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posted by chromas on Monday October 11 2021, @09:47PM   Printer-friendly

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: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday October 12 2021, @12:40AM (3 children)

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday October 12 2021, @12:40AM (#1186328)

    If they want money then actually do something of value. It's been shown they sure as hell don't do any peer review. It's not in their interest to do so since they get fees off all entries. The time has long since past since we needed them to print and distribute the information on dead trees. The Internet changed scientific publishing as profoundly as the drop in the cost of Aluminum in the late 19th century.

    So what it is that we actually need that is still valuable?

    • Peer Review
    • Editing
    • Storage and dissemination of large data sets
    • Archival and indexing

    Storing and serving a bunch of PDFs is incredibly cheap. If Netflix can serve its catalog with CDNs and orders of magnitude more content for $20/mo, then the publishers can fuck right off with $50 access fees per title. That's the same level of fucktarditude in expecting people to always pay $10 per viewing of a movie online while attached to a cable subscription service already charging $100/mo. That's on the way out.

    Maybe $50/year for unlimited access, custom bookmarking, the ability to order prints for $x w/ shipping, from a respectable publisher that actually conducts real peer review and vets papers. That's the only reason why I can see myself paying a publisher. Knowing they had an extensive staff of experts that actually peer reviewed the paper and provided their commentary. You know, filtering out the 5G causes COVID using wavelengths shaped like platonic solids kind of crap. Even better, with hugely popular papers, REPLICATE THE EXPERIMENT AND STUDY!!!!! Some people crowdfund video games, I would give a couple hundred to have some energy research investigated and replicated.

    Lastly, have the publishers ever spent billions on funding any science?

    Fucking parasites.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday October 12 2021, @10:11AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday October 12 2021, @10:11AM (#1186376)

    A lot of publishers do actually do peer review. I'm an unpaid peer reviewer that works for free for poor suffering multinational publishers who can barely make ends meet.

    They really don't to anything much except collect money. It's a pretty good racket to be in.

    • (Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Tuesday October 12 2021, @07:19PM

      by loonycyborg (6905) on Tuesday October 12 2021, @07:19PM (#1186485)

      On the other hand, if peer reviewers actually were on payroll of publishers then resulting conflict of interest would be dire indeed.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @08:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @08:00PM (#1186492)

      When I start my own journal, you can come work for me. I'll easily double what they're paying you now!