[HN Gopher] A note on recent content takedowns
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A note on recent content takedowns
Author : EvgeniyZh
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-09-24 08:15 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.researchgate.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.researchgate.net)
| dikei wrote:
| Back when I was a student, I never like ResearchGate: they forced
| you to create an account, then upload some random rubbish PDFs
| just to get credits to download what you want.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| The only few times I've thanked RG is when an obscure PDF was
| no longer on the university or author's website by RG had a
| copy cancelling out the link rot.
|
| Other than those few times, I've never found it useful.
| dikei wrote:
| Truth, I think I only used them one or twice to download some
| papers with attractive names that couldn't be found anywhere.
| It turned out the papers were quite bad, I figured they
| wouldn't be so hard to find otherwise.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I've been thinking about how the existence of sites like this and
| SciHub might actually _prolong_ the life of paywalled sites.
|
| See, when a scientist publishes an article, their academic
| success is partially judged by how many people cite their
| article. If everyone stopped citing articles that were owned by
| shitty companies, researchers would be disincentivized from
| publishing there. But when someone puts it also to SciHub the
| researcher still gets the H-index stats
|
| https://libguides.bc.edu/articleinfluence/hindex
| sega_sai wrote:
| I have no sympathy for researchgate. They syphon papers, they
| used black patterns early on to mass-send emails to invite people
| on the platform. And finally, as a researcher, I never found
| researchgate to be actually useful.
| superkuh wrote:
| There's no denying the site itself is a bit shady, most of my
| IP addresses are blocked. I find myself using researchgate
| hosted full text pdfs pretty regularly the last handful of
| years. At least a few times a month.
|
| This is far better than there being no pdfs at all. I don't
| really care about how researchgate tries to run their site
| beyond this.
| ok123456 wrote:
| But at least there's the network effect of getting access to
| papers, which is more than you can say about most social
| networks.
| noptd wrote:
| > But these most recent requests were notable because of the
| number of articles involved. Although privately stored files were
| not affected, the demands by Elsevier and ACS resulted in the
| removal of around 200,000 public files. In the context of a
| community of over 20 million researchers this is unfortunate,
| rather than existential, but it has sparked an acute reaction
| from many of our members who believe in the importance of open
| science.
|
| Wow, that's a staggering number of files.
|
| It's good to hear that other publishers, such as Springer Nature
| and Wiley, are embracing a more open, syndicated publishing model
| with ResearchGate at least.
| gwern wrote:
| It's particularly staggering because it's unlikely they've
| correctly verified the status of all 200k, and are just dumping
| out a database query. (Whenever one checks these things, it
| typically turns out that many are actually CC or otherwise Open
| Access, PD because federal government work, preprints permitted
| to be shared, etc.)
|
| One wonders if they sent Researchgate a DMCA and thus have
| perjured themselves countless thousands of times, and why
| Researchgate is rolling over?
| tagh wrote:
| I'm one of the researchers whose had a paper removed.
| Confusingly, it was the 'accepted manuscript' version, which
| Elsevier explicitly states you may share [0]. It's very obviously
| watermarked too, by their own editorial management system. It's
| very frustrating that you can do everything right by the
| publisher and still lose like this.
|
| [0] https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing
|
| *Edit: typo
| leephillips wrote:
| The policy link lists, in some detail, how and where you may
| share your accepted manuscript--for example, on arxiv. I would
| not interpret their criteria to include Researchgate.
| tagh wrote:
| I think you're right. I've double checked their FAQ, which
| states that you can upload your preprint to Researchgate, but
| then they only explicitly mention arxiv for swapping the
| preprint with the accepted manuscript. I guess I'll just have
| to swap over to arxiv.
|
| For the benefit of those who haven't submitted a manuscript
| before: the accepted version is just the preprint with
| improvements from the peer review process - and no "other
| publisher value-added contributions such as copy-editing,
| formatting, technical enhancements and (if relevant)
| pagination". Assuming the associate editor is a volunteer
| (true for the journal in question), Elsevier's only in-kind
| contribution at this point is their awful submission system,
| and the Chief editor's time in accepting the associate
| editor's decision... although the chief editor might also be
| a volunteer.
| leephillips wrote:
| And since the formatting is probably already done by the
| author with TeX, and (in my experience) the copy editing
| done by scientific journals usually makes the paper worse,
| there's not much "value-add" here.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Gonna come out and say it: science is broken in many many ways
| currently, but it won't be _un_ broken until publishing is 100%
| freely available, both the authors and the readers. SciHub is
| doing it right, and people putting SciHub content on IPFS are
| doing it Right, because that puts the burden on everyone, not
| just a handful of individuals.
|
| It should become good taste for universities to pin & seed as
| much of the global science corpus as possible on distributed
| systems, and it would also make sense for them since it would
| allow immediate fast and uncomplicated access to anyone within
| their networks (vicinity).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Scientific publication is broken but honestly I doubt that's
| the reason science itself is broken. Before the advent of the
| internet you had access to the journals in your library and
| pretty much that's it. If you wanted any other reference you
| had to do an ILL. Or write to the authors and wait for months.
| People obviously did great amazing science, much better than
| what's being done today.
|
| I used to live in a third world country where access to
| articles was abysmal (pre scihub) and honestly that was like
| the 10th biggest problem I had with doing good science. If
| you're smart and you want to learn something you will find a
| way. Money is not the same thing, and neither are ideas. You
| can't just will your way to those things.
|
| Again, I am happy scihub exists and support it fully, but
| that's honestly not solving the real problem with science.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Maybe I should've been more clear that it is _one_ of the
| problems that need to be solved. "Solving publishing is a
| necessary but not a sufficient condition to fix science as a
| system."
|
| There's still room for disagreement here ofc, but at least
| that should make my point clear. :)
| angelzen wrote:
| Everyone is already free to publish their work on the Internet.
| Not sure if the publishing model by itself is the core issue,
| or the science funding model at large. A symptom is the
| fetishisation of peer review as a gatekeeping mechanism, which
| I think is what you decry. Peer review is driven by the need of
| funding agencies to have some roughly objective criteria for
| personnel selection. Publish or perish. While it is not an
| ideal tool, I have a hard time coming up with a better
| alternative.
|
| Fundamentally science is about creating models of the world
| that are independently verifiable through experiment. Peer
| review inhabits an uncomfortable middle ground. While it serves
| a positive function in checking for methodological issues, it
| is only a distant proxy for independent experiments and is
| often prone to authority and group think.
| mcnichol wrote:
| I have a naive question.
|
| Am I only able to get the paper free by asking the researcher
| (assuming all others are behind paywalls) which is being enforced
| by some form of legal language?
|
| For example, say I post a link to my research paper alongside a
| presentation I gave associated to the work (let's say it's
| sitting on GitHub).
|
| Is there typically language to prevent this?
| phreeza wrote:
| I'm always a bit ambiguous about researchgate because it seems
| like it's replacing one walled garden with another one. I'd much
| rather see this kind of thing develop in on open and non-profit
| websites, as is already the case in many verticals.
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(page generated 2021-09-24 23:02 UTC)