[HN Gopher] An Interview with Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan on th...
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An Interview with Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan on the Delhi HC Case
Author : amrrs
Score : 140 points
Date : 2021-02-25 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (science.thewire.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (science.thewire.in)
| xvilka wrote:
| All of these publishers are also an impediment for the progress.
| Just look at more modern approach for the scientific publishing -
| Authorea[1], PubPub[2], some similar platforms.
|
| [1] https://www.authorea.com/
|
| [2] https://www.pubpub.org/
| Fomite wrote:
| New, modern publishing mechanisms have, unfortunately, by and
| large not solved the career incentives that surround academic
| publishing.
| oli5679 wrote:
| Guerilla Open Access Manifesto Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo,
| Italy
|
| https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840
|
| "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who
| want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and
| cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and
| journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a
| handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers
| featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to
| send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
|
| There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access
| Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not
| sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is
| published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to
| access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will
| only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until
| now will have been lost.
|
| That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money
| to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries
| but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing
| scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First
| World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous
| and unacceptable.
|
| "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the
| copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for
| access, and it's perfectly legal -- there's nothing we can do to
| stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
| already being done: we can fight back.
|
| Those with access to these resources -- students, librarians,
| scientists -- you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at
| this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked
| out. But you need not -- indeed, morally, you cannot -- keep this
| privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the
| world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling
| download requests for friends.
|
| Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly
| by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over
| fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers
| and sharing them with your friends.
|
| But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground.
| It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of
| knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and
| murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral -- it's a moral
| imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a
| friend make a copy.
|
| Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws
| under which they operate require it -- their shareholders would
| revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off
| back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide
| who can make copies.
|
| There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come
| into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience,
| declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
|
| We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our
| copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff
| that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy
| secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download
| scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We
| need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
|
| With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong
| message opposing the privatization of knowledge -- we'll make it
| a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
| baali wrote:
| For some more context I would like to share a precedent
| specifically in India and Delhi that could be relevant to this
| case as well, "Rameshwari Photocopy Service shop copyright case":
|
| https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-case
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_s...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Not unsurprisingly a lot of comments are very negative on
| publishers but I think the nature of the criticism is kind of
| weird. Publishers in almost every comment as well in the
| interview are almost always portrayed as institutions that rip
| everyone off. But this is strange, because if it was true,
| everyone would just stop paying them, they don't literally hold
| anyone at gunpoint.
|
| In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution
| that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of
| reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of
| Vogue for a fashionista.
|
| When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub
| they don't compete with the core business model of publishers,
| they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the
| business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals
| survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free
| lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on
| street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the
| business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities
| and status.
|
| So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is
| destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star
| scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms
| where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more
| cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would
| soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that
| publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not
| the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the
| very commodity they are selling.
| xtracto wrote:
| That is indeed a fair point: Why do people go to some Elsevier
| journal to look for an article instead of just going to the
| corresponding arxiv.org section? Because there is _trust_ in
| the curation of those articles.
|
| The problem with scientific publications is that there has not
| been a Spotify, Steam or Netflix disrupting company that
| provides the same service in a better way.
| jhbadger wrote:
| The thing about (closed-access journal) publishers that ticks
| people off is just how little of the value they create for
| their cost. They get the papers they publish for free, they get
| the peer review for free, they even get most of the editing for
| free (academic editors are generally volunteer, although copy
| editors, who check for spelling and formatting, are generally
| employees).
|
| As for why people keep paying, the answer is industry
| lobbyists. Whenever there is a movement to require open access
| of research, industry lobbyists shut it down. Although in many
| fields like physics and mathematics, people are bypassing
| journals (closed or open) in favor of preprints.
