13 ms·

A World Without Sci-Hub

331 points by sixtyfourbits 5y ago

jf 5y ago
What are pragmatic things that we can do to push for open access for academic papers?
- ackbar03 5y ago
  no idea where to start. The entire business model needs to be changed? I feel like its highly intertwined with the entire academia ecosystem, from grants, fundings, universities etc. But I think there were claims before that these journals were basically using their reputation to make outsized profits? i.e. all they do is receive publications, charge universities outrageous fees to access, and don't even pay reviewers? Thus an increasing number of predatory journals trying to take advantage of this model. If that is proven to be true I guess there is a case for nationalizing research publication work? Honestly I have no idea though, I don't know enough details about this
- pixel_tracing 5y ago
  You start with the scientists make it prestigious to publish in an open source journal, make it sexy, make it lucrative.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Well APS opened a new open access journal PRX which is more prestigious even than PRL, so I don't think that's the problem. Also Nature, which is like, the most prestigious, is also open access...
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      Nature is open access? Like what recently? And I assume they ask for a metric ton in cash to do that?
      - joeberon 5y ago
        Nevermind it's just Nature communications which is open access, I think the others require a fee
      - krab 5y ago
        It surprised me as well. But apparently, it's up to the authors (or their institution) to choose. > From January 2021, authors submitting primary research articles* to Nature will be able to choose to publish their work using either the traditional publishing route OR Open Access. > *Non-primary research (e.g. Reviews, Comments, News & Views) is not eligible for Open Access and is only published using the traditional publishing route. https://www.nature.com/nature/our-publishing-models https://www.nature.com/nature/our-publishing-models > The APC to publish Open Access in Nature is €9,500 https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options
        Isinlor 5y ago
        In many countries you could sponsor PhD student for a year on €9,500. It's just crime in white gloves. Academics are defrauding public money by having anything to do with Nature. Running Arxiv per paper costs somewhere in the order of 10 dollars.
        krab 5y ago
        From the list of latest articles[1], you can see it's indeed not the most popular option. Only one in seven articles from the last few pages is OA. The other OA journals still cost money that needs to be budgeted, i. e. not something you would pay out of your pocket. For example PLOS One charges you $ 1749. I guess the prices for publishing the articles may actually converge on a fair price for the reputation associated with the journal. [1]: https://www.nature.com/nature/research-articles https://www.nature.com/nature/research-articles
  - matthewdgreen 5y ago
    Forget sexy and lucrative. You make the NSF and NIH et al. require a link to an open website like Arxiv for each paper mentioned in an annual report. Instead of the crazy system that NSF currently has where you have to upload PDFs to their private Department of Energy archival service that taxpayers can’t access.
- xvilka 5y ago
  Sponsor or help to develop SciHub, LibGen, IPFS-based storage, arXiv and Co.
- blaeks 5y ago
  Imagine the live map of the money-flow around the research/review/publishing/usage. It could give us some hints. Pain becomes palpable If one think about it. Maybe some thermodynamically provable illustrations of the energy around the issue would help us illustrate the problem (read: the scale of sickness of the 'intellectual property') My hunch is that we're at the stage where KWh could - and should be used as the universal money (with all implications and hurdles it may signal) Like purified BTC.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    This is completely incomprehensible
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      (I think it meant) "If you visualize the monetary flow in the article publishing business, the "sickness" involved («pain») becomes visible: the energy waste becomes so apparent that it suggests replacing money directly with energy". Concept that its author wanted to stress by crafting an energy consuming post. (Joeberon, you never had to extensively decrypt the texts of theoretical philosophers of the latest centuries, had you ;) )
      - joeberon 5y ago
        I'm a physicist, and personally have very little interest in philosophy. I haven't read really any philosophy at all EDIT: actually that is false, I have read a lot of eastern philosophy, but that to me is more of a religious thing
  - mvind 5y ago
    i agree with this guy!!
- joeberon 5y ago
  Just encourage people to upload their paper to an open access archive like arXiv first. Very few journals disallow this, it's just that authors are either too lazy or just don't want to make their paper publicly available.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    It's also very field-specific. Like in computer science, almost everyone uploads to arXiv.
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Yeah same in some fields of Physics, for example all theoretical stuff, along with most optical or optomechanical stuff is always on the arXiv, however for example some obscure paper on seismic noise might only be in some very expensive journal
- amelius 5y ago
  Mention SciHub in your acknowledgements section.
- refurb 5y ago
  Tell authors to publish in open access journals? Oh right, they don’t want to because they aren’t as prestigious.
  - quantum_magpie 5y ago
    We don't want to because publishing in open access costs us $2000.
    - conz 5y ago
      We don't want to because publishing in open access costs us $2000. Out of curiosity, what does publishing in closed-access journals cost?
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        There's no way to be sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Or were you just referring to money?
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        I think the reference would be e.g. to post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691445 in this page from stuartbman («free for the author but kept behind a paywall, or the author pays up front»)
      - quantum_magpie 5y ago
        Nothing.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Closed-access journals charge the paper author thousands of dollars per page.
        IndPhysiker 5y ago
        It varies depending on the subject area and publisher. Some are free to publish, some have a few hundred dollars a page or more for color (as though they actually print them still), where others might charge thousands to balance the operation costs of a printing company along with journal subscribers. Some journals essentially demand a first born.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  When you quote a paper in your own work, explicitly mention that the resource is captive in a walled garden.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    And, in your online PDF, link the citation to the Sci-hub copy. This can be automated.
NmAmDa 5y ago
"Swartz potentially faced more jail time for downloading academic papers than he would have if he had helped Al Qaeda build a nuclear weapon. " Too much for the American values.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mettamage 5y ago
  It's things like this that make me believe that the US isn't a truly free society. It simply pretends it is. But all nations have their problems. The US simply has more than one might think.
  - TheTester 5y ago
    It is a Masonic society that actually pretends to give freedom to their sheep but is nothing more than an ilusión they merely choose which door to use when they go to the slaughterhouse
  - xorfish 5y ago
    The US has the highest prison population per capita in the world. Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.
    - nivenkos 5y ago
      It's good for violent crimes though. Whereas in Sweden for example, a violent rapist was awarded ~$84k - https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%C3%A5nd-ett-h%C3%A5n-mot-brottsoffren-1.52986188 https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%... - after he turned out to be a minor but had been tried as an adult, and in the end spent less than 2 years in prison. Some of ThePirateBay founders had longer sentences, absolute clown world.
      - xorfish 5y ago
        That outdated view in your comment is exactly what I mean. There might be an argument if the US actually had lower crime or recidivism rates than European countries, but it does not have that. Yes, it takes some effort to overcome that primal view on justice, but it leads to a more humane society with less crime.
musicale 5y ago
It's unfortunate that technical societies such as the ACM and IEEE (for example) seem to view their digital libraries as cash cows to be milked to pay for non-library overhead. I hope that increasing open access mandates - including distribution rights - for taxpayer-funded research will help to break down the paywalls. It's encouraging that the University of California has open access requirements - hopefully they will become universal among public and private universities.
frankling_ 5y ago
The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Funding and career advancement hinge on publications in these venues. If we accept that publishers don't offer much at all in return for the publication fees/library subscription costs (barely any editing, reviewers work pro bono, hosting PDFs is very cheap nowadays), the main issue is one of "reputation transfer". One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, so for each "Transactions on XYZ" there would be an "Open Transactions on XYZ" (as close in title as is legal). Importantly, each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), and according to the same process as the original journal, just without involvement from a traditional publisher. PDFs would be hosted on a site like arXiv. The goal would be that submitting to the open "sibling" would be the obvious rational choice (same people, same decision-making, no fees, open access), which in time even the funding agencies and tenure committees would have to acknowledge.
