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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/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:14PM (13 children)
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)
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)
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
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
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
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)
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
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.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @06:52PM (3 children)
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)
"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
It has been that way at least since the 1940s.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @10:24PM
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.