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posted by chromas on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the on-the-one-hand-information-wants-to-be-expensive…on-the-other-hand,-information-wants-to-be-free dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Despite two lost legal battles in the US, domain name seizures, and millions of dollars in damage claims, Sci-Hub continues to offer unauthorized access to academic papers. The site's founder says that she would rather operate legally, but copyright gets in the way. Sci-Hub is not the problem she argues, it's a solution, something many academics appear to agree with.

Sci-Hub has often been referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," but that description really sells the site short.

While both sites are helping the public to access copyrighted content without permission, Sci-Hub has also become a crucial tool that arguably helps the progress of science.

The site allows researchers to bypass expensive paywalls so they can read articles written by their fellow colleagues. The information in these 'pirated' articles is then used to provide the foundation for future research.

What the site does is illegal, according to the law, but Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world. In particular, those who don't have direct access to the expensive journals but aspire to excel in their academic field.

Source: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-proves-that-piracy-can-be-dangerously-useful-180804/


Original Submission

Related Stories

Paywall: A Documentary About the Movement for Open-Access Science Publishing 9 comments

Documentary puts lens on the open-access movement upending scientific publishing

Jason Schmitt was working at Atlantic Records when the online site Napster disrupted the music industry by making copyrighted songs freely available. Now, the communications and media researcher at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, is pushing for a similar disruption of academic publishing with Paywall, a documentary about the open-access movement that debuts today in a Washington, D.C., theater. "I don't think that it's right that for-profit publishers can make 35%–40% profit margins. The content is provided for them for free by academics," Schmitt, who produced the film, says.

The documentary explores the impact of Sci-Hub, a website that provides pirated versions of paywalled papers for free online, and interviews academics and publishing figures. Schmitt says many large publishers refused to go on camera—although representatives from Science and Nature did—and he is not impressed that several have begun publishing some open-access journals. "Elsevier is as much to open access as McDonald's fast food is to healthy," he says.

Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.

Related:


Original Submission

Library Genesis Seeding Project Helps to Decentralize Archive of Scientific Knowledge 8 comments

Meet the Guy Behind the Libgen Torrent Seeding Movement

Libgen and Sci-Hub, regularly referred to as the 'Pirate Bay of Science', are continually under fire. However, if all of the important data is decentralized, almost any eventuality can be dealt with. Today we meet the guy leading a new movement to ensure that Libgen's archives are distributed via the highest quality torrent swarms possible.

[...] [The] torrents used by Libgen were not in good shape so 'shrine' began a movement to boost the quality of their swarms. The project was quickly spotted and then supported by two companies (Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.com) that offer 'seedboxes', effectively server-based torrent clients with plenty of storage space and bandwidth available – perfect for giving swarms a boost.

The project gained plenty of traction and as a follow-up thread details, considerable success. Today we catch up with 'shrine' for some history, background information, and an interesting status report.

"Ironically this all started when I saw the TorrentFreak article about [Libgen] mirrors getting taken down. I immediately decided I wanted to find a way to preserve and protect the collection," 'shrine' says.

[...] "Scientists in the Reddit threads are sharing stories of how LibGen made their research possible. Unnamed cloud providers have pledged 100TB allocation on their servers. The response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone."

Previously:


Original Submission

Scientists to be Heard in High-Profile Publisher Lawsuit Against Sci-Hub in India 10 comments

Sci-Hub Founder Criticises Sudden Twitter Ban Over Over "Counterfeit" Content

Twitter has suspended the account of Sci-Hub, a site that offers a free gateway to paywalled research. The site is accused of violating the counterfeit policy of the social media platform. However, founder Alexandra Elbakyan believes that this is an effort to silence the growing support amidst a high profile court case in India.

[...] In recent weeks, Sci-Hub has become the focus of a high-profile lawsuit in India where Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society want the site blocked. The case isn't as straightforward as in other countries, in part because access to Sci-Hub is seen as vital by many local academics.

Earlier this week, the Indian High Court declared the case an "issue of public importance," inviting experts and scientists to testify on the matter. Meanwhile, however, the pressure on Sci-Hub grows.

Judge: Sci-Hub Blocking Case "Important" For Science, Community Representations Will Be Heard

Sci-Hub Pledges Open Source & AI Alongside Crypto Donation Drive 15 comments

Sci-Hub Pledges Open Source & AI Alongside Crypto Donation Drive

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has launched a donation drive to ensure the operations and development of the popular academic research platform. For safety reasons, donations can only be made in cryptocurrencies but the pledges include a drive to open source the project and the introduction of artificial intelligence to discover new hypotheses.

[...] A new campaign launched by Elbakyan on Saturday hopes to encourage people to contribute to the site's future, promising "dramatic improvements" over the next few years in return.