- eecc 5y ago
  I guess that’s why the journals insist on copyright transfer. At best you get a ”copy” you can share via email when asked personally; the equivalent of a musician paid a couple drink coupons to share with their friends that came to see the gig…
  - frankling_ 5y ago
    I'm not suggesting to publish every paper twice. The author submits only to one of the two journals. If it's the original journal, the article appears exactly as is common now, behind a paywall, and that's it. If it's the new sibling journal, the publisher of the original journal has nothing to do with it, no copyright transfer occurs, and the paper appears only on a free and open platform.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Sure there is a way around it. You publish in an established venue, but also put the paper on a public website. This is possible legally using the "standard trick": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 ... and is in relatively wide practice.
sam0x17 5y ago
As scientists, we need to stop citing papers that are behind a paywall. That is the only way this will end without external intervention e.g. actual regulation outlawing certain aspects of the pay-walls.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  As a scientist, I am obliged to cite every paper that is relevant to my work and that I refer to in any way, be that by paraphrase, mentioning, or direct quotation. You can't just ignore previous work because you don't like the way it was published.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Annnd that's how we got where we are folks. I guess it depends how you view your obligations. If you don't want people to be able to read, vet, or reproduce your research because the citations are suspiciously tricky to follow up on, that is of course your prerogative. As a scientist free and fair access to accurate and easily verifiable information should, of course, be in the forefront of what you care about. It is completely doable as well -- I've done it with my research for years. Even when citing books, I always ensure the relevant passages are available in Google Book search or something like SciHub. If not, I won't cite that source, because I wouldn't have been able to access it in the first place anyway.
    - jonathanstrange 5y ago
      I don't think it's a good idea to jeopardize scientific integrity in the fight against exorbitant subscription fees, that's going way too far. As convenient as Sci-Hub and Libgen are (everyone uses them because they are convenient), you seem to be blissfully unaware of the public library system and the fact that you can order any book or article from any research library in your country. Maybe it's a generational thing, I still remember going to large research library on a bike, ordering 30 articles and books and spending hours at the copying machine. It is possible to work that way, just less convenient. Anyway, the point is that it should be possible to fight expensive subscription fees and at the same time give credit to where it's due.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
> it seems clear that in the absence of the academic publishing industry, scholarship would be more widely available, not less I am thinking of the newspaper industry. Their paywalls didn't work (most of them). Now, there is a lot more news of worse quality. It gives me pause. It almost seems like a near perfect state — a world where Sci-Hub exists and the academic publishing industry. It's like having a thriving recording industry and Napster.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  The declining quality of journalism comes from cultural tolerance of bad quality - otherwise, they could just have remained unpublished. In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). Similarly, the interest towards openly accessible research results is public.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    > In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). I assume "raking" is a typo for "ranking", but I'm still not sure I understand your point. The only official rankings for newspapers I'm aware of is circulation. Are you saying that a newspaper from say Ireland or Lithuania is of does not reach thresholds of quality for public use because they have a smaller target market than Fox News or Bild? (I doubt that's what you mean, but I can't identify an alternative meaning.) What actually is a threshold of quality for public use?
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      No, the size of the target market is certainly not an indicator of quality - on the contrary: an idealized public tends to enhance quality. Rankings exist; a widespread one is the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. If you check the 2021 ratings on the map¹, you will see that excellence is reserved to a few countries only - CostaRica, Portugal and Ireland fare better than the UK, France, Germany, the USA and Australia. With "receiving public funding yet not reaching thresholds of quality for public use" it was meant that if the news organization receives public funding, its quality should reach some level well above that of an agency financially left to its own devices, and its quality should justify public investment. An entity receiving public funding is supposed to respond about its use - practices, outcomes etc. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg -- Now: the poster seemed to indicate a relation between "market" (number of buyers) and quality. The idea that information, commentary, analysis and research results and validation can be made akin to a "deregulated and for profit industry" (e.g. the music industry) is perplexing. Bread and water - privatized or not - must be accessible and not toxic, as part of societal organization. Less buyers' funding does not imply quality decrease, and free access to vital parts of knowledge is public concern.
mach1ne 5y ago
The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation. Even if they resisted, they still have the entire academic publishing industry very scared, and as we can see, these are people who aren't afraid to use the dirtiest tactics to protect their position. Even though the status quo is strong, it can be dismantled.
- OskarS 5y ago
  The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.
  - mach1ne 5y ago
    I think it proves my point. Would you rather see your paper featured in Nature or on any open access journal of your choice? Would you trust more on a random article from Nature or an article from any open access journal?
    - jltsiren 5y ago
      I would like to have a paper featured in Nature but published in a volunteer-run non-profit open access journal. The papers published in prestigious journals are often not very useful, because they must be written for a rather general audience. When I'm building upon someone else's work, the information I'm interested in tends to be buried in the supplements, because it's too obscure for the audience of the journal.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.
stuartbman 5y ago
Anecdotally, my university has been paying for fewer and fewer journal subscriptions. I was looking through the literature the other day and about half of the articles I needed to access weren't subscribed to by my (large, redbrick) university. I believe this is a shift recognising that academics will just skirt the access via sci-hub as a way for universities to trim their library budgets.
- tokai 5y ago
  Nah is almost definitely because of lower funding for the library. The budgets globally are so squeezed now that publishers are actually lowering their fees for the first time since the industry started.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    And because the publishers are being squeezed from all sides, including from sci-hub and proposed legislation, universities requiring open journals and so on.
- vehemenz 5y ago
  Same deal here. Some journals are not available, and the ones I have access to are difficult to search because they're spread among multiple aggregation services. This in a top 50 university in the US with ~50,000 students.
tejassanap 5y ago
There is no innovation when secrecy is involved.
Bellamy 5y ago
> Nobel laureates wrote a separate letter encouraging the Trump administration to go ahead with its plans—which, in any event, never came to fruition. What's the status with Biden administration?
advael 5y ago
I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most parsimonious solution. Nationalizing and then freeing scientific information, as this article proposes, is a solution that has widespread support among the experts generating the actual knowledge that would be shared, has obvious compounding benefits, and only harms a business model. I think so many people have become disillusioned with the promise of capitalism and profit motive precisely because we keep insisting that it needs to be our only tool in every situation, with frequently disastrous consequences.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits. What are the core functions of a journal? 1. facilitate reviews 2. distribute articles selected through #1 It seems to me that #2 is where the potential for restrictive and exploitative business models really shows up. The curation function #1 should be something that can be accomplished at nominal expense. Universities should be able to fund that collaboratively for very low cost, pro-socially without a need to recuperate those costs. Why don't we see that? I suspect that it's the existing journal industry blocking such a development.
  - advael 5y ago
