicated
| that way, modern physicists would be writing letters to each
| other critiquing work and offering advice. Somehow the life
| sciences became stuck in the "publish or perish" mentality.
|
| Just out of curiosity, you mention everyone uses Word in the
| life sciences--what is used in physics? LaTeX? I also have to
| use Word, and hate it.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Not the OP, but in my experience, when you are doing math,
| physics or CS and don't use LaTeX, you'll be looked at
| sideways. There is virtually no alternative when it comes
| to typesetting advanced maths.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I have friends who used MS Word to write their thesis in
| CS undergrad.
|
| Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like
| fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more
| trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I
| kinda looked at them sideways.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| MathML / very neat handwritten formulae are decent
| alternatives.
| madars wrote:
| Yep. "The authors don't use TeX" is also sign #1 on Scott
| Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough
| is Wrong" https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
|
| > This simple test (suggested by Dave Bacon) already
| catches at least 60% of wrong mathematical breakthroughs.
| David Deutsch and Lov Grover are among the only known
| false positives.
| refactor_master wrote:
| Without precision, recall and a proper problem
| formulation,"60%" is pretty bad, if not outright
| meaningless.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Perhaps unfairly, it's hard to take physics papers not
| written in LaTeX seriously. At least within particle
| physics and astrophysics/cosmology... I don't really read
| papers from other fields.
|
| Note that, arXiv makes you post LaTeX sources if it detects
| that it's a LaTeX document, and not everyone remembers to
| redact perhaps not meant to be public comments :).
| dieortin wrote:
| Yes, LaTeX is what's most widely used in physics.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I would add that even within physics there are massive
| differences, which also shows up in how grants are written.
| While the fundamental physics areas (like particle and
| astronomy) do publish a lot on arxiv etc. In the more applied
| areas it can often be quite different (which also applies to
| the use of word unfortunately). The metrics you use for your
| grant applications are also very different, the more applied
| areas often have to show impact through patents, spin offs
| etc., while this is less so in the fundamental sciences.
|
| The use of arxiv etc is slowly making its way into the more
| applied areas, so things are moving to become more open. On
| the other hand in quantum we are currently seeing the
| opposite trend, so much research is now within startups who
| are absolute flush with money, but typically don't have a
| path to commercialisation. So they do research, but only very
| little of that research gets published anywhere, so the
| scientific process is becoming much less open.
| selestify wrote:
| Why do the different disciplines have such different
| cultures?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Web itself got started at CERN, not in a zoology or
| animal testing lab. It takes a lot of time for successful
| innovations to diffuse throughout a broad, worldwide
| subculture. Just do the math.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| You just said it. Scientific fields are not differentiated
| arbitrarily; they drift apart as their experimental needs
| diverge. Chemistry and particle physics used to be one
| field, back before the cost of particle accelerators
| diverged from the cost of chemistry labs.
| selestify wrote:
| Right -- so how do the different experimental needs of
| each field inform their different cultures?
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Return on investment pays a role. The higher the profit
| margin, the more competitive and "locked down" the field
| is. But things like national prestige and space race type
| international politics comes into play. Very rarely is
| lots of money spent on pure science - there's almost
| always a catch.
| mynameismon wrote:
| I would wager the nature of work. It might be because maths
| and CS involve more work that doesn't require fancy
| equipment, there is lesser involvement of financial risk as
| compared to fields like biology or chemistry, where
| equipment is so expensive.
| ectopod wrote:
| I would guess money plays a part. The commercial prospects
| for discovering a new fundamental particle and discovering
| a cure for prostate cancer are quite different.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Well, it depends. Is the cure for mice, or actual humans.
| krull10 wrote:
| Most of my biology collaborators have switched in the past 5
| years to putting all their new submissions on biorxiv. It
| seems like medrxiv is now getting popular since COVID started
| too. But, as in math and physics, I guess a big problem is
| articles that predate this change are still paywalled in many
| cases.
| hmwhy wrote:
| I think there is a lot to learn from what you said, but I
| just want to remind everyone else reading your comment that
| it is anecdotal.
|
| I have experience with both research in physics and chemistry
| in multidisciplinary teams, and my experience is the exact
| opposite to yours in terms of competition and the willingness
| to help others. Heck, the last time I released some results
| on arXiv a group that is notoriously unfriendly suddenly
| reached out and was all friendly. It turns out that after
| discussing with us about our results they released a half-
| finished draft on something similar that they have been
| working on, and presumably tried to stay ahead/dilute the
| significance of our results by getting it published in a
| peer-reviewed journal first. Also, during the time we were
| doing our work, nobody responded when we were asking if we
| could access data or algorithms. I don't blame anyone and
| we're definitely not entitled to anyone's help, but that's
| just a counter example and obviously depends on how well you
| know the field, everyone else in the field, reputation, etc.