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| > So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is
| destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming
| star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet
| platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my
| more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy
| would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that
| publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is
| not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's
| the very commodity they are selling.
|
| That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an
| internet attention economy is a better state.
|
| In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass.
| All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning
| Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already
| free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many
| problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains
| from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems
| stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review),
| and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the
| "attention economy" of the field.
|
| But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't
| need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the
| research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it
| would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation
| and attention
|
| If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what
| they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals
| were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some
| fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.)
| For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies
| that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the
| corporation could perform more high-quality editing,
| proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically.
|
| Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are
| no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting
| is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the
| individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid
| editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial
| team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF.
|
| So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing
| printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned
| societies managed to do just fine) and a vague "reputation and
| attention". Sounds like a raw deal.
| visarga wrote:
| > But this is strange, because if it was true, everyone would
| just stop paying them, they don't literally hold anyone at
| gunpoint.
|
| In a world where scientists careers didn't depend on
| publications, you'd be right.
| pas wrote:
| Change is hard, common knowledge attacks are easy, publishers
| are like dictators, defectors are punished (publishing in a
| worse journal, basically only a minority of researchers can
| even flirt with the idea), and even if the global optimum is
| not a dictatorship it's hard to get there.
| helixc wrote:
| A reasonable request is not to shut all prestigious publishing
| monopolies down, but to ask/beg/fight them to be less greedy.
| As you mentioned, publishers run market places and sell
| distribution channels. They do not need that high margins to
| run the business. Where the profit goes to? Not the science
| community, but heir owners and executives high up on the rank
| who do not contribute much but get the most cash rewards. I
| believe this is what worth fighting for.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with "thriving
| internet status economies" or "reputation and attention." The
| problem is the "exclusivity" where people have to pay e.g. $45
| to read an article often partially or completely funded by
| taxpayers and with absolutely no value-add other than
| "reputation and attention," in order to discover it is
| irrelevant to what they're researching.
|
| In my view, it would be ideal if in an open-access world some
| editors and/or organizations _endorsed_ and vouched for
| particular papers, and academics competed intensely for those
| endorsements, if those endorsements were career-making or
| career-killing, and those editors /organizations made a living
| from charging scientists for their consideration and review.
|
| That's not the bad part. If the output is available to everyone
| to read, I don't see the tragedy.
| tasogare wrote:
| I didn't know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company
| already had a bad record of political censorship but now it
| attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and
| important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to
| exist for long.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Despite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub, it _is_ breaking the
| law. Copyright infringement, whether you agree with it or not,
| is a crime. If Twitter received notice from the journals' legal
| teams to take down the account, they may not have the ability
| to fight back (depending on the journals' legal arguments).
| ska wrote:
| But it it breaking any laws on Twitter? Unless the twitter
| account was providing links to copyright material, probably
| not.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| If the Twitter account provided links to Sci-Hub's website,
| it'd be very easy for the journals to construe
| infringement. Whether the account actually did, I don't
| know. I'm just pointing out how it could work.
| aryamaan wrote:
| What are the efficient ways to fight unjust laws?
| krastanov wrote:
| Voting and contacting your representatives is pretty
| efficient... Yeah, lobbying from big entities is a problem
| that we need to solve, but come on, look at what we have
| already achieved. Convincing the average people around you
| is frequently more work.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| I don't know. Some would say "take a stand", but all I know
| is that: if your legal team says there's almost no way
| you'd win a lawsuit from the journals, and that you could
| be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages, you
| don't "take a stand". Because it's not just the company
| you'd be taking down, but yourself from the inevitable
| lawsuits from angry investors. It's sad, buts it's the
| reality we live in.
| brainless wrote:
| You are right. But to add, these laws are lobbied by
| large corporations that don't care about much other than
| their profits.
|
| Change is hard and it's okay, not everyone will fight for
| it. But some will.
| neatze wrote:
| Hypothetically, can publishers go after authors who used sci-hub
| ?
| TT3351 wrote:
| I'm willing to bet publishers understand that will make any
| remaining good will they have with the people who generate
| their content evaporate
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Hostages aren't usually full good will, and hostage takers
| aren't the best negotiators.