In addition to offering enhanced search features and a mobile app, Sci-Hub is pledging developments that include the open sourcing of the project. Also of interest is the pledge to introduce an artificial intelligence component that should make better use of the masses of knowledge hosted by Sci-Hub.

"Sci-Hub engine will [be] powered by artificial intelligence. Neural Networks will read scientific texts, extract ideas and make inferences and discover new hypotheses," Elbakyan reveals.

The overall goal of the next few years is to boost content availability too, expanding from hosting "the majority of research articles" available today to include "any scientific document ever published."

Related: Sci-Hub Bounces from TLD to TLD
Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful
Paywall: A Documentary About the Movement for Open-Access Science Publishing
Swedish ISP Punishes Elsevier for Forcing It to Block Sci-Hub by Also Blocking Elsevier
Library Genesis Seeding Project Helps to Decentralize Archive of Scientific Knowledge
Scientists to be Heard in High-Profile Publisher Lawsuit Against Sci-Hub in India


Original Submission

Ten Years of Sci-Hub 20 comments

Futurism has done an interview over e-mail with Alexandra Elbakyan who founded Sci-Hub ten years ago. Over that time, it has become both widely used and well-stocked, having picked up momentum in 2016. There are now over 87 million research articles in its database, though not evenly distributed over academic disciplines.

As of September, Sci-Hub has officially existed for 10 years — a milestone that came as a lawsuit to determine if the website infringed on copyright laws sits in India’s Delhi High Court. Just a few months prior, Elbakyan tweeted that she was notified of a request from the FBI to access her data from Apple. And before that, the major academic publisher Elsevier was awarded $15 million in damages after the Department of Justice ruled that Sci-Hub broke copyright law in the U.S.

But that ruling can’t seem to touch Sci-Hub. And Elbakyan remains absolutely unrepentant. She advocates for a future in which scientific knowledge is shared freely, and she’s confident that it’s coming.

Futurism caught up with Elbakyan to hear what’s next. Over email, she explained her vision for the site’s future, her thoughts on copyright law, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The article goes on to report that she had expected copyright law to be corrected long before so much time had passed. In many ways Sci-Hub can be seen as a form of push back against the academic publishing houses which are infamous for abusive practices and pricing. The cost of research, writing, editing, peer-review, and more are all borne by the researchers and their institutions with little beyond distribution borne by the publisher. The big publishing houses then sell access back to the same researchers and institutions at rates that a small and decreasing number can afford.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:25PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:25PM (#721349)

    The best type of scientific paper is the "literature review" which is the science equivalent of what middle schoolers call a "book report." A literature review contains no original research whatsoever, but it fulfills the requirement of attracting sweet sweet attention toward the author. Scientists are retards who have the maturity of a middle schooler screaming, "Look at me! I got my name in print!!"

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:43PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:43PM (#721355)

      A literature review also summarizes the current state of the literature on a particular topic. So rather than a thousand scientists each grinding through reading five hundred papers each, one (or a few) scientists prepare an article which summarizes those five hundred articles.

      Or, put another way, you don't know much, do you?

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:45PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:45PM (#721358)

        Literature reviews are a valuable tool for the lazy aka people with better things to do with their time than run down every last detail of every claim.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:55PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:55PM (#721364)

        Found the butthurt academic. Let me tell you what I know of your kind, professor. I have worked in academia alongside you willfully ignorant types. I have seen the high flyers who refuse to do any of their own research, who instead literally wallpaper their office doors with all the literature review papers to their names. Their unoriginal papers earn them their tenure because quantity is all that matters. The rest of us ordinary folk do actual innovative work that requires practical knowledge and skill while you ivory tower eggheads perpetuate your unearned existence by regurgitating each other's excrement.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:14PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:14PM (#721429)

          Were you so crotchety before you became a post-doc?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:49PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:49PM (#721528)

            Um, the AC reads more like a failed Bachelor's candidate. Hell hath no idiot like a scholar who fails.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:48PM

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:48PM (#721360) Journal

      Lmao, did someone own you in an online debate with a metaanalysis that showed you were full of shit about something?