|
| I personally enjoyed using LaTeX for writing manuscripts for
| physics-oriented topics, but I don't mind Word for chemistry
| manuscripts. In fact, I would argue that writing chemistry
| manuscripts in LaTeX sucks for most chemists (maybe except
| for theoretical and some physical chemists) simply because
| editing chemical structures, reactions, equipment setup and
| process diagrams is _easy_ with an embedded chemical editor
| object in a Word document.
|
| I'm not familiar with how they work internally at publishers
| when getting manuscripts ready for publishing, but most
| journals require you to use a Word template with ready-to-use
| style rules and adhere to certain easy-to-follow formatting
| rules for everything else. Remembering my early days of using
| LaTeX (when I was already familiar with using Word for
| manuscripts), I could say the same about how cumbersome it is
| to do certain things in LaTeX without even talking about
| chemical structures. Particularly when it comes to journals
| that charge subscription fees, I'm not sure why you seem to
| suggest that it's on the authors to get the manuscript
| "camera ready". If nothing else, I have seen just as many
| crap-looking papers formatted with LaTeX than those with
| Word, and the same can be said about good-looking papers.
| So... I guess it just depends on the authors themselves
| and/or the editors.
|
| For much the same reasons as what I have said about
| competition, I think your last comment is just as biased
| against your own experience than everything else in my
| opinion.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my
| experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved
| about particle physics was that everyone helps.
| Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their
| contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd
| ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial"
| talk I hear a lot of in my world.
|
| That's probably because physicists and mathematicians have
| less to lose by openly talking about their results and
| methods, while in bio research, there is a lot of proprietary
| secrets about lab techniques and hard-earned experiment data,
| which many researchers see as competitive advantage they
| justly reap in exchange for the labor they put into obtaining
| it.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| I am a particle physicist and would like to say that Fermilab
| (where I'm working on one of the experiments there) and CERN
| don't compete. One of the best examples is the construction
| of DUNE which is a new experiment which will be the largest
| neutrino experiment so far is done between CERN and fermilab
| closely. The prototype is even there. Fermilab main focus is
| different a little bit from CERN. Also Fermilab is part of
| every CERN collaboration (except maybe small experiments here
| or there). Usually in particle physic we tend to confirm
| results with different experiments and sometimes different
| techniques and because of the nature of statistics and
| probabilities involved, this always encouraged collaboration
| and people trying to help each other. I understand that this
| is completely different from the competition in other fields.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Exactly -- and that's the point I was trying to make about
| competition. Fermilab arguably is CERN's biggest
| "competitor" and it's entirely complementary - e.g. look at
| the work done with LEP and Tevatron. In contrast, I've had
| other academics politely ask me not to present my work at a
| particular conference because so-and-so might be there and
| that might mean that they'd see it and _their_ paper on
| x+[?]x might come out before _our_ paper on x-[?]x, and
| that would make it harder to get into a particular journal,
| etc --- and I didn 't. It's pretty stupid really. I wish
| we'd pool resources sensibly, and divide the big ideas
| ahead of time.
| [deleted]
| kongolongo wrote:
| What do you think of fields like medicine or biology where
| preprints can become a source of misinformation. For example a
| lot of conspiracy around unproven treatments for covid, vaccine
| efficacy, and vaccine safety directly source preprints that
| never make it to publication.
| raattgift wrote:
| > In physics i have always been able to post [to] arXiv
|
| I'm fairly sure Sci-Hub (and book scanners like CZUR's) made
| DOI useful, even (and perhaps especially) for working and
| teaching physicists at large research universities with
| excellent librarians.
|
| Sometimes in the moment one wants to read something
| sufficiently old or inconveniently rare cited in an arxiv
| preprint or in one of its easy-to-click references. Or if one
| is Reviewer Number 3 or that person's victim.
| wdb wrote:
| I still think if the research is paid or subsidised by tax payers
| money it should be freely accessible. Maybe EU should do
| something good and make it part of the rules. All wishful
| thinking of course
| Cenk wrote:
| That is exactly what the EU is attempting to do:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
| andyferris wrote:
| The one thing that makes me wonder how nations would behave
| here is government-funded information generally is only
| available for free in the host country. BBC content is only
| free in Britain. ABC content is only free in Australia. Is e.g.
| NPR content gratis outside the US? Similarly, should NSF-backed
| research be freely available to the USA or the world?
|
| (I'm in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style
| content, for similar reasons really - it's generally useful for
| humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you
| produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the
| first place).
