The thing I am concerned about with SciHub is its centralized nature. So far it has resisted everything, but supposed that eventually Elsevier manages to land Elbakyan in jail, or hack back SciHub and delete its content, what would happen? I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up. And I'd also be happy if the paper collection segment was free software, so that other entities could cooperate in case the original SciHub went down.
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
> I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up.
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
Comment 1:
>The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia.
Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub:
>In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years.
Please don't take HN threads further into political, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar. This comment manages to be all three, and it's a step change in the thread—a step down. Let's climb the other way please.
Agreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively broadening access to works of scientific research.
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
> Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action (...)
The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
Yes, capitalism is a worthy ideal. But don't forget that rentism is one of its failure modes, and a very common one; I don't think it's inaccurate to describe attempts to fight rentism as anti-capitalist.
The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized.
It was an improvement over feudalism, but the subsequent improvements have occurred with the general replacement of capitalism, in its original sense, with the modern mixed economy; capitalism is now a reversal of progress, not an ideal to aspire to.
>The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized.
This is completely untrue, classical liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke were espousing those ideals well before the word "capitalism" was even coined, it just used to be called Liberalism.
> Finding ways to maximize profit, as is being done here, is exactly the ideal of capitalism
That's just like, your opinion, man.
I could also say that finding ways to maximize individual freedom is the ideal of capitalism, and that's exactly the opposite of what Elsevier et al do, so they're the anti-capitalist ones and freedom of information is a capitalist ideal.
Intellectual property is a good example of the contradictions of capitalism. It destroys the principles of freedom, but in truth is necessary to perpetuate the capitalist system.
As for that being my opinion, it isn't. Capitalism has never been about maximizing individual freedom.
The foundational act of capitalism was the Enclosure Act. How does the Enclosure Act increase individual freedom? It doesn't.
You're conflating a specific subset of negative freedoms for human freedom in general. Which itself was a post-hoc justification for capitalism.
As for freedom of information being a capitalist ideal, why then is it that institutions like state secrets, patent law, copyright law and so on were created under capitalism? You claim that it is controversial, so why is there no capitalist country that doesn't have it? And why was it specifically lobbied for by early capitalists and created with capitalist?
This is just a nice fantasy that was established after capitalism already started. The very birth of capitalism, the Enclosure Act, was to restrict freedom to increase profit.
In fact, the original libertarians and anarchists were a movement that sought to end capitalism, precisely because of its coercion.
> Intellectual property is a good example of the contradictions of capitalism. It destroys the principles of freedom, but in truth is necessary to perpetuate the capitalist system.
Your assertion is quite wrong and far-fetched. Intellectual property is not necessary to "perpetuate the capitalist system", at all, and asserting otherwise has no bearing in reality. Your right to private property and to own means of production does not depend in any way on the state being able to stop others from copying concepts or ideas.
Profit is not human nature, until you abandon actually senseful definitions of profit. People selling their labour at a market price by definition cannot make profit, meaning that the vast majority of people don't make a profit, so how can it be claimed that it is human nature?
Human nature is to sometimes, with a ton of exceptions, maximize resources and utility. This does not mean maximizing profit, unless you redefine profit to be a meaningless word.
The ideals of capitalism are the ideals of classical Liberalism: small government limited mainly to the protection of citizens rights under the standard of "natural law". Intellectual property isn't such a right, because unlike with real physical property, when you "steal" intellectual property from somebody you're not preventing them from using it in future. I can't imagine many of the founding fathers would be supportive of the massive state apparatus for enforcing IP.
These are the ideals of capitalism in the same way that the ideals of European feudalism are those of upholding the natural order of things as mandated by God.
Authors choose to publish in these journals. They could choose to publish purely in open source journals and this would be a non-issue.
And “communal resources”? What if a private institution publishes a paper? You have a right to access that free as well? All public ally funded research is already available for free.
They choose it as much as I choose to implement whatever my PM asks me to. I could weasel my way out of it, most likely by changing jobs, but at a significant personal monetary and career-development expense.
Publishing open access in journals maintained by the cartel is expensive. Scientists can't really afford to pay this out of pocket, so they tack it onto grant costs, reducing the money they get to actually do science. And it's overall not a pleasant experience.
Yes, all of that. And it's even before we talk about how your worth as a researcher depends on which journal you publish in. There's a number of them where if you get accepted, it's like winning a small lottery and you will do it, whatever the rules are.
