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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/


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  • (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    Your information is ~20-30 years out of date.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.

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  • (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.