      Kinda want to keep this post on my dining room table so I have an unlimited supply of salt at hand.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:45PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:45PM (#721359) Journal

    Namely, people can look up the original paper and see that the free press has yet again published bullshit science reporting the over-hypes and misrepresents.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:50PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @01:50PM (#721362)

      The only thing I would worry about on any site, not just Sci-Hub, is that they might be publishing falsified or distorted information. As you point out, the free press is far more worrisome than SciHub.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:11PM (16 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:11PM (#721369)

    Despite two lost legal battles in the US, domain name seizures, and millions of dollars in damage claims being found guilty of copyright infringement multiple times, Sci-Hub continues to offer unauthorized access to academic papers flagrantly violate copyright law. The site's founder says that she would rather operate illegally than seek the permissions and pay the fees necessary to operate legally. legally, but copyright gets in the way. Sci-Hub is not the problem she argues, it's a solution, something some but quite unquantified many academics appear to agree with. And that the legal owners of the right to copy the articles do not.
    Sci-Hub has often been referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," but that description really sells the site short, even though it is quite accurate.
    While both sites violate copyright law are helping the public to access copyrighted content without permission , Sci-Hub has also become a crucial tool that arguably helps the progress of science at the expense of those who actually publish the content.
    The site allows researchers to bypass expensive paywalls the legal process of actually purchasing access to articles so they can read articles written by their fellow colleagues. The information in these 'pirated' articles is then used to provide the foundation for future research. Even though by doing so the chain of custody of the information is broken and any article downloaded from SciHub is therefore no more reliable than "I heard it on the internet." Not to mention Sci-Hub wouldn't guarantee that a correction or retraction would be included with the articles they pirated, which might endanger lives.
    What the site does is illegal, according to the law, but please allow them to keep breaking the law because it is just so darn useful to people who don’t want to legally pay for what they get. Sci-Hub is praised by thousands of researchers and academics around the world.[Citation needed.] And citation needed also to cite the many more thousands who see this as blantant copyright infringement. That would be data instead of anecdote. In particular, those who want to cheat the publishers and get ahead by any means necessary because they’re just so darn good they should be allowed to get away with it. don't have direct access to the expensive journals but aspire to excel in their academic field And apparently aren't able to make their own publishing house which would be the legal solution to the problem, wanting the benefits of the system without being willing to share the cost of it. In other words, freeloaders.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:35PM (6 children)

      by eravnrekaree (555) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:35PM (#721375)

      You're wrong. The actual researchers get little or nothing from the Journal. So the researchers put in all of the work and so on, then they have to often essentially give up their copyright and hand over all of their work for a journal to profit from. If you actually wanted something to benefit researchers, the journal should be run and owned by the researchers themselves, theres no need for a middleman or upper management to rake in profits from someone elses labors. The reviewers of the articles are also non-paid usually. The journals do not benefit the actual researchers in most cases, they are not there for their benefit. They are relicts from the age when there was no internet and everything had to be printed, bound and mailed out.At that time Journals could sort of justify their existence for running the printing presses and collecting money to run all of that. All of the printing and binding and mailing is gone, replaced by very very low cost and highly commoditized internet distribution so the need for specialized scientific journals is gone, you can use basically ANY internet hosting solution. yet the journals are still there, collecting fees for distributing someone elses work, as if they still need or have printing overhead as if you still need to kill trees and run huge printing presses and mass mailing operations. the costs are gone but the profit remains so someones raking in a lot of profit and its these for profit journals and their CEOs, the researcher does not benefit.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:37PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:37PM (#721472)

        No, I'm right.

        The researchers get to pay for access to the journal data the publisher has published. I don't think I stated much else about the reading researcher. The publisher has the information and wants to charge for access to it. Sci-Ref wants to say the information isn't allowed to have a value placed on it by the publisher. The law supports the publishers.

        Everything else I wrote, especially about financial benefits, I was discussing those who retain the rights to copy the article, i.e. the publisher. That the researchers cede copyright to the publisher changes nothing. The researchers don't factor into this discussion, really. (Other than a really GOOD team of researchers, or a team in possession of valuable information, can leverage their reputation to change the publishing contract to retain some or all of those rights. Especially after a limited period of time of publisher exclusivity.)

        There is nothing prohibiting Sci-Ref, or anyone else, from setting up a journal as you've described it. Why, then, do you suppose that such efforts aren't generally successful without government backing? They typically have a run, run out of information and subscribers, and fold. (Or they discover that they have to convert to the model that has evolved over time into what we have now.) By the way... let's say you have a journal set up exactly as you describe and access fees are still charged to the readers of the article so that the journal can defuse its expenses. Is Sci-Ref still entitled to freely take that material and republish it? Do the writing researchers somehow get a more valid claim to the copyright than the publisher did by contract?

        Another correction: It doesn't reflect a pre-internet age. If it did, they would not survive today. Actually it reflects the ethical value that one performs and publishes research as a contribution back to the profession in which one participates in. One consuming the research pays for the access to it. Not exactly altruism, but altruism fits into that model. Doctor makes living seeing patients, not conducting research, for example. Scientist needs to be recognized as expert, and gets prestige from publishing in Journal X, but all compensation isn't finanacial. It is more a relic from the age when there were very few, if any, "professional researchers." One that still carries through today. And there isn't any guarantee that there should be or that researchers should be supported by the publishing system. (If you want that, write a textbook).