"hey could choose to publish purely in open source journals and this would be a non-issue."
These journals often offload the cost of publishing onto the authors themselves, and that money is tight. An open access publication is about the same cost as keeping an undergrad employed in my lab for a semester.
And that ignores, as others have noted, that career incentives put "Only publish in open access journals" as the kind of principled stand that might kill a new researcher's career.
I didn’t know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company already had a bad record of political censorship but now it attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to exist for long.
Despite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub, it is breaking the law. Copyright infringement, whether you agree with it or not, is a crime. If Twitter received notice from the journals’ legal teams to take down the account, they may not have the ability to fight back (depending on the journals’ legal arguments).
Rosa Parks broke the (unjust) law, but that doesn’t mean everyone who didn’t do the same before her is bad. Are all black people who suffered oppression up to that point wrong for not fighting for their rights? I don’t think so. That’s all I’m saying. Just because Twitter choose to follow the law regarding copyright does not mean they’re “evil”. I honestly don’t see how people are reading my comment as support of Twitter taking down Sci-Hub? Literally, the first few words of my comment are: “Despite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub...” Key word: I.
If the Twitter account provided links to Sci-Hub’s website, it’d be very easy for the journals to construe infringement. Whether the account actually did, I don’t know. I’m just pointing out how it could work.
They could’ve. But just because they didn’t, doesn’t mean they’re complicit. Someone else mentioned Jim Crow laws as an example of unjust laws that should’ve been fought against. That doesn’t mean everyone who didn’t fight is complicit. If you don’t have the willpower or firepower (legal arguments) to fight something, that doesn’t make you bad for backing out.
I don’t know. Some would say “take a stand”, but all I know is that: if your legal team says there’s almost no way you’d win a lawsuit from the journals, and that you could be on the hook for millions of dollars in damages, you don’t “take a stand”. Because it’s not just the company you’d be taking down, but yourself from the inevitable lawsuits from angry investors. It’s sad, buts it’s the reality we live in.
Voting and contacting your representatives is pretty efficient... Yeah, lobbying from big entities is a problem that we need to solve, but come on, look at what we have already achieved. Convincing the average people around you is frequently more work.
For some more context I would like to share a precedent specifically in India and Delhi that could be relevant to this case as well, "Rameshwari Photocopy Service shop copyright case":
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
Public mone is spent two times for a paper: first time to publish and second time to read it.
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
All of these publishers are also an impediment for the progress. Just look at more modern approach for the scientific publishing - Authorea[1], PubPub[2], some similar platforms.
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.
Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?"
Aaron cofounded Reddit, resigned, turned down multiple opportinities to build out other tech companies, dedicated himself to open access activism and eventually killed himself as he was prosecuted for wire fraud.
Meanwhile, Relx currently has a market cap of £33 bn, and revenue of £8 bn, when it is essentially providing the service of pdf publishing to its unpaid authors and editors.
Arron and Alexandra are extremely brave, and it is Relx and other companies that are taking my property when my tax money is spent to generate research that they then want to charge millions of dollars for others to access.
That's exactly the difference: the scientists don't get paid from the money you pay the journal. They do the work for free and the reviewers do the work for free. If all the journals somehow disappeared, nothing much would change. In some fields the pre-print is what counts anyways, and you don't pay to download a paper on arXiv.
Your comment makes no sense. No one is forced to publish in these journals. It's a choice. So if these journal did disappear I highly doubt "nothing would change".
The choice of publication venue is driven by prestige. Researchers want to publish in “high impact,” high visibility venues. In many fields those are closed journals, but if those journals magically disappeared the research community would probably just take a bit to figure out a new pecking order, and in that sense nothing would change.
JMLR is an interesting example, where the editorial board of a top journal in the machine learning field basically forked the journal to an open alternative, and of course nobody hesitated to publish there because that’s where the prestige was.
For new fields like machine learning, there are free, open access journals that work perfectly well in filtering the highest quality research.
It is helpful to have top tier journals like Nature, but the value is generated by the editors and article submittors. If we shut down the top journals tomorrow new open access ones would quickly take their place, and the behaviour of their owners is parasitic.
The notion that we have no art or artists unless compensated appears to imply money somehow causes art.
If this were the case, then why all the fuss when capitalist music and art industry “discover” an artist? Sure, some pop groups are created, but the greats are discovered, long existing, before glommed onto by publishers or labels.