| lou1306 wrote:
| They could, but the optics of such an action would be really,
| really bad. Moreover, my gut feeling is that most researchers
| that use sci-hub _could_ obtain most of the papers through
| their employer 's subscription anyway. It's just that the UX of
| Sci-Hub is so much better.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Academic journals pose many problems:
|
| 1) They restrict access to research with paywalls.
|
| 2) The research they publish is usually funded with public funds.
| Governments do not get money from journals.
|
| 3) The work being published is produced by researchers.
| Researchers do not get any money from the journals.
|
| 4) Journals rarely verify what they publish.
|
| So, in short, Sci-Hub is a necessary disobedience movement that
| aims to end with the most pointless institution in academia: paid
| journals.
|
| This is not the same as Napster.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| You are confusing two things here: 1) the problems that for-
| profit journals bring, and 2) the supposed problems that all
| academic journals have, regardless of whether they are
| published by a for-profit or a non-profit publisher.
|
| In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-
| profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make
| their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do
| verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is
| rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors
| end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass
| that review.
|
| If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for
| scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at
| Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in
| discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko
| alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those
| discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank
| goodness for journals.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| When you publish something, you also mention your affiliation
| and your title. Often with an email that relates to your
| affiliation.
|
| If you are affiliated with the Mickey Mouse Center for
| Crackpottery and Eugenics, I am going to have that in
| consideration when reading your content.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| "This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing.
| Knowledge, when left to it's own nature, wants to be free and
| spread. The digital music revolution is just another aspect of
| this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in
| my life, and never will. As an app developer, I implement all
| the tricks I know to stop people from pirating my work, but if
| they KNOW how to do it, and ARE WILLING to do it, good for
| them.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Napster is different. The fact you do not want to pay for
| music does not make it free to produce, promote and
| distribute.
|
| There is real time and money involved in songwriting,
| composing, interpreting, recording, marketing, etc.
|
| In this case, the journals paid nothing for the research they
| publish, and they share none of the money they make.
|
| An analogy for a journal would be a napster that forces you
| to publish your music there and then doesn't pay you
| anything.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| Scihub and Napster are "the same thing", in the sense that
| both are tools that were created to enable the peer to peer
| sharing of information, one bypasses the journals
| middlemen, the other the record labels. Information is
| meant to be free, anything that tries to stop it is going
| against the nature of info. The way I see it's like trying
| to stop entropy, good luck trying to create your perpetual
| motion machine.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| There's an implication here that "spotify for papers" -
| aka good distribution for a fair price - could be the end
| state.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| You are then saying Amazon and Ebay are the same as The
| Silk Road.
|
| They are marketplaces, but from an ethical standpoint
| they are vastly different.
|
| You cannot stop piracy but a different thing is saying
| music piracy is legitimate. You are conflating different
| things.
|
| If you don't understand the difference between Napster
| and Scihub you probably think music piracy is OK. It is
| not.
|
| First of all, scholars themselves use Scihub and most
| scholars that do not have a conflict of interest disagree
| with how companies like Elsevier operate.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think music piracy is more than OK, it is good. I also
| understand the distinction you are trying to make and it
| is a makes sense. Journals add nothing. Musicians,
| producers, and other technicians do work to make music.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I'm on the fence about Sci-hub. Every time I read about it, I
| remember this article about how they operate.
|
| >Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They're
| phishing, they're spamming, they're hacking, they're password-
| cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal
| credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal
| access to published content is the most obvious target, this is
| just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal
| multiple streams of personal and research data from the world's
| academic institutions.
|
| This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are
| losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks
| changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this
| is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or
| whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my
| local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the
| same thing.
|
| https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
| kick wrote:
| That link is transparently pushing something, and what it's
| pushing definitely isn't "the truth."