    I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many journals getting the work of expert scholars as peer-reviewers for free. As someone in a different comment thread pointed out, part of the barrier for such a move is that funding decisions build journals in as a gatekeeper, so effectively funding is locked behind publication. It's possible that simply removing the publishers from the equation would create the result everyone but them seems to want "automagically"
hoseja 5y ago
>the cause of open access to information enjoys broad support in (...) the machine learning field Ah yes, as shown by the example of OpenAI.
- advael 5y ago
  A name that is ironic in the same way as the "academic publishing industry" (as mentioned in the article) OpenAI's weird insistence that its "open" research only be accessible to entities it trusts not to do harm with it (like... Microsoft of course!) is indicative of a divide between academic research and corporate research that exists in all fields. While there are serious concerns about AI risk, when I hear it in a corporate context, it always seems to be a thin veneer of affected concern painted over an all-too-familiar drive to keep innovation under lock and key When talking about ML's preference for open access, the article was probably referring to the fact that ML literature is overwhelmingly published on arXiv or similarly open-access places (even if it's also published elsewhere) compared to most fields. Personally, I think this is strictly because it's a relatively new field without as many entrenched norms
cybert00th 5y ago
> But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam. Those are fair sentiments but in my experience, replacing one ideological solution (capitalism) with another (socialism) just shifts the pile of money to be made, from one group of people to another. From my perspective, I'm not sure there really is a solution as, no matter what we try, at some point somewhere greed just seems to get the better of us.
- johnday 5y ago
  Who exactly do you see as profiting from a globally open-access paper store?
sirodoht 5y ago
Side note that might interest some people: we started a Sci-Hub meetup in London with (among other goals) to try and find ways to help Sci-Hub and contribute to the Open Access movement. https://scihublondon.org/ https://scihublondon.org/
jtbayly 5y ago
> “few public figures, if any, draw the direct connection between the expensive barricades around scientific research and the conspicuous epistemic collapse of significant portions of the American political discourse.” That’s because it’s a major claim that has to be defended, not simply declared. On its face the claim seems absurd to me.
- pacbard 5y ago
  It could even be argued that the barricade around scientific research is what kept the epistemic "superiority" of academia and academics. Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. It's possible that this democratization process has opened up the scientific knowledge to the masses but it is also possible that access to scientific literature doesn't really help without the training required to make sense of it.
  - dsign 5y ago
    Scientific papers are incredibly specialized, and no amount of general training makes them easier to read. The best way to get good at reading your topic is to... well, do a lot of reading/corroboration reviewing of said papers. Access to scientific papers is needed, no matter what.
  - naasking 5y ago
    > Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. I think we'd be better off letting people read the papers themselves, even if they do a poor job of it. Seems very unlikely to be any worse than science journalism as it currently exists.
  - ravitation 5y ago
    I see this all the time... I work in medical research (basic science, not clinical), and I see people "cite" papers, based solely on their titles, without understanding, or likely even reading, the nuanced findings of the actual papers. It's dangerous because it gives people, often with secondary agendas, the illusion of scientific backing when there really isn't any (or when it's far more nuanced). I'll just note that I am still in favor of open over closed, but I think we're lagging in scientific literacy currently.
pdm55 5y ago
I hold conflicted views on this issue. I don't want to inhibit authors from publishing, as I love books. But often they are too expensive. So, about 50% of the time I pay for them, and 50% of the time I get them from sci-hub. And certainly paying for scientific articles is a big rip off. It effectively means that once you are no longer enrolled or working at a university, your access to this paywalled information is gone.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  How do you get books from Sci-hub?
  - pdm55 5y ago
    https://z-lib.org/ https://z-lib.org/
spansoa 5y ago
Sci-Hub needs to be uncensorable and forked into a separate project, without Alexandra E. at the helm. It needs to be a Tor hidden service with the admin being completely anonymous. There's too much heat around the project currently. Jumping from ccTLD to ccTLD may help a small bit, but a hidden service with an unknown admin (or group of admins!) is exponentially better.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Putting it on the “dark web” is just a different, more effective barrier than the money barrier the industry wants.
  - spansoa 5y ago
    > more effective barrier Tor, or more specifically the Tor Browser Bundle is not some huge hurdle to overcome if you want to browse certain content. I imagine for the audience of Sci-Hub, downloading then using Tor is no biggie. The only real hurdle may be discovery of the right .ONION but once you search for `The Hidden Wiki` on DuckDuckGo you will be soon in Onionland and there are plenty of search engines and directories on there that could potentially point to the latest Sci-Hub .ONION
    - jtbayly 5y ago
      I can't think of anybody else that has Tor on their computer, or knows how to get it or whether it's safe, or why they should get it. I have had Tor on my computer for years, and I've never heard of 'The Hidden Wiki'. On the other hand, I know people who have searched for papers and downloaded them from Scihub. I don't think you know "the audience" for Sci-Hub. It's meant to make the content public, not free for the right people who already know tons of stuff about the dark web.
ghoul2 5y ago
Everytime scihub is mentioned on HN, multiple comments go on about how it should go "distrubuted" - ipfs, torrents, etc. While the current database of scihub is hugely valuable and must be protected in whatever way we can, the true value of scihub is in the "invisible" network of sources for the papers - how quickly papers find their way into the scihub db once they are published. A non-updating scihub will start to depreciate in utility very quickly. _Thats_ the true value Alexandra E brings to scihub - and not easily replaced if she quits/gets into legal trouble/etc.
- temp8964 5y ago
  If what you said is true, then it seems unreasonable to make the whole thing depends on her. Isn't it? So not only we need distributed storage of the database / files, we also need distributed method to update the database / files.
  - nlitened 5y ago
    Yes. Unfortunately, not that many free countries are left on earth, where one can download and distribute scientific papers without getting into jail.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Non-cooperation with US authorities is a very different thing from general freedom. I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN. In the case of scientific publishing, the US authorities are in the wrong and I'm glad their reach does not extend everywhere.
      - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
        > I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN. This sounds like some "... assuming your not a Red ..." Cold War-era dialogue to me. Is that really the best way of expressing your point about the differences between personal freedom and non-cooperation with US law.
kriro 5y ago
The real way to change anything (imo) is to get the tax payers more angry at the status quo and out-inovate the current journals. Right now, I'm pretty sure most people don't care about academic publishing or even know what is going on. The scandal in my opinion is that a professor or phd candidate is paid by the state to do research and then the state has to pay again to license the contributions their employees made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free. The main problem is that the academic system is a dog eat dog world with people clinging to their positions or fighting with all dirty tricks in the book to get tenure, reputation or funding. I'm not sure how to fix it. The way to get to a better world probably leads through blood sweat and motivation by small groups. Run an open access journal, make it the best or highly regarded in your small niche. The more of these exist, the better. Maybe that's an interesting area for an accelerator to pump some non-profit money into. Hire some people as editors, make the content available for free. Use startup strategies to turn it into a very feisty publisher where academics want to publish. Make sure the stuff in the journal is easy to cite and becomes cited often etc. Use a bowling pin strategy to start with one topic (probably something computer science related) and once that is excellent, branch out.
- sitkack 5y ago
  Since corporations have captured government, the solution is as you say, to "burn down" the old journals and rebuild them on top of arxiv, dblp, semantic scholar, git, etc. The ACM is slowly starting to open up, but it really needs to go all in and just be free for everyone and get a lower amount of of funding from way more sources. You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier. Throw in forums, video conferencing and shared docs and you can build entire academic structures in the cloud. Run a journal on a subreddit, papers on arxiv, video on meet (recordings posted to youtube), code in github, computation on colab notebooks. WeWork should offer wetlab space. ;) Ideally we would have a storage commons where data that doesn't fit into the arxiv model of papers. Something like object storage but with some built in structure.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    The problem is that this assumes academics want to change and use new methods to distribute their work. The primary goal of all academics is to secure more grants - what happens afterwards is an afterthought.
