[HN Gopher] Sci-Hub: Researchers File Intervention Application t...
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Sci-Hub: Researchers File Intervention Application to Fight ISP
Blocking
Author : gengear
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-11-20 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| cblconfederate wrote:
| You would expect that at least during the covid remote-work thing
| they would not go after sci-hub, the remote work tool that makes
| science faster and more productive (TM) .
| bostonsre wrote:
| There are selfish individuals in this world who just want to
| tax society and not contribute much in return. They are in most
| industries, but this one is particularly detrimental to
| everyone. You would think that there would be some activist
| hackers out there fighting on the side of sci hub beyond just
| extracting documents.
| TaXaZ wrote:
| The current scientific publication model is only benefits the
| gatekeepers in publishing industry. It directly goes to the
| packet of publishing industry by ripping off the tax-payers twice
| with a steep price. Nowadays research institution pay high fees
| both for paywall and open-access. No matter you access or publish
| you some how give tax-payers money to these publishing
| industries. It has been shown the steep price is also un-
| justified as peer-review are done freely (for credit, not money)
| by science worker themselves and there are plenty of open-review
| and open-science projects which prove the price is not justified.
|
| It might worth it to repeat part of my comment in [1]:
|
| > The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution
| based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He
| basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build
| the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry
| for decades. You can find a good review of this scheme from below
| YouTube video[3].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218202
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo
| nivenkos wrote:
| Father of Ghislaine Maxwell, no less.
| smegsicle wrote:
| Wonder what she's up to?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Why can't we have a wiki style libgen "alternative" if the only
| "copyright" arises from "editing" and miscellaneous efforts they
| put into it. Would libgen be "low quality" if it somehow had
| access to all research irrespective of quality?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There are numerous open-access academic publishers or
| prepublication serviers, including PLOS, Arxiv, and others.
| Some of those (SSRN) have been bought by academic publishing
| monopolists (Elsevier), which have also bought some content
| management tools (Mandeley).
|
| The problem going forward is in breaking the stranglehold over
| academic careers that prestige journals have, a key source of
| their power. In order to gain entry into or promotion through
| academic ranks, academics in many fields must publish in
| prestige journals, many owned by the monopoly cartel.
|
| There's also the small matter of the 60+ million _previously_
| published academic articles, _many under a copyright regime
| which would have seen them enter the public domain years or
| decades ago_ , which remain locked behind copyright prisons.
|
| In short: your idea's not bad, it's actually being implemented.
| It remains difficult to implement because of structural
| reasons, and still only addresses a part of the problem.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| The main issue is review of material, outside of being a domain
| expert how would an end user determine which content to trust
| as rigorous?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| how do i know from a DOI/name/title that the research is
| good? just "being" on the journal is more important than the
| details of peer reviewers and their own research? i am
| saying, how do you evaluate the "goodness" of a paper if you
| weren't told it came from Elsevier or some other publication?
| i am genuinely curious
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| For me personally, I'm involved in academia and research so
| I live and breathe it. It's difficult for me to evaluate
| papers outside of my domain, and takes a huge amount of
| background research to do so.
|
| A good first filter is usually (not always) seeing the
| journal its published in. The primary thing here though, is
| not looking for good journals but rather avoiding the known
| predatory ones.
|
| My concern is for the people who don't live and breathe
| research. There is a massive amount of depth and detail
| that is easily overlooked when you're unfamiliar with the
| subject.
|
| Things like poor method can invalidate results, and people
| unfamiliar with the particular methodology can miss that.
| Even the statistical analysis could be flawed, or they use
| a statistical method which is not appropriate for their
| data or study design.
| tux3 wrote:
| The studies published by people who are really into ESP
| and paranormal ideas are annoying like this.
|
| It's an exercise in making papers that look like they
| have vaguely decent protocol and statistical methodology,
| but arrive at insane, obviously wrong results through
| cleverly non-obvious, intricate flaws.
|
| Like the Underhanded Code Contests, but for research.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It's an exercise in making papers that look like they
| have vaguely decent protocol and statistical methodology,
| but arrive at insane, obviously wrong results through
| cleverly non-obvious, intricate flaws.
|
| What if I told you that 90% of all research findings are
| like that.
| tux3 wrote:
| I'd ask you to show me the pre-registered cross sectional
| study you did to come up with that number =)
| jasode wrote:
| _> just "being" on the journal is more important than the
| [...] research? i am saying, how do you evaluate the
| "goodness" of a paper if you weren't told it came from
| Elsevier or some other publication?_
|
| I think I understand the motivation for your question and
| why you're confused.
|
| Your mental model for your question seems to be this: if
| science person is competent, he/she should be able to
| evaluate any Libgen paper _without needing to outsource_
| the assessment of "good/bad" to a middleman publisher like
| Elsevier. Therefore, a file-hosting website like Libgen is
| all that academics should need.
|
| But the mental model is this: the scientists/readers are
| busy and they _don 't want to waste time on bad papers_.
| E.g. Nature journal _rejects ~93%_ of 10000 submissions in
| a year.[1] Therefore, reading Nature means people don 't
| have to wade through ~9000 other papers. In short, readers
| still want _curation_ because it saves time.
|
| Platforms like Libgen or Scihub solve _distribution
| /downloads_ of pdf files. But hosting documents is the easy
| part. The hard problem they don't solve is the human
| _curation_. Conceivably, an academic "Libgen" would host
| _all 10000 submitted papers_ and busy readers are not
| interested in that. Instead, having papers pass several
| levels of human curation filters into a _manageable subset
| for readers_ leads to accumulated prestige for both the
| Journal and the particular paper. Prestige also leads to
| academic promotions, lab funding, etc. Libgen as a pdf
| hoster does not have a prestige-accumulation feedback loop.
|
| (I didn't downvote your question.)
|
| [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/8755/what-
| propo...
|
| EDIT reply to: _> I don't understand, how does sci-hub
| undermine the prestige-accumulation feedback loop?_
|
| I was not saying Scihub undermines prestige at journals
| like Nature. Instead, Scihub _does not _solve_ the problem
| of creating prestige /impact_ for submitters (including
| _unknown_ ones) who need papers validated by peers
| (especially _respected_ peers). Scihub only solves the
| files hosting aspect -- the pdf download button. But
| hosting the "download links" is not the hardest problem
| that middlemen publishers solve.
| crateless wrote:
| I don't understand, how does sci-hub undermine the
| prestige-accumulation feedback loop?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| why can't we have a system of peer review on scihub?
| scientists have a verified profile and they well,
| "review" papers as they go so if you are interested in a
| field, you would wither find the topic or find a name you
| know and go from there? why would that not work?
|
| what i am suggesting is, let scihub help the researchers
| do the peer review work themselves. think of it as a
| highly restrictive version of wikipedia? that sounds
| stupid but it would be "open" for public scrutiny and
| well, free for people to use the research
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Alexandra Elbakyan is a living example of a better human being.
| xvilka wrote:
| Yes, she is exactly the opposite of the people who own and work
| for publishing industry.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Creators and sharers vs fence-makers.
|
| A friend calls the latter bridge trolls. They find a useful
| resource that someone created and many need, and aim to extract
| a toll for it - without having created it.
|
| Let's be more like the creators and less like the bridge
| trolls.
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