        The publisher takes the profits because it is the publisher who puts up the financial risk in having a staff who edits and publishes the material in a collected form. Whether paper or electronically there are expenses. Whether those expenses (publisher's staff time) is waived, the expense is still there on the books as hours put in. (And I dispute what you're saying that distributing electronically is low-cost. Possibly lower cost than paper. But it sounds like you've never dealt with an ISP on a commercial distribution server where you pay for the data people are accessing from you. I haven't either, but I'm not naive enough to expect web hosting on a commercial data distribution scale is free.) A successful publisher/journal also exploits their popularity and success by charging premiums for access.

        Again, there is nothing prohibiting any person from setting up their own website and publishing their results. For free or behind a paywall. But unless you personally have the draw to your name you won't be very successful charging for access to your own research. You can publish for free, but so can anybody else on the Internet. So yep, we still need the publishing industry and their interests are needing to be protected. For now.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:48PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:48PM (#721500)

          > The publisher takes the profits because it is the publisher who puts up the financial risk in having a staff who edits and publishes the material in a collected form.

          Ahahaha.

          Your information is ~20-30 years out of date. There is no financial risk whatsoever, and profit margins are larger than Apple's.

          > Again, there is nothing prohibiting any person from setting up their own website and publishing their results.

          Almost every single researcher does this. Betting the progress of humanity on tens of thousands of individual homepages, that can disappear at any moment, is fucking stupid.

          > But unless you personally have the draw to your name you won't be very successful charging for access to your own research.

          Are you truly so stupid and divorced from reality? Currently, NO RESEARCHER IS GETTING PAID FOR THEIR PAPERS. Quite the opposite: RESEARCHERS NEED TO PAY TO THE PUBLISHER TO SUBMIT PAPERS.

          • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:47PM

            by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:47PM (#721527) Journal

            > The publisher takes the profits because it is the publisher who puts up the financial risk in having a staff who edits and publishes the material in a collected form.

            Ahahaha.

            Your information is ~20-30 years out of date. There is no financial risk whatsoever, and profit margins are larger than Apple's.

            Wrong. There is lesser risk for an established publisher. But all it takes to make the established publishers unprofitable, legally, is to replace what they do. You can do that yourself, can't you? No? Then there is risk in being a publisher. Just because your risk and Elsevier's are different doesn't invalidate the point.
            Witness all sorts of journals that start up and go out of print.
            And it won't surprise me if something does come along to replace the academic publishing industry. But it won't come by theft as SciHub does it. PLOS, maybe someday. PubMed. All are threats to the profit-journal system. None are quite there yet.
            A publishing powerhouse makes its profits from economy of scale, BTW. They've put up the investment and risk to be able to have that scale.

            > Again, there is nothing prohibiting any person from setting up their own website and publishing their results.

            Almost every single researcher does this. Betting the progress of humanity on tens of thousands of individual homepages, that can disappear at any moment, is fucking stupid.

            Almost every single researcher does this? Then what's the problem? I think what you meant is that every researcher has their own website, where they might share their papers that they have copyright over or where copyright has returned to them. And yes, I agree that relying on individual homepages for progress is stupid. Which is why we still have publishers. Do-doy! You have a better solution that currently and actually works besides allowing SciHub to steal them and publish them themselves? Great! Let's hear it!

            > But unless you personally have the draw to your name you won't be very successful charging for access to your own research.

            Are you truly so stupid and divorced from reality? Currently, NO RESEARCHER IS GETTING PAID FOR THEIR PAPERS. Quite the opposite: RESEARCHERS NEED TO PAY TO THE PUBLISHER TO SUBMIT PAPERS.

            Exactly. That's my point. You have the complete freedom to publish your own information, free or for charge, on your own website. You won't find anybody to pay for it if you just publish it yourself, and publishing it yourself free gives you no more cachet than anybody else on the Internet. It's yours, but it's useless. To both society and as an income stream.

            So what's your problem that publishers can create value and charge for it? That the author doesn't get paid? They won't with SciHub, either. They don't if they self-publish.

            And, BTW, if you need to pay a publisher to publish your work you are dealing with a predatory publisher, same as any other vanity publisher. Genuine journals usually don't pay the researcher, but neither does the researcher pay. That won't stop someone desperate for publish-or-perish from buying into vanity publishing.

            --
            This sig for rent.
      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:13PM (2 children)

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:13PM (#721486)

        > The actual researchers get little or nothing from the Journal.

        Exposure. Which is critical to future grants.
        The peer review process is supposed to guarantee the reader that they are not investing their limited time reading bollocks.
        Anybody can self-publish, but it's akin to selling your DangDongSki car to rich people who want the proven reliability of a Lexus.