Terretta 5y ago
Every time this comes up, I ask if the “academic publishing industry” provides any service where I, as an individual, can subscribe for one reasonable subscription fee, to one single site, with all the research. It seems no. - No one service or site or subscription or pass - No reasonable fee - No aggregation of all the research They’ve externalized the useful work back onto the user. Sci-hub does that work for me. If I could pay $100/month* for sci-hub, I would. * Footnote: Arbitrarily rating it as 3x more value than, say, Bloomberg. And while I think it should be a public service rather than a fee, if there is a fee, it likely should be geo-adjusted by global income bands: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/408581467988942234/pdf/WPS7528.pdf https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/4085814679889422...
- wrycoder 5y ago
  What about Deepdyve?
  - Terretta 5y ago
    Good question. They don’t make this obvious, but: - you don’t get the article, you get a browser window - they only have about 1/2 of the articles (!) Quoting from their FAQ: Q. What does "renting" mean? Renting articles is the simple and affordable way to get the high quality articles that you want, with the same layout and formatting as the printed or PDF versions. "Rented" articles are available through DeepDyve's cloud-based service and can be viewed through your browser from anywhere you have an internet connection. Read full text articles as often as you want during the rental period, and depending on your plan, you may print a limited number of pages per month. However, rented articles cannot be downloaded or shared. Q. Why can't I rent, download, or print some articles? DeepDyve works with many publishers but unfortunately not all of them have given us permission to let our users rent, download, or print some/all of their articles. If an article is marked as "Preview" it means we only have permission to display the abstract but nothing else. As for downloading PDF’s, approximately half of the articles in our collection can be purchased and downloaded directly from DeepDyve. For the remaining half, DeepDyve provides a link that takes you to the publisher site where you can purchase the PDF directly from them.
Bayart 5y ago
Before Sci-Hub, I had to find those among my friends with the right access credentials to the right publishers and ask them to get the articles on my behalf, often in batches to not make too much an annoyance of myself. Needless to say Sci-Hub has been a massive improvement to my quality of life, insofar as satiating my intellectual curiosity is needed. And I'm not even a researcher.
- sitkack 5y ago
  Two great uses of sci-hub are for historic papers when walking the reference chain backwards in time and anything IEEE. I really wish IEEE and ACM would open their entire catalog of knowledge over a certain age, I don't really care what year they pick.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    IEEE journals, and especially their standards, do actually provide a value added service that government funding doesn’t cover and they obviously run as part of a non profit so it seems very morally ambiguous. I imagine likewise for ACM.
    - sitkack 5y ago
      I think the work of the standards bodies needs to be disambiguated from Open Access journals. In no way am equating IEEE and ACM with Springer and Elsevier. For the longest time, I think they have recently relaxed a bit, but IEEE forbid authors from posting a copy of their paper on their academic web page.
- gms7777 5y ago
  I am a researcher, and despite having institutional access to most papers I want, I still rely heavily on Sci-Hub as do my colleagues. It has been such an incredibly valuable resource and I'm constantly surprised by how complete it is -- I very rarely come across a paper I need access to that it doesn't have. I do wonder sometimes if it almost makes it too easy, in a way that ends up propping up the status quo of closed publishing and takes away the incentive of publishing in open access sources. Early in my career I remember discussions about publishing in closed journals, concerns that papers will be less read because people may not have access to them. In the last few years, I feel like this has gone away because it seems like everyone (among researchers at least) knows about Sci-Hub. I mean, I still think that on the whole, Sci-Hub is a good thing for the research community and the state of the publishing industry -- it gives people access to the research and ultimately does take some money out of the publishers' pockets. But it does also make a broken system feel less broken, and thus people are less willing to actively push for change.
ravenstine 5y ago
I've heard multiple times, and I don't remember exactly from where, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request. If that is the case, why exactly don't researchers stick their papers literally anywhere on the internet that isn't a paywall? Is there a legal difference between sharing a paper with an individual and uploading it to a public index? Honestly, with the current psychology of the public, I don't think this would be worse than having journals pick holding research for ransom.
- jasode 5y ago
  >, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request. Yes but in most cases, the authors are only legally allowed to give away the less desirable pre-prints manuscripts that was created for journal submission. The publishers allow them to retain the copyright to their draft work. However, the copyright to the final journal article with all the nice typesetting, pretty graphs, etc is assigned to the publisher. That more desirable finished article is the one behind the paywall. (That's not to say that some authors "break the rules" and share the final journal article instead of their preprint but that's going to depend on the particular author.)
  - IndPhysiker 5y ago
    Many for-profit journals are now giving authors a few freebies of final versions to share with friends as the PDFs have DRM included. Old school researchers back before social media would use new articles they can't access as a reason to introduce themselves and build the professional network, which I sincerely hope is still going on.
- petschge 5y ago
  Because the rules allow us to send out copies of the final article in "personal correspondence with other researchers" but limit upload to preprint servers (arxiv) and institutional repositories (our own website) to the last version that we submitted, without the services of the journal, i.e. before language editing and layouting.
ncmncm 5y ago
Incidentally, many researchers still believe that, to publish in (what they think of as) "high-impact" journals, they have to sign over copyright to the journal. The journals make every effort to give this impression, but it is wholly false. This has been a public service announcement.
shae 5y ago
Misinformation is free, real research is expensive, even if funded by your tax dollars.
hyperstar 5y ago
is it impossible to access sci-hub without a browser extension?
mlinksva 5y ago
> Few people today are priced out of streaming films or buying MP3s The article is trying to underscore the expensiveness of scientific literature (undeniable) with the above, but it is true for any reasonable value of "few"?
dredmorbius 5y ago
Let's not forget the names of the prosecutors who literally hounded Aaron Swartz to his death: Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. May their names always be associated with this infamy.
rramadass 5y ago
PSA: The article Title is somewhat confusing. It actually argues for the knowledge-sharing model that Sci-Hub (and its brethren) advocate. At the end, the article says: But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. It is quite frustrating that the Scientific Community producing the Intellectual Property that the "Academic Publishing Industry" makes money out of, is not doing more to bring the "Cartel" down once and for all. Have they become so pusillanimous that they are no longer willing to stand-up against what is clearly unethical and wrong? It is time to re-read The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitu...) and ACT on it.
beckman466 5y ago
> Whether intended or not, the impossibly high paywalls of academic publishers only serve to keep scientific information out of the population’s hands. What makes this even more discordant is that the people being prevented from accessing the information are often also the taxpayers who helped fund the research in the first place. > By framing the debate about Sci-Hub as one concerning property rights, both advocates of Elbakyan’s site and its detractors fall afoul of what John Gall called the “operational fallacy.” In his book The Systems Bible, Gall defined the operational fallacy as a situation where “the system itself does not do what it says it is doing.” In other words, what a system calls itself is not always a reliable indicator of its true function. In this case, the name of the “academic publishing industry” implies that it is supposed to be involved in the dissemination of scholarship. But the effective function of the academic publishing industry as it actually exists is to prevent the dissemination of scholarly work. The author mentions his disproval of Elbakyan and her friends focusing on property rights, yet doesn't actually make a logical or convincing argument against it. Fail. The reason Elbakyan focuses on property rights is because intellectual property is the most harmful thing blocking science today. Intellectual property literally commoditizes and monopolizes collective feedback loops/learnings, disinheriting the working class.
valgor 5y ago
What is a good way to support sci-hub? Given the nature of illegally share documents and the constantly server hopping, I have always been apprehensive about supporting sci-hub even though I want to.