|
| The _only_ thing, and I repeat: _the only thing_ that
| absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even
| says outright that they _do_ , rather than just blatant
| speculation, is PDF downloading.
|
| _Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to
| come to the attention of publishers or library technical
| departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made
| 45,092 PDF requests._
|
| What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just
| requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even
| _try_ to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing
| something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing
| something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"
|
| They aren't even trying at this point.
| sodality2 wrote:
| No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their
| database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles"
| but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.
|
| >What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally
| just requesting PDFs
|
| Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not
| arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the
| Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is
| admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
| nicoburns wrote:
| My guess would be that Sci-hub probably isn't doing this
| because my guess is that they don't need to. Given how
| widespread support and usage of Sci-hub is within academia,
| I suspect they have access voluntarily donated credentials
| on the order of hundreds if not thousands (remember that
| it's not only faculty staff that have access to journal
| articles: students do too).
| sodality2 wrote:
| Now that I agree with; the article specifically avoids
| attributing it to them, and if they could, you can bet
| they would. So I'm assuming they're taking a mostly
| unrelated incident and pushing an agenda with it.
| kick wrote:
| _No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their
| database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles"
| but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group._
|
| You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually
| doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil,
| but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."
|
| _Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I 'm
| not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the
| Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is
| admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack._
|
| So if there's no proof, and you'd agree with it even if
| there was, then why bother posting this awful article?
| sodality2 wrote:
| I suppose to see what others thought about it. I
| specifically mentioned in the parent comment that I was
| on the fence and that "This might just be a hit piece by
| the same companies who are losing money". I did mention
| the proof in the article, which _is real_. I 'll admit my
| initial judgement of the article was off, but not
| entirely wrong given that I never said I wholly agreed
| with it. Or maybe I'm moving goalposts or whatever.
| Anyway, I thank you for pointing out what I did not
| realize.
|
| >You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually
| doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing
| Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-
| Hub."
|
| I am not negating it, I am admitting that I am wrong.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned.
|
| Right, because Aaron Swartz is famous for negotiating deals to
| legally license and pay for PDFs.
|
| > They're phishing, they're spamming, they're hacking, they're
| password-cracking
|
| I sure hope so. Relying on credential donations would be a
| great way to make Elsevier's anti-piracy efforts much easier
| while landing more academic activists in jail / suicide.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Eh. I agree with the sentiment. But you do see how there is a
| difference between just downloading PDF's and what is
| referenced in the article? Not at all saying it is sci-hub's
| fault. And I myself have literally uploaded to sci-hub
| (ironically, in case my FBI agent is reading this). But it's
| not equivalent to crack accounts, scrape 45k pdfs as it is to
| simply upload something you've downloaded.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| So if Elsevier gets rid of network licenses like the one
| Aaron Swartz abused and the next generation of activists is
| forced to abuse other kinds of licenses, that means they
| should just roll over and give up? Really?
|
| Nuts!
|
| Look at it this way: would you rather A. lose the war and
| pay Elsevier forever and ever, B. donate your credentials
| to scihub and get slapped with a lifetime Elsevier ban and
| big Aaron Swartz suicide level lawsuit, or C. use a sketchy
| library computer one day and a few months later have to
| contact Elsevier support to get your account reset because
| the PDFs won't download?
|
| I don't know about you, but A and B seem really bad to me
| and C seems much less bad.
| sodality2 wrote:
| I prefer C.
| neatze wrote:
| How many scientist agree that people who access there's paper
| should pay ~$30 ?
| whatever1 wrote:
| We are not compensated for reviewing on behalf of journals. We
| even pay to publish, and then pay to read our own paper.
|
| edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but
| if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the
| reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| That's inaccurate. When you publish to a journal, the journal
| will give you a pdf of your paper which you can put up on a
| personal site. You always have access to distribute your
| research.
|
| Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences
| do).
| whatever1 wrote:
| Journals charge to publish. They even charge more if you
| want color pages.
|
| I have the proofs of my papers, but I cannot access them
| online anymore.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| That's inaccurate. Plenty of journals don't allow you to
| put up a copy on your personal website. For example these
| fine folks that run many journals:
|
| https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-
| your-...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| So called "green OA" practices are:
|
| a. far from ubiquitous
|
| b. often include provisions created by the publisher
| designed to make discoverability outside of the journal
| difficult
| danielyaa5 wrote:
| probably any of them that publish to a journal, the scientist
| could make it public themselves if they wanted to. This is
| theft...