        Does it suck ? Yes.
        Can you dismiss it as a giant waste ? Until some big credible organization creates a reliable peer-reviewed database of content, the incumbents are what's trusted, and therefore what will keep being used.

        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:31PM (1 child)

          by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @02:31PM (#721784) Journal

          Anybody can self-publish, but it's akin to selling your DangDongSki car to rich people who want the proven reliability of a Lexus.

          Guy I work with had a Lexus. Sold it after a year because it kept breaking down and cost an arm and a leg each time. He got a Nissan instead.

          Which would seem to be missing the point...except I don't think it is really, because:

          The peer review process is supposed to guarantee the reader that they are not investing their limited time reading bollocks.

          This part doesn't seem to be doing its job properly, as a lot of these "reviewed" studies are still junk:
          https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/02/04/011259 [soylentnews.org]
          https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/12/29/046254 [soylentnews.org]
          https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/29/1226237 [soylentnews.org]

          Can you dismiss it as a giant waste ? Until some big credible organization creates a reliable peer-reviewed database of content, the incumbents are what's trusted, and therefore what will keep being used.

          Yeah, that "trust" is part of the problem, not the solution. It is one of the misguided beliefs that is preventing a better system from replacing these journals.

          • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:57PM

            by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:57PM (#721842)

            You notice that I did put all the weasel words to show that what the system is supposed to be, knowing well that it's barely passable in practice.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:42PM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:42PM (#721380)

      In other words, just follow orders.

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:46PM (6 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:46PM (#721478)

        In other words, the system exists as it is for a reason. And Sci-Hub violates the right to obtain a copy of the information that legally belongs to someone else.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:17PM (2 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:17PM (#721487)

          > violates the right to obtain a copy of the information that legally belongs to someone else.

          Conversely, if my taxes paid for any portion of the grant, then the paper should be legally free for me to read.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:47PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:47PM (#721499)

            Any part? If you want to go that route, then it seems that you should only be allowed to read that which is proportionate to the funding.

          • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:15PM

            by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:15PM (#721541) Journal

            I guess in the United States that FASTR still hasn't passed yet. I wonder who the roadblocks on that are.

            --
            This sig for rent.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:27PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:27PM (#721490)

          > In other words, the system exists as it is for a reason.

          That reason being, "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

          Oh, wait.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:22AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:22AM (#721715)

          OK, trolls gotta eat, so...

          In other words, the system exists as it is for a reason.

          The reason being bought and paid for legislation.

          And Sci-Hub violates the right to obtain a copy of the information that legally belongs to someone else.

          No. The text is legally (see above) bound to the publisher, the information is free as in nobody owns it.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:19PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:19PM (#721936)

            Thanks for trying to feed me, but your food isn't nourishing.

            The reason being bought and paid for legislation.

            Yep. And the laws exist for reasons too. Your disagreeing with them doesn't change that it is the system and there are those who don't get rich off it who nevertheless support it.

            No. The text is legally (see above) bound to the publisher, the information is free as in nobody owns it.

            Thanks for making the point that SciHub is in fact violating the right of the publisher to determine who gets to make a copy. Facts are free and not copyrightable. (Though ethically there is the matter of plagiarism.) Information is not necessarily free, but it is a common misconception because it is a dream of many. Moot point, anyway, because SciHub isn't simply rewriting articles in a method which just shares the information. They are infringing copyright - that same legally bound text that you noted is not theirs to pass along freely.

    • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:38PM

      by Osamabobama (5842) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:38PM (#721473)

      While you were at it, you should have also changed "fellow colleagues" by lining out the "fellow." That phrase is ridiculous.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:14PM (13 children)

    by eravnrekaree (555) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:14PM (#721370)

    Do all these journals do is charge exhorbitant fees to fund the mansions of the CEO, it looks like most of the real work is done by academicians and the journal which does little or nothing but profits. Why don't academicians form their own non-profit and academician owned co-op journals rather than allowing some for profit entity profit from their work? Most importantly, academicians should retain 100% of their copyright and be free to publish their work on their own websites. The academicians like being able to access the work of other academicians so why don't they get together and agree to a new open journal that would also allow the public to access their research, which would improve the openness of information to the public, such as people in the public interested in science?

    It seems like a paywall journal is sort of an outmoded idea, from when there was no electronic media and everything had to be printed on paper and the fee to cover the cost of that. With electronic distribution the cost of distribution is nearly nil but someone is obviously raking in massive profits by continueing to collect the massive fees like they did when they ran a printing press.

    Interested members of the public should have access to science research as well, without having to pay massive fees and subscriptions. Many public libraries cannot even afford to pay the fees that the publishers demand.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:31PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:31PM (#721373)

      The academicians like being able to access the work of other academicians so why don't they get together and agree to a new open journal that would also allow the public to access their research, which would improve the openness of information to the public, such as people in the public interested in science?