The argument that artist was not already creating art, uncompensated, for the sake of creation and, particularly for music, sharing, seems without basis in clear objective reality of where art comes from or what ‘causes’ artists to create art.
Perhaps you’re confusing distribution with art. The distribution industry would look very different if sharing were frictionless from artist to fan to fan and no middleman had to get a vig.
Such is the complexity of laws, that, through a series of steps that each seem reasonable individually, one can become an owner of a thing that should not be their property.
We are not compensated for reviewing on behalf of journals. We even pay to publish, and then pay to read our own paper.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
This sounds like a valid viewpoint, but it could lead to significant downsides. Like pay per review scams on Amazon. I don't know how this policy will play out in reality.
Nothing would change (except that Elsevier etc would have to reach their pockets for the first time).
The editor invites domain experts to review manuscripts. By compensating the reviewers it does not mean that you suddenly get more domain experts. Same people will be invited. But they will be compensated by taking a cut of the publisher's profits.
Or we can cut the middle men and publish in community maintained non-profit open-access journals.
Open access are not always free. I think one of the biggest materials science journal is asking from the authors to pay something in the order of $4,000 to make it open access [1].
The trick is to kick out out the for-profit middlemen who are taking advantage of the prestige and impact that various journals built over time, and now they just receive paychecks and free labor.
That's inaccurate. When you publish to a journal, the journal will give you a pdf of your paper which you can put up on a personal site. You always have access to distribute your research.
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).
Your link states you retain the right to do this, but that it may be subject to an embargo period. If it's referring to the allowed embargo period according to US law (which requires all federally funded papers be shared publicly) then it would be 12 months. They further allow you to share preprints which are not their professionally-formatted versions (i.e. you can put your pre-review version on arxiv), as does generally everyone else.
Also Taylor & Francis may have decent journals in some niches but generally aren't a great publisher.
This is false, it is merely a CSE viewpoint. In science, several prestigious journals are difficult to get into, and afterwards, charge you for the paper, per column or per page, being published. Figures and color may cost extra (significantly).
I would pay $10 if the author got at least payed $8 out of that. But since authors get payed nothing, I rather download the work from some other site and send the author a thank you mail if I really liked their work.
A whole lot of us post our papers on our websites. Those that don't are typically afraid of getting their employers in legal trouble, or don't know how to set up a website beyond the faculty bio page that their department makes for them.
My understanding is that the universities have contracts with the journals that mandate the professors and researchers publish in the journal with almost no exceptions. You’re putting the blame in the wrong place.
Universities have contracts with journals through their libraries to provide their staff full access to publications.
Universities rarely tell scientists where to publish. That is determined by the scientists, the quality of the paper and the editor of the journal.
Scientists and PhD students need to publish in high impact factor journals for their work to be recognized, for promotions, graduation, etc. There is a lot of work that goes into a scientific publication. It's not a blog (which most people equate it to when they say why isn't it free).
Scientists can make their publications available on their personal website. Generally google scholar will give you a pdf if its available. Some labs maintain papers on their site, other scientists don't. Generally, finding older publications is a challenge.
I've commented on this earlier. Asking the researcher to not publish in these journals is pointless. You need to legislate access. But in general, most scientists will have access to these journals from their university libraries (at least in US/Canada/Europe).
This is inaccurate. Universities have contracts with publishers to get their faculty access to the journals.
I've never encountered a mandate to publish in certain journals because the university has contracts with them. On occasion there are incentives like breaks on open access fees essentially because the university pre-paid, and there are field specific norms on where to publish.
then they are stealing money from universities... essentially the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it. What do you think the money for the university is used for?
Who, exactly, do you think gets the money from journal access fees? I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who write the articles, nor the people who peer-review them, nor the universities who employ either group.
Universities around the world collectively pay billions of dollars to gain access to journals, many of which their own researchers contribute to. The University of California cut ties with Elsevier because of the extremely high cost of accessing their work.[1] And that is a huge deal for a major US university like that to end things with the world's largest academic publisher. The universities are not making money from journals -- they're paying exorbitant amounts to for-profit companies with some of the largest profit margins in any industry.
If someone were to snap their fingers tomorrow and make it so that scientists could publish their work without having to deal with these for-profit publishers, universities would save millions of dollars (per school), taxpayers would save money, and the general public would also have greater access to the work that they themselves funded through public grants.
It's confusing but "the University of California" as used here actually refers to the entire system of ten schools, from Berkeley to, uh, Merced. The system collectively negotiates for journals.