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| My understanding is that the universities have contracts with
| the journals that mandate the professors and researchers
| publish in the journal with almost no exceptions. You're
| putting the blame in the wrong place.
| Fomite wrote:
| This is inaccurate. Universities have contracts with
| publishers to get their faculty access to the journals.
|
| I've never encountered a mandate to publish in certain
| journals because the university has contracts with them. On
| occasion there are incentives like breaks on open access
| fees essentially because the university pre-paid, and there
| are field specific norms on where to publish.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Universities have contracts with journals through their
| libraries to provide their staff full access to
| publications.
|
| Universities rarely tell scientists where to publish. That
| is determined by the scientists, the quality of the paper
| and the editor of the journal.
|
| Scientists and PhD students need to publish in high impact
| factor journals for their work to be recognized, for
| promotions, graduation, etc. There is a lot of work that
| goes into a scientific publication. It's not a blog (which
| most people equate it to when they say why isn't it free).
|
| Scientists can make their publications available on their
| personal website. Generally google scholar will give you a
| pdf if its available. Some labs maintain papers on their
| site, other scientists don't. Generally, finding older
| publications is a challenge.
|
| I've commented on this earlier. Asking the researcher to
| not publish in these journals is pointless. You need to
| legislate access. But in general, most scientists will have
| access to these journals from their university libraries
| (at least in US/Canada/Europe).
| [deleted]
| danielyaa5 wrote:
| then they are stealing money from universities...
| essentially the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for
| the university by attending it. What do you think the money
| for the university is used for?
| krastanov wrote:
| > the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the
| university by attending it
|
| This statement makes me think you significantly
| misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The
| scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors,
| staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The
| university does take some of the grant money given to
| lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned
| salaries).
| nimih wrote:
| Who, exactly, do you think gets the money from journal
| access fees? I'll give you a hint, it's not the people
| who write the articles, nor the people who peer-review
| them, nor the universities who employ either group.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| Universities around the world collectively pay _billions_
| of dollars to gain access to journals, many of which
| their own researchers contribute to. The University of
| California cut ties with Elsevier because of the
| extremely high cost of accessing their work.[1] And that
| is a _huge_ deal for a major US university like that to
| end things with the world 's largest academic publisher.
| The universities are not making money from journals --
| they're paying exorbitant amounts to for-profit companies
| with some of the largest profit margins in any industry.
|
| If someone were to snap their fingers tomorrow and make
| it so that scientists could publish their work without
| having to deal with these for-profit publishers,
| universities would save millions of dollars (per school),
| taxpayers would save money, and the general public would
| also have greater access to the work that they themselves
| funded through public grants.
|
| [1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-
| split-pub...
| Fomite wrote:
| Hell, I use Sci-Hub on occasion to find my own papers because
| it's the fastest way to get to them.
| markus92 wrote:
| Same. Had to pirate my own paper once as my institution
| didn't have a subscription to that specific journal. Zero
| qualms here about that.
| dutchmartin wrote:
| I would pay $10 if the author got at least payed $8 out of
| that. But since authors get payed nothing, I rather download
| the work from some other site and send the author a thank you
| mail if I really liked their work.
| crumbshot wrote:
| > _The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of
| these works, scientists are - they do all the work, and academic
| publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of
| Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy
| where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It
| is a very different thing._
|
| This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector,
| in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many
| other things that would be better run through public provision:
| housing, medical care, etc.