331 points by sixtyfourbits 5y ago

jf 5y ago

What are pragmatic things that we can do to push for open access for academic papers?

ackbar03 5y ago
no idea where to start. The entire business model needs to be changed? I feel like its highly intertwined with the entire academia ecosystem, from grants, fundings, universities etc. But I think there were claims before that these journals were basically using their reputation to make outsized profits? i.e. all they do is receive publications, charge universities outrageous fees to access, and don't even pay reviewers? Thus an increasing number of predatory journals trying to take advantage of this model. If that is proven to be true I guess there is a case for nationalizing research publication work? Honestly I have no idea though, I don't know enough details about this
pixel_tracing 5y ago
You start with the scientists make it prestigious to publish in an open source journal, make it sexy, make it lucrative.
- joeberon 5y ago
  Well APS opened a new open access journal PRX which is more prestigious even than PRL, so I don't think that's the problem. Also Nature, which is like, the most prestigious, is also open access...
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Nature is open access? Like what recently? And I assume they ask for a metric ton in cash to do that?
    - joeberon 5y ago
      Nevermind it's just Nature communications which is open access, I think the others require a fee
    - krab 5y ago
      It surprised me as well. But apparently, it's up to the authors (or their institution) to choose. > From January 2021, authors submitting primary research articles* to Nature will be able to choose to publish their work using either the traditional publishing route OR Open Access. > *Non-primary research (e.g. Reviews, Comments, News & Views) is not eligible for Open Access and is only published using the traditional publishing route. https://www.nature.com/nature/our-publishing-models https://www.nature.com/nature/our-publishing-models > The APC to publish Open Access in Nature is €9,500 https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/publishing-options
      - Isinlor 5y ago
        In many countries you could sponsor PhD student for a year on €9,500. It's just crime in white gloves. Academics are defrauding public money by having anything to do with Nature. Running Arxiv per paper costs somewhere in the order of 10 dollars.
        krab 5y ago
        From the list of latest articles[1], you can see it's indeed not the most popular option. Only one in seven articles from the last few pages is OA. The other OA journals still cost money that needs to be budgeted, i. e. not something you would pay out of your pocket. For example PLOS One charges you $ 1749. I guess the prices for publishing the articles may actually converge on a fair price for the reputation associated with the journal. [1]: https://www.nature.com/nature/research-articles https://www.nature.com/nature/research-articles
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  Forget sexy and lucrative. You make the NSF and NIH et al. require a link to an open website like Arxiv for each paper mentioned in an annual report. Instead of the crazy system that NSF currently has where you have to upload PDFs to their private Department of Energy archival service that taxpayers can’t access.
xvilka 5y ago
Sponsor or help to develop SciHub, LibGen, IPFS-based storage, arXiv and Co.
blaeks 5y ago
Imagine the live map of the money-flow around the research/review/publishing/usage. It could give us some hints. Pain becomes palpable If one think about it. Maybe some thermodynamically provable illustrations of the energy around the issue would help us illustrate the problem (read: the scale of sickness of the 'intellectual property') My hunch is that we're at the stage where KWh could - and should be used as the universal money (with all implications and hurdles it may signal) Like purified BTC.
- joeberon 5y ago
  This is completely incomprehensible
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    (I think it meant) "If you visualize the monetary flow in the article publishing business, the "sickness" involved («pain») becomes visible: the energy waste becomes so apparent that it suggests replacing money directly with energy". Concept that its author wanted to stress by crafting an energy consuming post. (Joeberon, you never had to extensively decrypt the texts of theoretical philosophers of the latest centuries, had you ;) )
    - joeberon 5y ago
      I'm a physicist, and personally have very little interest in philosophy. I haven't read really any philosophy at all EDIT: actually that is false, I have read a lot of eastern philosophy, but that to me is more of a religious thing
- mvind 5y ago
  i agree with this guy!!
joeberon 5y ago
Just encourage people to upload their paper to an open access archive like arXiv first. Very few journals disallow this, it's just that authors are either too lazy or just don't want to make their paper publicly available.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  It's also very field-specific. Like in computer science, almost everyone uploads to arXiv.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    Yeah same in some fields of Physics, for example all theoretical stuff, along with most optical or optomechanical stuff is always on the arXiv, however for example some obscure paper on seismic noise might only be in some very expensive journal
amelius 5y ago
Mention SciHub in your acknowledgements section.
refurb 5y ago
Tell authors to publish in open access journals? Oh right, they don’t want to because they aren’t as prestigious.
- quantum_magpie 5y ago
  We don't want to because publishing in open access costs us $2000.
  - conz 5y ago
    We don't want to because publishing in open access costs us $2000. Out of curiosity, what does publishing in closed-access journals cost?
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      There's no way to be sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Or were you just referring to money?
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      I think the reference would be e.g. to post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28691445 in this page from stuartbman («free for the author but kept behind a paywall, or the author pays up front»)
    - quantum_magpie 5y ago
      Nothing.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Closed-access journals charge the paper author thousands of dollars per page.
      - IndPhysiker 5y ago
        It varies depending on the subject area and publisher. Some are free to publish, some have a few hundred dollars a page or more for color (as though they actually print them still), where others might charge thousands to balance the operation costs of a printing company along with journal subscribers. Some journals essentially demand a first born.
ur-whale 5y ago
When you quote a paper in your own work, explicitly mention that the resource is captive in a walled garden.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  And, in your online PDF, link the citation to the Sci-hub copy. This can be automated.

NmAmDa 5y ago

"Swartz potentially faced more jail time for downloading academic papers than he would have if he had helped Al Qaeda build a nuclear weapon. " Too much for the American values.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mettamage 5y ago
It's things like this that make me believe that the US isn't a truly free society. It simply pretends it is. But all nations have their problems. The US simply has more than one might think.
- TheTester 5y ago
  It is a Masonic society that actually pretends to give freedom to their sheep but is nothing more than an ilusión they merely choose which door to use when they go to the slaughterhouse
- xorfish 5y ago
  The US has the highest prison population per capita in the world. Mostly because of an outdated view on justice and crime.
  - nivenkos 5y ago
    It's good for violent crimes though. Whereas in Sweden for example, a violent rapist was awarded ~$84k - https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%C3%A5nd-ett-h%C3%A5n-mot-brottsoffren-1.52986188 https://www.gp.se/ledare/v%C3%A5ldt%C3%A4ktsmannens-skadest%... - after he turned out to be a minor but had been tried as an adult, and in the end spent less than 2 years in prison. Some of ThePirateBay founders had longer sentences, absolute clown world.
    - xorfish 5y ago
      That outdated view in your comment is exactly what I mean. There might be an argument if the US actually had lower crime or recidivism rates than European countries, but it does not have that. Yes, it takes some effort to overcome that primal view on justice, but it leads to a more humane society with less crime.

musicale 5y ago

It's unfortunate that technical societies such as the ACM and IEEE (for example) seem to view their digital libraries as cash cows to be milked to pay for non-library overhead. I hope that increasing open access mandates - including distribution rights - for taxpayer-funded research will help to break down the paywalls. It's encouraging that the University of California has open access requirements - hopefully they will become universal among public and private universities.

frankling_ 5y ago

The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Funding and career advancement hinge on publications in these venues. If we accept that publishers don't offer much at all in return for the publication fees/library subscription costs (barely any editing, reviewers work pro bono, hosting PDFs is very cheap nowadays), the main issue is one of "reputation transfer". One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, so for each "Transactions on XYZ" there would be an "Open Transactions on XYZ" (as close in title as is legal). Importantly, each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), and according to the same process as the original journal, just without involvement from a traditional publisher. PDFs would be hosted on a site like arXiv. The goal would be that submitting to the open "sibling" would be the obvious rational choice (same people, same decision-making, no fees, open access), which in time even the funding agencies and tenure committees would have to acknowledge.