There was also a big fight over prices with Nature about 10 years ago.
> the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it
This statement makes me think you significantly misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors, staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The university does take some of the grant money given to lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned salaries).
They could, but the optics of such an action would be really, really bad. Moreover, my gut feeling is that most researchers that use sci-hub could obtain most of the papers through their employer's subscription anyway. It's just that the UX of Sci-Hub is so much better.
You are confusing two things here: 1) the problems that for-profit journals bring, and 2) the supposed problems that all academic journals have, regardless of whether they are published by a for-profit or a non-profit publisher.
In certain fields, journals continue to be published by non-profit learned societies that now, in the digital era, make their articles freely available to all. And they certainly do verify what they publish inasmuch as the peer review process is rigorous and challenging, and even the most esteemed authors end up having to make major corrections to the paper to pass that review.
If you think journals as a vetted, reputable venue for scientific debate no longer have a place, just go look at Academia.edu today where anyone can sign up and participate in discussion sessions. The result: crackpots, cranks, and wacko alt-history or racist/nationalist extremists take over those discussion sessions, drowning out the actual scholars. Thank goodness for journals.
"This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing. Knowledge, when left to it's own nature, wants to be free and spread. The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. As an app developer, I implement all the tricks I know to stop people from pirating my work, but if they KNOW how to do it, and ARE WILLING to do it, good for them.
> The digital music revolution is just another aspect of this same concept, I never ever paid for any string of bits in my life, and never will. [my italics]
You sound proud of that! So, you're not a musician or artist or writer etc etc, then – I can't imagine any of those saying that. Calling something "a string of bits" to make it sound valueless is a strange trick.
> "This is not the same as Napster" - It's the same thing.
I think Alexandra's point is a good one – they are essentially different:
"The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing."
Scihub and Napster are "the same thing", in the sense that both are tools that were created to enable the peer to peer sharing of information, one bypasses the journals middlemen, the other the record labels. Information is meant to be free, anything that tries to stop it is going against the nature of info. The way I see it's like trying to stop entropy, good luck trying to create your perpetual motion machine.
You are then saying Amazon and Ebay are the same as The Silk Road.
They are marketplaces, but from an ethical standpoint they are vastly different.
You cannot stop piracy but a different thing is saying music piracy is legitimate. You are conflating different things.
If you don't understand the difference between Napster and Scihub you probably think music piracy is OK. It is not.
First of all, scholars themselves use Scihub and most scholars that do not have a conflict of interest disagree with how companies like Elsevier operate.
I think music piracy is more than OK, it is good. I also understand the distinction you are trying to make and it is a makes sense. Journals add nothing. Musicians, producers, and other technicians do work to make music.
> The problem is that publishers are not actual creators of these works, scientists are – they do all the work, and academic publishers simply use their position of power in the Republic of Science to extract unjust profits. Sci-Hub does not enable piracy where creative people are deprived of the reward they deserve. It is a very different thing.
This has strong parallels with how the parasitic private sector, in its endless thirst for profit above all else, ruins so many other things that would be better run through public provision: housing, medical care, etc.
I think the private sector (for the most part) does a good job on delivering new housing, and are largely limited by local rules such as zoning and set-asides.
The only real criticism of them IMO is that they're cyclical with the economy. They tend to build during good times, but the most cost-effective time to build housing is during bad times (now) because construction costs are also low.
As someone who have escaped from places with public housing and healthcare provision, I suspect you were never really experiencing that. Some place for wise regulation - maybe.
That said, a parallel is very poor. Modern academia is a zero sum morally corrupt game, guilty of many sins on its own.
Like you have said, this is obvious. Same with academic positions. In real life, if you think you know better, you go start your own business and don't wait until all your enemies die out.
Having experienced, in a couple of very different countries, the difference between public and private housing and healthcare I know which one I prefer.
No experience as an insider in academia so can't comment on that.
Ah, yes, I remember that time when I tried to copy a house and the private sector, all parasitic-like, went on about bullshit like "labour" and "materials" and "land". Like, what's that? I have rights, you know!
Not unsurprisingly a lot of comments are very negative on publishers but I think the nature of the criticism is kind of weird. Publishers in almost every comment as well in the interview are almost always portrayed as institutions that rip everyone off. But this is strange, because if it was true, everyone would just stop paying them, they don't literally hold anyone at gunpoint.