| juskrey wrote:
| As someone who have escaped from places with public housing and
| healthcare provision, I suspect you were never really
| experiencing that. Some place for wise regulation - maybe.
|
| That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero
| sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
| pizza wrote:
| Maybe you should elaborate on why you think academia is a
| zero sum game. Like e.g. for one researcher to get a grant,
| another one doesn't?
| [deleted]
| MrPatan wrote:
| Ah, yes, I remember that time when I tried to copy a house and
| the private sector, all parasitic-like, went on about bullshit
| like "labour" and "materials" and "land". Like, what's that? I
| have rights, you know!
| someguydave wrote:
| Tankies are now top commenters on hn?
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I think the private sector (for the most part) does a good job
| on delivering new housing, and are largely limited by local
| rules such as zoning and set-asides.
|
| The only real criticism of them IMO is that they're cyclical
| with the economy. They tend to build during good times, but the
| most cost-effective time to build housing is during bad times
| (now) because construction costs are also low.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Not the only criticism. How about the fact that there are
| incentives to hoard more housing units than one can use while
| others have none?
| slt2021 wrote:
| what a brave woman, she is singlehandedly disrupting the
| scientific publications cartel
| crumbshot wrote:
| Agreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively
| broadening access to works of scientific research.
|
| Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-
| capitalist action, against our broken system where a small
| number of private companies control access to what should be
| communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| "Russian hackers stealing valuable Western IP"
|
| actually kind of surprised I haven't heard this yet
| tpmx wrote:
| She's Kazakhstani, not Russian, but...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan#Views_and_c.
| ..
|
| > Elbakyan has stated that she is inspired by communist
| ideals, although she does not consider herself a strict
| Marxist.] She has stated that she supports a strong state
| which can stand up to the Western world, and that she does
| not want "the scientists of Russia and of my native
| Kazakhstan to share the fates of the scientists of Iraq,
| Libya, and Syria, that were 'helped' by the USA to become
| more democratic."
|
| ...
|
| > In 2017, a species of parasitoid wasps discovered by
| Russian and Mexican entomologists was named after Elbakyan
| (Idiogramma elbakyanae). Elbakyan was offended by this,
| writing, "If you analyse the situation with scientific
| publications, the real parasites are scientific publishers,
| and Sci-Hub, on the contrary, fights for equal access to
| scientific information." Following this event, and in the
| context of her long-running tense relations with the liberal,
| pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community, she
| blocked access to Sci-Hub for users from the Russian
| Federation.
|
| So basically she's a Putin supporter.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| That seems overly reductive.
|
| Must all people who want the USA to do well be "Biden
| supporters" or "Trump supporters"? I think not.
| tpmx wrote:
| (I'm not american.)
|
| At the very least we should be able to agree that her
| goals align remarkably well with Putin's goals.
|
| And to be clear: I also believe that freeing scientific
| information from publishers is a nice goal - it's just
| that her goal is broader than that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That famous Marxist, Putin.
| dilawar wrote:
| Public mone is spent two times for a paper: first time to publish
| and second time to read it.
|
| OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some
| positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making
| many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being
| the most prominent.
| giomasce wrote:
| The thing I am concerned about with SciHub is its centralized
| nature. So far it has resisted everything, but supposed that
| eventually Elsevier manages to land Elbakyan in jail, or hack
| back SciHub and delete its content, what would happen? I'd be
| much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient
| configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities
| can back it up. And I'd also be happy if the paper collection
| segment was free software, so that other entities could cooperate
| in case the original SciHub went down.
| xkeysc0re wrote:
| There are several ongoing efforts to maintain an archive of
| SciHub
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_...
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying...
|
| The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is
| actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers.
| It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are
| provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the
| site
| jerheinze wrote:
| > I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more
| resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that
| other entities can back it up.
|
| For IPFS have a look at https://libgen.fun/ and
| https://freeread.org/ipfs/
|
| Also see the HN thread on those:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
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