eecc 5y ago
I guess that’s why the journals insist on copyright transfer. At best you get a ”copy” you can share via email when asked personally; the equivalent of a musician paid a couple drink coupons to share with their friends that came to see the gig…
- frankling_ 5y ago
  I'm not suggesting to publish every paper twice. The author submits only to one of the two journals. If it's the original journal, the article appears exactly as is common now, behind a paywall, and that's it. If it's the new sibling journal, the publisher of the original journal has nothing to do with it, no copyright transfer occurs, and the paper appears only on a free and open platform.
einpoklum 5y ago
Sure there is a way around it. You publish in an established venue, but also put the paper on a public website. This is possible legally using the "standard trick": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 ... and is in relatively wide practice.

sam0x17 5y ago

As scientists, we need to stop citing papers that are behind a paywall. That is the only way this will end without external intervention e.g. actual regulation outlawing certain aspects of the pay-walls.

jonathanstrange 5y ago
As a scientist, I am obliged to cite every paper that is relevant to my work and that I refer to in any way, be that by paraphrase, mentioning, or direct quotation. You can't just ignore previous work because you don't like the way it was published.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Annnd that's how we got where we are folks. I guess it depends how you view your obligations. If you don't want people to be able to read, vet, or reproduce your research because the citations are suspiciously tricky to follow up on, that is of course your prerogative. As a scientist free and fair access to accurate and easily verifiable information should, of course, be in the forefront of what you care about. It is completely doable as well -- I've done it with my research for years. Even when citing books, I always ensure the relevant passages are available in Google Book search or something like SciHub. If not, I won't cite that source, because I wouldn't have been able to access it in the first place anyway.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    I don't think it's a good idea to jeopardize scientific integrity in the fight against exorbitant subscription fees, that's going way too far. As convenient as Sci-Hub and Libgen are (everyone uses them because they are convenient), you seem to be blissfully unaware of the public library system and the fact that you can order any book or article from any research library in your country. Maybe it's a generational thing, I still remember going to large research library on a bike, ordering 30 articles and books and spending hours at the copying machine. It is possible to work that way, just less convenient. Anyway, the point is that it should be possible to fight expensive subscription fees and at the same time give credit to where it's due.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

> it seems clear that in the absence of the academic publishing industry, scholarship would be more widely available, not less I am thinking of the newspaper industry. Their paywalls didn't work (most of them). Now, there is a lot more news of worse quality. It gives me pause. It almost seems like a near perfect state — a world where Sci-Hub exists and the academic publishing industry. It's like having a thriving recording industry and Napster.

mdp2021 5y ago
The declining quality of journalism comes from cultural tolerance of bad quality - otherwise, they could just have remained unpublished. In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). Similarly, the interest towards openly accessible research results is public.
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > In some Countries, newspapers receive public funding yet may not reach thresholds of quality for public use (in many top industrialized countries the press has disappointing international official raking). I assume "raking" is a typo for "ranking", but I'm still not sure I understand your point. The only official rankings for newspapers I'm aware of is circulation. Are you saying that a newspaper from say Ireland or Lithuania is of does not reach thresholds of quality for public use because they have a smaller target market than Fox News or Bild? (I doubt that's what you mean, but I can't identify an alternative meaning.) What actually is a threshold of quality for public use?
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    No, the size of the target market is certainly not an indicator of quality - on the contrary: an idealized public tends to enhance quality. Rankings exist; a widespread one is the Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders. If you check the 2021 ratings on the map¹, you will see that excellence is reserved to a few countries only - CostaRica, Portugal and Ireland fare better than the UK, France, Germany, the USA and Australia. With "receiving public funding yet not reaching thresholds of quality for public use" it was meant that if the news organization receives public funding, its quality should reach some level well above that of an agency financially left to its own devices, and its quality should justify public investment. An entity receiving public funding is supposed to respond about its use - practices, outcomes etc. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Press_freedom_2021.svg -- Now: the poster seemed to indicate a relation between "market" (number of buyers) and quality. The idea that information, commentary, analysis and research results and validation can be made akin to a "deregulated and for profit industry" (e.g. the music industry) is perplexing. Bread and water - privatized or not - must be accessible and not toxic, as part of societal organization. Less buyers' funding does not imply quality decrease, and free access to vital parts of knowledge is public concern.

mach1ne 5y ago

The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation. Even if they resisted, they still have the entire academic publishing industry very scared, and as we can see, these are people who aren't afraid to use the dirtiest tactics to protect their position. Even though the status quo is strong, it can be dismantled.

OskarS 5y ago
The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.
- mach1ne 5y ago
  I think it proves my point. Would you rather see your paper featured in Nature or on any open access journal of your choice? Would you trust more on a random article from Nature or an article from any open access journal?
  - jltsiren 5y ago
    I would like to have a paper featured in Nature but published in a volunteer-run non-profit open access journal. The papers published in prestigious journals are often not very useful, because they must be written for a rather general audience. When I'm building upon someone else's work, the information I'm interested in tends to be buried in the supplements, because it's too obscure for the audience of the journal.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.

stuartbman 5y ago

Anecdotally, my university has been paying for fewer and fewer journal subscriptions. I was looking through the literature the other day and about half of the articles I needed to access weren't subscribed to by my (large, redbrick) university. I believe this is a shift recognising that academics will just skirt the access via sci-hub as a way for universities to trim their library budgets.

tokai 5y ago
Nah is almost definitely because of lower funding for the library. The budgets globally are so squeezed now that publishers are actually lowering their fees for the first time since the industry started.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  And because the publishers are being squeezed from all sides, including from sci-hub and proposed legislation, universities requiring open journals and so on.
vehemenz 5y ago
Same deal here. Some journals are not available, and the ones I have access to are difficult to search because they're spread among multiple aggregation services. This in a top 50 university in the US with ~50,000 students.

tejassanap 5y ago

There is no innovation when secrecy is involved.

Bellamy 5y ago

> Nobel laureates wrote a separate letter encouraging the Trump administration to go ahead with its plans—which, in any event, never came to fruition. What's the status with Biden administration?

advael 5y ago

I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most parsimonious solution. Nationalizing and then freeing scientific information, as this article proposes, is a solution that has widespread support among the experts generating the actual knowledge that would be shared, has obvious compounding benefits, and only harms a business model. I think so many people have become disillusioned with the promise of capitalism and profit motive precisely because we keep insisting that it needs to be our only tool in every situation, with frequently disastrous consequences.

paisawalla 5y ago
I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits. What are the core functions of a journal? 1. facilitate reviews 2. distribute articles selected through #1 It seems to me that #2 is where the potential for restrictive and exploitative business models really shows up. The curation function #1 should be something that can be accomplished at nominal expense. Universities should be able to fund that collaboratively for very low cost, pro-socially without a need to recuperate those costs. Why don't we see that? I suspect that it's the existing journal industry blocking such a development.
- advael 5y ago
  I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many journals getting the work of expert scholars as peer-reviewers for free. As someone in a different comment thread pointed out, part of the barrier for such a move is that funding decisions build journals in as a gatekeeper, so effectively funding is locked behind publication. It's possible that simply removing the publishers from the equation would create the result everyone but them seems to want "automagically"

hoseja 5y ago

>the cause of open access to information enjoys broad support in (...) the machine learning field Ah yes, as shown by the example of OpenAI.