      People actually do this, at least in some fields. The problem is that journals have a reputation, based on their decisions what to publish and what not to publish, and the reputation of a scientist in turn depends on the reputation of the journals they manage to get their publications in. New journals don't yet have any reputation, which means that publishing in them also means not much reputation building for those sending the papers in, which means people have incentive to continue sending their papers to the existing journals.

      Moreover, not all scientists feel the problem, as the journal is paid for by their institution, and thus the cost does not show up in their own research budget.

      And of course preprint archives like arXiv also help. If the paper is on arXiv, then it can be freely obtained from there, and the journal reference can be seen as just a mark of approval.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:53PM (2 children)

        by eravnrekaree (555) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:53PM (#721387)

        It sounds like some of the costs of the journals are passed onto the students (via tuition) or to the taxpayer if the universities are public subsidized. Nice.

        • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:49PM

          by nitehawk214 (1304) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:49PM (#721446)

          Considering that journals don't review shit anymore, and even journals with a supposedly "high reputation" simply rubber stamp approve any paper that pays the fee... it is no wonder the journals are simply leeches of public money.

          --
          "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
        • (Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:59AM

          by legont (4179) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @04:59AM (#721680)

          Research is financed by grants and universities take a sizable chunk of it for the "services". That's where money come from. BTW, scientists have no word whatsoever in determining how much they have to "share". However, they are expected to find the grants themselves and may be punished for under-performance.

          So, to answer your concerns, the "institutions" screw everybody.

          --
          "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @03:10PM (#721394)

        It think it's worth pointing out that the reputation you speak of is with the tenure committee members and the granting agencies. The scientists I know would be happy to publish anywhere if it carried equal weight with their tenure committee and the grant submissions.

        I'm no longer a scientist, but I hope my papers are available in Sci-Hub for any and all to read. I did the science to advance our collective knowledge, not line the pockets of a publishing company. That was a rude awakening when I entered grad school.

    • (Score: 1) by exaeta on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:32PM (1 child)

      by exaeta (6957) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:32PM (#721374) Homepage Journal

      It would take little more than a month or two to set that up. The problem is you need at least one full time employee for something like that, and nobody wants to pay to get the ball rolling.

      --
      The Government is a Bird
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:40PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:40PM (#721377)

        Even non-profit employees have got to eat.

        The thing about modern tech (essentially free digital global communication) is that something like SciHub can be run as a relatively low cost hobby.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:52PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:52PM (#721480)

      Why don't academicians form their own non-profit and academician owned co-op journals rather than allowing some for profit entity profit from their work? Most importantly, academicians should retain 100% of their copyright and be free to publish their work on their own websites.

      Good question. Why don't they?
      Generally the researchers (not necessarily academics) have 100% of their copyright and are free to publish the work on their own websites. Until they sign a publishing contract which cedes those rights to a publisher. (And such a contract may be signed before the researcher actually does the work, which is immaterial).
      Answer why they would do that and you will understand why the system is the way it is. And why what Sci-Hub does is wrong.
      (By the way, did you know that many journal contracts these days only cede those exclusive publishing rights for a limited amount of time? After a period the rights return to the author(s) who are then free to publish it themselves or sell the rights to someone else. But Sci-Hub comes along and says the authors shouldn't have those rights, either.)

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:37PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:37PM (#721496)

        "Answer why they would do that and you will understand why the system is the way it is."

        We do that because the bureaucrat idiots who control our pay and promotions need an easy-to-understand metric to "evaluate" our performance. A few decades ago it was different, but now that is literally the only reason left.

        "And why what Sci-Hub does is wrong."

        Speaking as an academic, from the bottom of my heart: fuck you.

        "But Sci-Hub comes along and says the authors shouldn't have those rights, either."

        I have yet to meet an academic who doesn't want their work available to everyone, for free.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @07:53PM (#721504)

          A few decades ago it was different

          It has been that way at least since the 1940s.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:24PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:24PM (#721938)

          Even if you were right, which I don't believe is true, it neverthess would be a choice YOU made by being employed at a place where you feel compelled to play along with the system.

          Again, you are perfectly free to make your own website and make all your original work available for free. But you'd get in trouble, so you don't. You wouldn't be noticed academically, so you don't. And you'd rather eat, same as all of us who do things we'd rather do for free but we have to eat. Entropy is a bitch, huh?

          As for fucking me, no thanks, you're not my type. Besides, it's clear your upset because you fucked yourself.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:26PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday August 14 2018, @09:26PM (#721544) Journal

      Why don't academicians form their own non-profit and academician owned co-op journals rather than allowing some for profit entity profit from their work?

      They can, and frequently do. Look, for example, at this list [simmons.edu], where editorial boards of journals broke off en masse from a journal and formed a new one with better access policies.

