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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/
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @10:37PM (2 children)
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)
SC?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @09:11AM
Sorry, SH.
Yes, written too late at night.