In the most basic sense what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention. Being on the cover of reputable journals for a scientist is like being on the cover of Vogue for a fashionista.
When people in India rip off scientific articles using sci-hub they don't compete with the core business model of publishers, they just want knowledge. But journals aren't really in the business of selling knowledge in the first place. Journals survive sci-hub for the same reason Harvard survives free lectures of YouTube and Hollywood survived ripped blue-rays on street-markets. Because these institutions are not in the business of selling textbooks or movies, they sell celebrities and status.
So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
> So assuming for a second that the publishing hegemon is destroyed, what will happen next? Will all the up and coming star scientists happily publish on undifferentiated internet platforms where all that matters is science? Some maybe, but my more cynical guess is that a thriving internet status economy would soon emerge that would inhabit the exact same niche that publishers have now. Because the exclusivity of publishers is not the tool they wield against the public or scientists, it's the very commodity they are selling.
That's a very good analysis, I think, but it overlooks that an internet attention economy is a better state.
In the field of machine learning, it has already come to pass. All the top publishing venues (the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the conferences NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ...) are already free of charge and open access for everyone. There are many problems with reviews in those venues (mostly growing pains from the rapidly increasing number of submissions, and problems stemming from the fact that there is 1 single round of review), and indeed the conferences, JMLR and Twitter are now the "attention economy" of the field.
But it has massive positive externalities, namely, you don't need to pay (or have your university pay) for access to the research anymore. The system works as badly (or as well) as it would with the publishers, but without giving them a cut.
The thing about (closed-access journal) publishers that ticks people off is just how little of the value they create for their cost. They get the papers they publish for free, they get the peer review for free, they even get most of the editing for free (academic editors are generally volunteer, although copy editors, who check for spelling and formatting, are generally employees).
As for why people keep paying, the answer is industry lobbyists. Whenever there is a movement to require open access of research, industry lobbyists shut it down. Although in many fields like physics and mathematics, people are bypassing journals (closed or open) in favor of preprints.
> what a publisher is, is an institution that sells reputation and attention
If that is all publishers are now, then they are no longer what they once promised to be. Initially many respected journals were published by non-profit learned societies. (In some fields, like certain branches of linguistics, they still are.) For-profit publishers originally told those learned societies that if they handed their journals over to the corporation, the corporation could perform more high-quality editing, proofreading, and typesetting and do it more economically.
Fast forward a few decades, and the for-profit corporations are no longer providing those things. Proofreading and copyediting is now all on the unpaid editorial team (or even on the individual authors). Typesetting is often on the unpaid editorial team, and the publisher wants the unpaid editorial team to simply provide a camera-ready PDF.
So, yes, in the end the for-profit publisher is just providing printing and distribution (which even the non-profit learned societies managed to do just fine) and a vague “reputation and attention”. Sounds like a raw deal.
Many researchers are abandoning Elsevier and for-profit journals, but unfortunately two of the major non-profit technical societies in our field - ACM and IEEE - still seem to view digital libraries as a cash cow that can milk as much as possible to pay for unrelated activities, and they also still charge fees to authors for open access. These societies are hard to escape since they actually organize some of the best and biggest conferences.
USENIX is open access I believe, which is great, and I even think some of ACM's SIGs - SIGCOMM for example - make their publications, such as CCR and conference proceedings, available immediately via open access. (I think they are no longer published in print format, so that may save money.)
Hopefully many other SIGs (as well as IEEE societies) will follow suit, and hopefully government open access requirements will improve the situation as well. It doesn't make sense for taxpayer-funded research publications to be locked behind a third-party paywall.
I'm not sure what's supposed to be wrong with "thriving internet status economies" or "reputation and attention." The problem is the "exclusivity" where people have to pay e.g. $45 to read an article often partially or completely funded by taxpayers and with absolutely no value-add other than "reputation and attention," in order to discover it is irrelevant to what they're researching.
In my view, it would be ideal if in an open-access world some editors and/or organizations endorsed and vouched for particular papers, and academics competed intensely for those endorsements, if those endorsements were career-making or career-killing, and those editors/organizations made a living from charging scientists for their consideration and review.
That's not the bad part. If the output is available to everyone to read, I don't see the tragedy.
They don't literally hold anyone at gunpoint, but they do figuratively. If you stop paying a publisher then you don't get access to the papers your researchers need to read in order to perform their work.