      The problem is that doing this takes significant time and effort, and it can take years to establish the reputation of the new journal, even with the editorial board carrying over. It takes time for word to spread and for scholars to accept that the quality of the new journal is good.

      Most importantly, academicians should retain 100% of their copyright and be free to publish their work on their own websites.

      Generally they DO retain the ability to distribute their UNEDITED materials, and academics frequently exchange so-called "preprints" of the draft article material they actually prepare themselves.

      It seems like a paywall journal is sort of an outmoded idea, from when there was no electronic media and everything had to be printed on paper and the fee to cover the cost of that. With electronic distribution the cost of distribution is nearly nil but someone is obviously raking in massive profits by continueing to collect the massive fees like they did when they ran a printing press.

      Okay, first off, the cost is NOT "nearly nil," at least if you want to have a functional, high-quality journal. Estimates I've seen are that running an open-access journal still costs somewhere of around 1/3 of what a traditional publisher journal costs per article. It's not just the cost of paper and printing.

      You see, you want the author to be able to retain copyright, but you're not just asking for an author to be able to self-publish the stuff the author is capable of preparing. Journal articles undergo copy-editing (and some undergo significant amounts) to make the text flow better, improve and clarify any charts/figures/examples, etc. In some cases, an article is sent back to an author and rewritten to deal with editorial requests for clarification and reorganization.

      A lot of people -- even with PhDs -- are not very good writers without an editor. Or they simply don't pay attention to editorial details. You need someone to do all that. And even by farming that copyediting out to India or something (as many journals do today), it still costs something.

      But there's more administrative costs to deal with. Yes, academics handle a lot of the work of choosing what articles to review, choosing reviewers, acting as reviewers, making broad editorial decisions, etc. But then you need people to handle the real "gruntwork" of making sure things flow smoothly -- acknowledging submissions, organizing them, sending them out to reviewers, bugging reviewers for the reviews, compiling reviews, then sending back and forth the material at various stages of editing to authors, reviewers, editors, etc. At a small journal that receives relatively few submissions, that is sometimes handled by a part-time grad student or two at a university for some pay... but at a larger major journal, it may require a full-time employee or more. That takes money. At the biggest journals, you may even have paid editorial administrative staff to deal with the quantities of submissions and make sure things run on time. (Academics often volunteer their time, but when they do so, they often don't pay much attention to things like deadlines unless they need to. Journals can't publish regularly and run without responsible people actually paying attention to deadlines, and sometimes you need to pay someone to do so.)

      And there's more other random business, like "marketing" your journal. I'm including a lot in that category -- not necessarily "advertising" it in the traditional way (though that is sometimes done for new journals), but making sure academics and libraries are aware of its existence. Making sure the big scholarly databases and indexes in your field actually know about your journal and have accurate data about it, etc. That also takes someone responsible to pay attention to it, particularly for new journals without a reputation.

      And there are lots of other little things. But they add up. Which is why even "open-access" journals still cost significant amounts to publish in. And SOMEONE has to pay for those costs. For true open-access journals, that cost burden is put on the authors, rather than subscribers. It's less than a traditional model journal, but it's not insignificant.

      Interested members of the public should have access to science research as well, without having to pay massive fees and subscriptions.

      I absolutely agree. But if you want quality journal articles, edited reasonably well, released on a regular basis, etc., you need competent administrative people to make sure all the steps happen. That often takes a lot of time from people often doing uninteresting work behind the scenes... which you generally need to pay for (at least partly).

      And it's false to say that traditional journals provide nothing to academics. They get the prestige of the journal name. Most academics need to keep their jobs. They need to get more grants. They need to get tenure. To do so, they need to appear to be publishing in the "best" places with the highest standards. While open-access journals are breaking through in many fields, a lot of the top journals are still following the traditional publishing model.

      We can argue that the system is broken, and scientists should be doing more to fix it. But that takes effort. It takes a bit more organization than a bunch of academics just banding together and saying, "Hey, let's have a journal!" and posting unedited submissions online. If you want the benefits of a good filtering journal that takes the time to publish quality research (and to do it well) -- it takes more. And the inertia has set in for most academics -- young academics who are trying to get tenure need to publish in the best places regardless of their policies, because they want to keep their jobs. And established academics are used to the journals that already exist, so it's much easier to keep doing what they're doing. The only people who can make a difference are the tiny percentage of senior academics who also feel very invested in the dynamics of publication in their fields -- enough to take time away from stuff they'd often rather be doing (i.e.. research) to solve other problems.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @08:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @08:59AM (#721713)

      Perhaps Google should? ... but make profit Google style.