advael 5y ago
A name that is ironic in the same way as the "academic publishing industry" (as mentioned in the article) OpenAI's weird insistence that its "open" research only be accessible to entities it trusts not to do harm with it (like... Microsoft of course!) is indicative of a divide between academic research and corporate research that exists in all fields. While there are serious concerns about AI risk, when I hear it in a corporate context, it always seems to be a thin veneer of affected concern painted over an all-too-familiar drive to keep innovation under lock and key When talking about ML's preference for open access, the article was probably referring to the fact that ML literature is overwhelmingly published on arXiv or similarly open-access places (even if it's also published elsewhere) compared to most fields. Personally, I think this is strictly because it's a relatively new field without as many entrenched norms

cybert00th 5y ago

> But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam. Those are fair sentiments but in my experience, replacing one ideological solution (capitalism) with another (socialism) just shifts the pile of money to be made, from one group of people to another. From my perspective, I'm not sure there really is a solution as, no matter what we try, at some point somewhere greed just seems to get the better of us.

johnday 5y ago
Who exactly do you see as profiting from a globally open-access paper store?

sirodoht 5y ago

Side note that might interest some people: we started a Sci-Hub meetup in London with (among other goals) to try and find ways to help Sci-Hub and contribute to the Open Access movement. https://scihublondon.org/ https://scihublondon.org/

jtbayly 5y ago

> “few public figures, if any, draw the direct connection between the expensive barricades around scientific research and the conspicuous epistemic collapse of significant portions of the American political discourse.” That’s because it’s a major claim that has to be defended, not simply declared. On its face the claim seems absurd to me.

pacbard 5y ago
It could even be argued that the barricade around scientific research is what kept the epistemic "superiority" of academia and academics. Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. It's possible that this democratization process has opened up the scientific knowledge to the masses but it is also possible that access to scientific literature doesn't really help without the training required to make sense of it.
- dsign 5y ago
  Scientific papers are incredibly specialized, and no amount of general training makes them easier to read. The best way to get good at reading your topic is to... well, do a lot of reading/corroboration reviewing of said papers. Access to scientific papers is needed, no matter what.
- naasking 5y ago
  > Opening up the tools to review the scientific literature gives people the power of "doing their own research" without having the tools and skills to decide whether a paper they have found on whatever topic is good research. I think we'd be better off letting people read the papers themselves, even if they do a poor job of it. Seems very unlikely to be any worse than science journalism as it currently exists.
- ravitation 5y ago
  I see this all the time... I work in medical research (basic science, not clinical), and I see people "cite" papers, based solely on their titles, without understanding, or likely even reading, the nuanced findings of the actual papers. It's dangerous because it gives people, often with secondary agendas, the illusion of scientific backing when there really isn't any (or when it's far more nuanced). I'll just note that I am still in favor of open over closed, but I think we're lagging in scientific literacy currently.

pdm55 5y ago

I hold conflicted views on this issue. I don't want to inhibit authors from publishing, as I love books. But often they are too expensive. So, about 50% of the time I pay for them, and 50% of the time I get them from sci-hub. And certainly paying for scientific articles is a big rip off. It effectively means that once you are no longer enrolled or working at a university, your access to this paywalled information is gone.

ncmncm 5y ago
How do you get books from Sci-hub?
- pdm55 5y ago
  https://z-lib.org/ https://z-lib.org/

spansoa 5y ago

Sci-Hub needs to be uncensorable and forked into a separate project, without Alexandra E. at the helm. It needs to be a Tor hidden service with the admin being completely anonymous. There's too much heat around the project currently. Jumping from ccTLD to ccTLD may help a small bit, but a hidden service with an unknown admin (or group of admins!) is exponentially better.

jtbayly 5y ago
Putting it on the “dark web” is just a different, more effective barrier than the money barrier the industry wants.
- spansoa 5y ago
  > more effective barrier Tor, or more specifically the Tor Browser Bundle is not some huge hurdle to overcome if you want to browse certain content. I imagine for the audience of Sci-Hub, downloading then using Tor is no biggie. The only real hurdle may be discovery of the right .ONION but once you search for `The Hidden Wiki` on DuckDuckGo you will be soon in Onionland and there are plenty of search engines and directories on there that could potentially point to the latest Sci-Hub .ONION
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    I can't think of anybody else that has Tor on their computer, or knows how to get it or whether it's safe, or why they should get it. I have had Tor on my computer for years, and I've never heard of 'The Hidden Wiki'. On the other hand, I know people who have searched for papers and downloaded them from Scihub. I don't think you know "the audience" for Sci-Hub. It's meant to make the content public, not free for the right people who already know tons of stuff about the dark web.

ghoul2 5y ago

Everytime scihub is mentioned on HN, multiple comments go on about how it should go "distrubuted" - ipfs, torrents, etc. While the current database of scihub is hugely valuable and must be protected in whatever way we can, the true value of scihub is in the "invisible" network of sources for the papers - how quickly papers find their way into the scihub db once they are published. A non-updating scihub will start to depreciate in utility very quickly. _Thats_ the true value Alexandra E brings to scihub - and not easily replaced if she quits/gets into legal trouble/etc.

temp8964 5y ago
If what you said is true, then it seems unreasonable to make the whole thing depends on her. Isn't it? So not only we need distributed storage of the database / files, we also need distributed method to update the database / files.
- nlitened 5y ago
  Yes. Unfortunately, not that many free countries are left on earth, where one can download and distribute scientific papers without getting into jail.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Non-cooperation with US authorities is a very different thing from general freedom. I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN. In the case of scientific publishing, the US authorities are in the wrong and I'm glad their reach does not extend everywhere.
    - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
      > I wouldn't conflate the two unless I was intentionally trying to shill for RU or CN. This sounds like some "... assuming your not a Red ..." Cold War-era dialogue to me. Is that really the best way of expressing your point about the differences between personal freedom and non-cooperation with US law.

kriro 5y ago

The real way to change anything (imo) is to get the tax payers more angry at the status quo and out-inovate the current journals. Right now, I'm pretty sure most people don't care about academic publishing or even know what is going on. The scandal in my opinion is that a professor or phd candidate is paid by the state to do research and then the state has to pay again to license the contributions their employees made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free. The main problem is that the academic system is a dog eat dog world with people clinging to their positions or fighting with all dirty tricks in the book to get tenure, reputation or funding. I'm not sure how to fix it. The way to get to a better world probably leads through blood sweat and motivation by small groups. Run an open access journal, make it the best or highly regarded in your small niche. The more of these exist, the better. Maybe that's an interesting area for an accelerator to pump some non-profit money into. Hire some people as editors, make the content available for free. Use startup strategies to turn it into a very feisty publisher where academics want to publish. Make sure the stuff in the journal is easy to cite and becomes cited often etc. Use a bowling pin strategy to start with one topic (probably something computer science related) and once that is excellent, branch out.

sitkack 5y ago
Since corporations have captured government, the solution is as you say, to "burn down" the old journals and rebuild them on top of arxiv, dblp, semantic scholar, git, etc. The ACM is slowly starting to open up, but it really needs to go all in and just be free for everyone and get a lower amount of of funding from way more sources. You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier. Throw in forums, video conferencing and shared docs and you can build entire academic structures in the cloud. Run a journal on a subreddit, papers on arxiv, video on meet (recordings posted to youtube), code in github, computation on colab notebooks. WeWork should offer wetlab space. ;) Ideally we would have a storage commons where data that doesn't fit into the arxiv model of papers. Something like object storage but with some built in structure.
- nexuist 5y ago
  The problem is that this assumes academics want to change and use new methods to distribute their work. The primary goal of all academics is to secure more grants - what happens afterwards is an afterthought.