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I doubt the EU will take the lead on such a thing; the EU has a
| lot less tolerance for new technologies upending traditional
| institutions than the US. European universities basically
| require professors to publish in journals owned by a handful of
| publishing companies, which has served to cement the power of
| those publishers (American universities tend to be a little
| more open minded about new publishing models in my experience).
| I have heard European researchers complain that people were
| citing the arxiv version of their papers rather than the
| "official" version -- it made it harder for them to advance
| their careers.
| acomjean wrote:
| Our papers (US NIH funded) are required to be free and publicly
| available.
|
| Of course publishers have wised up to this and now charge us
| money to publish. But at least anyone who finds the papers on
| pubmed can read them.
|
| Pubmed also tags and indexes the articles so searching is
| easier.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/
| ta988 wrote:
| Only after one year.
| bernardv wrote:
| Why are commercial publishers even necessary anymore? They
| are obsolete.
| AmIDev wrote:
| India decided to require all publicly funded research to make
| research papers and data open access[0]
|
| [0]
| https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/STIP_Doc_1.4_Dec2020....
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is a paywalled copy itself, the PDF literally only has the
| first page.
|
| You can, of course, get the rest from sci-hub.
|
| Is this intended irony?
|
| 10.1126/science.352.6285.508
| sflicht wrote:
| I don't see why it would be a controversial bill in Congress to
| simply exempt scientific publications (broadly construed) from
| all copyright law. Springer and Elsevier (the latter not even an
| American company) would be losers, but I doubt they spend more
| than a couple $mil on lobbying per year between the two of them.
| The benefit to humanity seems pretty clear.
|
| This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under
| the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more
| controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a
| time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights
| on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science
| and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a
| position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting,
| and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so
| it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status
| quo _violates_ the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal
| copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the
| progress of science.
| aomobile wrote:
| After music and tv, we need some sort of affordable unlimited
| subscription for books and scientific papers
| tasogare wrote:
| No we don't. Sci-hub is doing the job fine. Also just like
| music and tv, the fragmentation of the market would require on
| the have multiple subscriptions at the same time.
| VortexDream wrote:
| No, why? The science is mostly funded by public institutions.
| Academic research belongs to all of us as a civilization.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I worked incident response for one of these publishers. The grind
| was constant and unending and they very rarely made decisions to
| improve the security of the documentation, meaning we were
| constantly on high alert to respond...usually on holiday
| weekends...like Labor Day.
|
| I'm torn, because I see both sides of it...moreso now that I'm
| not receiving a paycheck to keep it safe.
| echopurity wrote:
| Capitalism is anti-science and anti-progress. People are evolving
| around it.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Progress has been faster under capitalism than feudalism,
| socialism, or communism.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Where do you draw the line between socialism & communism when
| making that claim?
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to
| time.
|
| A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me,
| and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees
| _do_ get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it 's libraries
| that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers
| in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If
| the number of requests times the price per request is lower than
| the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay
| within budget.
|
| Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page
| charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor
| contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as
| crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of
| publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing
| in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of
| dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe,
| so we can see our work.
|
| Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to
| publish, and then pay again to read.
|
| Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now
| encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would
| seem great, except that they did not increase grants to
| compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money
| that cannot go to support graduate students.
|
| As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar
| discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I
| work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers
| as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to
| their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the
| papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died
| long before the web got started.
| gbrown wrote:
| > but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute
| to the library budget.
|
| Not defending the publishing system, but that's what indirects
| are for.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read
|
| That makes me sick. I'm sorry that you had to suffer this
| indignity.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| There is also r/scholar where I may or may not have provided
| articles to other people.
| raattgift wrote:
| Similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in
| open-access mode.
|
| I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under
| an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the
| research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all
| the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental
| results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from
| that work.
|
| The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research
| for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are
| prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ...
|
| This seems like another of those situations where government
| make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-
| payers.
| stathibus wrote:
| Yeah, progress is being made. It's an open secret that
| traditional journal publishers add no value in the 21st
| century. Zero, zilch. Their time is up, and they know it... In
| some fields more than others so far, but it will come for the
| rest eventually.
|
| As far as I'm concerned a paper hasn't been stolen unless it's
| been accessed without the authors' permission.
| krull10 wrote:
| Governments shouldn't be paying significant amounts of tax
| payer money in page fees or open access fees. There should be a
| small cap on what will be paid, a requirement work is open
| access and deposited in public databases, and that's it. It's
| outrageous that tax payers are spending $5000 so someone can
| publish in a Nature type journal, and a waste compared to the
| additional postdoc and researcher salaries all these page
| charges could instead go to pay for. Unfortunately, the
| incentives in academia are such that as long as grants will
| provide such funds researchers will publish in these journals,
| so I think this can really only be fixed by funding bodies
| reducing the money they provide for publications. At the end of
| the day, I don't think any journal should be getting more than
| ~$200-$300 for publishing an article. They simply don't add
| much value at this point beyond the prestige of their name.
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