Because by copyright law they hold the keys to the kingdom (of scientific literature)
Change is hard, common knowledge attacks are easy, publishers are like dictators, defectors are punished (publishing in a worse journal, basically only a minority of researchers can even flirt with the idea), and even if the global optimum is not a dictatorship it's hard to get there.
That is indeed a fair point: Why do people go to some Elsevier journal to look for an article instead of just going to the corresponding arxiv.org section? Because there is trust in the curation of those articles.
The problem with scientific publications is that there has not been a Spotify, Steam or Netflix disrupting company that provides the same service in a better way.
EDIT: Thinking more about it, I think such a service would be fair to say have a raw collection of journal articles (it could even be based on Arxiv) and charge for the "curation" layer on top of it. Now the only question is how to kickstart that curation layer in a matter that is trusted by scientists. Maybe it could be something more distributed where also curators (reviewers) and writers get some profit.
A reasonable request is not to shut all prestigious publishing monopolies down, but to ask/beg/fight them to be less greedy. As you mentioned, publishers run market places and sell distribution channels. They do not need that high margins to run the business. Where the profit goes to? Not the science community, but heir owners and executives high up on the rank who do not contribute much but get the most cash rewards. I believe this is what worth fighting for.
I would go even further and say that these prestigious institutions don't need any execs. They are just a pressure tool for corporate interests. There's no shutting down needed, just dismantling their bureaucracy. If there is one community where self-organizing is genre consensually known to work it's the academic community. There are already tons of fields where this is the case: some top-notch-international and most local conferences and journals alike in CS and math are already being run collegially by universities and unions. As always it's always where there are big corps that thing go awry (looking at you biology and medicine).
This! What the journals are selling is reputation.
The authors can choose to publish wherever they want - but there is value in publishing in Science, Nature. And their academic overlords acknowledge it too. Who gives a shit if a professor publishes a dozen papers in some obscure journal no one reads?
If you want to solve this issue stop violating the journals copyrights and start attacking the academic leaders who demand professors publish in them.
I'm on the fence about Sci-hub. Every time I read about it, I remember this article about how they operate.
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money, but it has some merit with proof of attacks changing passwords, etc. Real, tangible damage. I'm not sure this is what Aaron Swartz envisioned. I'm all for vigilante justice or whatever pirates use to justify it (seriously, I petitioned my local college to stop subscribing to them) but this is hardly the same thing.
That link is transparently pushing something, and what it's pushing definitely isn't "the truth."
The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.
Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.
What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"
No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.
>What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs
Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.
You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."
Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.
So if there's no proof, and you'd agree with it even if there was, then why bother posting this awful article?
I suppose to see what others thought about it. I specifically mentioned in the parent comment that I was on the fence and that "This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money". I did mention the proof in the article, which is real. I'll admit my initial judgement of the article was off, but not entirely wrong given that I never said I wholly agreed with it. Or maybe I'm moving goalposts or whatever. Anyway, I thank you for pointing out what I did not realize.
>You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."
I am not negating it, I am admitting that I am wrong.
My guess would be that Sci-hub probably isn't doing this because my guess is that they don't need to. Given how widespread support and usage of Sci-hub is within academia, I suspect they have access voluntarily donated credentials on the order of hundreds if not thousands (remember that it's not only faculty staff that have access to journal articles: students do too).
Now that I agree with; the article specifically avoids attributing it to them, and if they could, you can bet they would. So I'm assuming they're taking a mostly unrelated incident and pushing an agenda with it.
I sure hope so. Relying on credential donations would be a great way to make Elsevier's anti-piracy efforts much easier while landing more academic activists in jail / suicide.
Eh. I agree with the sentiment. But you do see how there is a difference between just downloading PDF's and what is referenced in the article? Not at all saying it is sci-hub's fault. And I myself have literally uploaded to sci-hub (ironically, in case my FBI agent is reading this). But it's not equivalent to crack accounts, scrape 45k pdfs as it is to simply upload something you've downloaded.
So if Elsevier gets rid of network licenses like the one Aaron Swartz abused and the next generation of activists is forced to abuse other kinds of licenses, that means they should just roll over and give up? Really?
Nuts!
Look at it this way: would you rather A. lose the war and pay Elsevier forever and ever, B. donate your credentials to scihub and get slapped with a lifetime Elsevier ban and big Aaron Swartz suicide level lawsuit, or C. use a sketchy library computer one day and a few months later have to contact Elsevier support to get your account reset because the PDFs won't download?
I don't know about you, but A and B seem really bad to me and C seems much less bad.