      There's already Google Scholar which is a foot in the door. They have the name and reputation, the prestige, so they wouldn't look like those obscure, questionable publishing names. They have the budget and resources. The question is whether this will make money for them? But they're smart and should figure it out. They might even have the incentive of having all that technical data. What use is Google Scholar for them anyway... perhaps that purpose might align with being a free-to-access, free-to-publish publisher themselves. I wouldn't mind advertisements beside a research paper, as badly as a research paper I won't read without paying. This might even allow small high-tech companies to effectively advertise to the right audiences.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:17PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @04:17PM (#721409)

    She deserves one.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:50AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:50AM (#721691)

      She also deserves to pay the $20 million in judgments levied against SciHub. Including the $5 million that was awarded by default because she didn't feel a need to respond to the lawsuit. (Which, anywhere, is regarded as conceding guilt.)

      She's not Edward Snowden, as much as some people would like to portray her as.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @06:32AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @06:32AM (#722070)

        No she doesn't. Luckily, there are still some countries out of the reach of morons like you.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @04:11PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 16 2018, @04:11PM (#722280)

          The courts would disagree with you about whether she is required to pay them.

          And what is truly moronic is to completely ignore a lawsuit as it has been reported she did with ACS suit. Allowing someone to secure a default judgment against you. That's stupid. That allows for broad injunctive actions the likes of which the Internet has rarely seen because she didn't arrange to defend herself.

          I see that there is an extradition treaty between Kazakhstan and the US. She'd better be careful or the next step may be somewhere along the spectrum of Richard O'Dwyer or Kim Dotcom. And it doesn't seem like she's got Dotcom's resources to stall an extradition.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @05:56PM (#721450)

    On vulcan you have to be accepted to the science academy before you get to read anything ...

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:37PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:37PM (#721576)

    Recently I was doing a paper about modelling of some phenomenon. There is a well-established model made, as in 90% papers is stated, in 1950s by A.
    One morning I was so bored that instead of copying the reference from one paper to another (as every scientist did), I decided to look how sir A. derived his model. But... there is no way to get the original paper!
    I have an access to academic sources, and the only thing I could do was to order a complete book (price of a small used car) which would take 6 months (!) to complete.
    I finally found the paper in SH by its identifier. And I found two things:
    First, Sir A. used derivation from 1890s paper by T. I cannot verify it because T. wrote this thing not only in German, but printed in Schwabacher. Equations seem similar.
    Second - The formulation now known as "A's model" has two more factors (and one is critical for application in which it is used today) not given by A. in his original paper.
    I decided to dig deeper: I found an information about a Russian paper from H., 1960s, who first added one of these factors. This paper was inaccessible in any official way, even with inter-library queries, I got it asking on a Russian forum, someone had a book and djvu'ed me photos.
    Finally, K. added the last factor in early 1970s, and i got an information that all these models have been described in 1980s by... Sir A, but this paper is totally non-existent. It's some introduction to a chapter for low-volume book, which popped out of the jackdaw's arse and although a bigger publisher printed it, they seem not to know about it. It was very hard to get it, but I located a copy and got a scan of the introduction. Yes, there were both factors! With proper quotations, of course except sir H.
    I wanted to know what happened and why the model is called A's and not T.H.A. So: T. is not known at all. H. and K. published in smaller, but still worldwide journals. But sir A. published in a more "noble" one.
    Summing up, while researching where A's model came, I found that the full model is described in papers totally inaccessible in a normal way and there are more authors of this model. Most citations of A's models are just wrong and point to the wrong paper.
    Conclusion: Although it looks like academic community is very modern, in fact it is really bound to the traditions of old-contracted printers, now in form of publishers. Although the relations have changed to more business-oriented, the obsolete trusting "friend craftsmen" more than "uncertain" new has persisted. And it is easier for academic world to brake the growth of novel knowledge exchange services than to develop the new methods of it.

    And about the last sentence: If you are in a shop, and shopkeeper starts putting hand into your trousers to check that you haven't stolen anything, you slap the shopkeeper in face. So if a publisher, even which my University has contracted, wants to run their own illegal spying software on my computer during downloading a paper, I go SC.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:38AM (#721619) Homepage Journal

      SC?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:11AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:11AM (#721714)

        Sorry, SH.
        Yes, written too late at night.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:50AM (#721625)

    Scientists do all the hardwork, and publishers are just there to profit. Heck scientists even have to pay to reach more readers. And scientist also do the difficult reviews, for free. Considering how difficult research is, publishers are just those "smart" greedy bastards taking advantage of scientists' desire for attention. It feels great when publishers are getting screwed this time around.

  • (Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:12AM

    by legont (4179) on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:12AM (#721684)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan [wikipedia.org]

    She was 22 when she did it.

    I am also surprised she has not been labeled Russian Enemy of the Democracy and Free American People (not yet anyway, but check her biography).

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
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