Terretta 5y ago

Every time this comes up, I ask if the “academic publishing industry” provides any service where I, as an individual, can subscribe for one reasonable subscription fee, to one single site, with all the research. It seems no. - No one service or site or subscription or pass - No reasonable fee - No aggregation of all the research They’ve externalized the useful work back onto the user. Sci-hub does that work for me. If I could pay $100/month* for sci-hub, I would. * Footnote: Arbitrarily rating it as 3x more value than, say, Bloomberg. And while I think it should be a public service rather than a fee, if there is a fee, it likely should be geo-adjusted by global income bands: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/408581467988942234/pdf/WPS7528.pdf https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/4085814679889422...

wrycoder 5y ago
What about Deepdyve?
- Terretta 5y ago
  Good question. They don’t make this obvious, but: - you don’t get the article, you get a browser window - they only have about 1/2 of the articles (!) Quoting from their FAQ: Q. What does "renting" mean? Renting articles is the simple and affordable way to get the high quality articles that you want, with the same layout and formatting as the printed or PDF versions. "Rented" articles are available through DeepDyve's cloud-based service and can be viewed through your browser from anywhere you have an internet connection. Read full text articles as often as you want during the rental period, and depending on your plan, you may print a limited number of pages per month. However, rented articles cannot be downloaded or shared. Q. Why can't I rent, download, or print some articles? DeepDyve works with many publishers but unfortunately not all of them have given us permission to let our users rent, download, or print some/all of their articles. If an article is marked as "Preview" it means we only have permission to display the abstract but nothing else. As for downloading PDF’s, approximately half of the articles in our collection can be purchased and downloaded directly from DeepDyve. For the remaining half, DeepDyve provides a link that takes you to the publisher site where you can purchase the PDF directly from them.

Bayart 5y ago

Before Sci-Hub, I had to find those among my friends with the right access credentials to the right publishers and ask them to get the articles on my behalf, often in batches to not make too much an annoyance of myself. Needless to say Sci-Hub has been a massive improvement to my quality of life, insofar as satiating my intellectual curiosity is needed. And I'm not even a researcher.

sitkack 5y ago
Two great uses of sci-hub are for historic papers when walking the reference chain backwards in time and anything IEEE. I really wish IEEE and ACM would open their entire catalog of knowledge over a certain age, I don't really care what year they pick.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  IEEE journals, and especially their standards, do actually provide a value added service that government funding doesn’t cover and they obviously run as part of a non profit so it seems very morally ambiguous. I imagine likewise for ACM.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    I think the work of the standards bodies needs to be disambiguated from Open Access journals. In no way am equating IEEE and ACM with Springer and Elsevier. For the longest time, I think they have recently relaxed a bit, but IEEE forbid authors from posting a copy of their paper on their academic web page.
gms7777 5y ago
I am a researcher, and despite having institutional access to most papers I want, I still rely heavily on Sci-Hub as do my colleagues. It has been such an incredibly valuable resource and I'm constantly surprised by how complete it is -- I very rarely come across a paper I need access to that it doesn't have. I do wonder sometimes if it almost makes it too easy, in a way that ends up propping up the status quo of closed publishing and takes away the incentive of publishing in open access sources. Early in my career I remember discussions about publishing in closed journals, concerns that papers will be less read because people may not have access to them. In the last few years, I feel like this has gone away because it seems like everyone (among researchers at least) knows about Sci-Hub. I mean, I still think that on the whole, Sci-Hub is a good thing for the research community and the state of the publishing industry -- it gives people access to the research and ultimately does take some money out of the publishers' pockets. But it does also make a broken system feel less broken, and thus people are less willing to actively push for change.

ravenstine 5y ago

I've heard multiple times, and I don't remember exactly from where, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request. If that is the case, why exactly don't researchers stick their papers literally anywhere on the internet that isn't a paywall? Is there a legal difference between sharing a paper with an individual and uploading it to a public index? Honestly, with the current psychology of the public, I don't think this would be worse than having journals pick holding research for ransom.

jasode 5y ago
>, that you can access research papers for free simply by reaching out to the authors and that many if not most of them are willing to provide said papers upon request. Yes but in most cases, the authors are only legally allowed to give away the less desirable pre-prints manuscripts that was created for journal submission. The publishers allow them to retain the copyright to their draft work. However, the copyright to the final journal article with all the nice typesetting, pretty graphs, etc is assigned to the publisher. That more desirable finished article is the one behind the paywall. (That's not to say that some authors "break the rules" and share the final journal article instead of their preprint but that's going to depend on the particular author.)
- IndPhysiker 5y ago
  Many for-profit journals are now giving authors a few freebies of final versions to share with friends as the PDFs have DRM included. Old school researchers back before social media would use new articles they can't access as a reason to introduce themselves and build the professional network, which I sincerely hope is still going on.
petschge 5y ago
Because the rules allow us to send out copies of the final article in "personal correspondence with other researchers" but limit upload to preprint servers (arxiv) and institutional repositories (our own website) to the last version that we submitted, without the services of the journal, i.e. before language editing and layouting.

ncmncm 5y ago

Incidentally, many researchers still believe that, to publish in (what they think of as) "high-impact" journals, they have to sign over copyright to the journal. The journals make every effort to give this impression, but it is wholly false. This has been a public service announcement.

shae 5y ago

Misinformation is free, real research is expensive, even if funded by your tax dollars.

hyperstar 5y ago

is it impossible to access sci-hub without a browser extension?

mlinksva 5y ago

> Few people today are priced out of streaming films or buying MP3s The article is trying to underscore the expensiveness of scientific literature (undeniable) with the above, but it is true for any reasonable value of "few"?

dredmorbius 5y ago

Let's not forget the names of the prosecutors who literally hounded Aaron Swartz to his death: Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. May their names always be associated with this infamy.

rramadass 5y ago

PSA: The article Title is somewhat confusing. It actually argues for the knowledge-sharing model that Sci-Hub (and its brethren) advocate. At the end, the article says: But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. It is quite frustrating that the Scientific Community producing the Intellectual Property that the "Academic Publishing Industry" makes money out of, is not doing more to bring the "Cartel" down once and for all. Have they become so pusillanimous that they are no longer willing to stand-up against what is clearly unethical and wrong? It is time to re-read The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitu...) and ACT on it.

beckman466 5y ago

> Whether intended or not, the impossibly high paywalls of academic publishers only serve to keep scientific information out of the population’s hands. What makes this even more discordant is that the people being prevented from accessing the information are often also the taxpayers who helped fund the research in the first place. > By framing the debate about Sci-Hub as one concerning property rights, both advocates of Elbakyan’s site and its detractors fall afoul of what John Gall called the “operational fallacy.” In his book The Systems Bible, Gall defined the operational fallacy as a situation where “the system itself does not do what it says it is doing.” In other words, what a system calls itself is not always a reliable indicator of its true function. In this case, the name of the “academic publishing industry” implies that it is supposed to be involved in the dissemination of scholarship. But the effective function of the academic publishing industry as it actually exists is to prevent the dissemination of scholarly work. The author mentions his disproval of Elbakyan and her friends focusing on property rights, yet doesn't actually make a logical or convincing argument against it. Fail. The reason Elbakyan focuses on property rights is because intellectual property is the most harmful thing blocking science today. Intellectual property literally commoditizes and monopolizes collective feedback loops/learnings, disinheriting the working class.

valgor 5y ago

What is a good way to support sci-hub? Given the nature of illegally share documents and the constantly server hopping, I have always been apprehensive about supporting sci-hub even though I want to.