What I find the most fascinating is that a single person, possibly with the help of a few select others, is able to curate, index, host, and serve 85% of scholarly literature[0] which otherwise would be inaccessible to many.
80 million papers are available on Sci-Hub to its half a million daily users.[1] That is around 80 TB of data, and 2 TB of daily outbound traffic.[2]
Given the fact that Sci-Hub has achieved all those whilst being forced to operate under the radar, I have massive respect for Elbakyan first and then all the others that have helped it survive. Not only Sci-Hub is an undeniable disruption, but also an amazing technical feat that many startups would envy.
Something that came up often when talking to people at my college was that our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that. We're talking multi million dollars per year per university per journal contracts.
Reviewers are volunteers. Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible. How much does it cost to replicate a file system across 5 to 10 data centers, have a 10G link to each data center, and run a few nodes to serve web traffic?
Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for journals.
> P.S. Seed its torrents!
I know no one will give legal advice here but: is this legal to do?
"A reminder that Elsevier made
$6 BILLION selling your academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...
And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0
And paid the reviewers of the articles $0"
> our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure required to maintain a service like that
> Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible
Yes. The truth is these problems and costs are created by the copyright industry. Since copying is illegal, they have set themselves up as the only legal source for this material and that requires a lot of storage and bandwidth.
All they have to do is place their copyrighted works in the public domain. The storage and distribution problems will solve themselves immediately and at zero cost to them. People will literally do their work for them.
> Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for journals.
Well motivated enthusiasts in their free time can achieve 100x what middle-grade 'digital consultants' can do in the same time...
Building sci-hub in a corporate world, even leaving out the legal issues, would be very expensive. Begin by thinking how many 30 person meetings you're going to need to have to decide how to arrange the tender process...
In Germany you'll get sued very quickly for offering others' copyrighted content, there's a whole industry there of lawyers mailing you that you've violated their clients' (copyright holders) rights but if you pay the around 1000 Euroes "damages" and sign a letter agreeing to not violate their rights again it'll go away. If they catch you seeding/uploading a part of another of their copyrighted content, then they'll ask for even more money.
So if you think seeding is the right thing, you'll probably end up really broke and unable to pay your bills there.
The other side of this are lawyers profiting off people who get these letters and charging money for basically copy-pasted emails on how to respond.
That's true. Putting tax funded research studies behind corporate paywalls also is in many contexts and jurisdictions. But it's funny how that one doesn't ever get prosecuted.
It also shed some light on the inefficiency / inefficacy of most production groups .. a few persons with a real motive ended up doing more than many large companies.
Nothing new, it's obvious to many how much drag and cruft lies in the majority of businesses in the world.
I work in corporate software development, and the incredible inefficiencies astound me every day.
There's a lot of useless work mandated by law as well... I've spent years of my life developing useless anti-money laundering software because a lawmaker somewhere thought of a convoluted potential possible money laundering insurance fraud scheme (while ignoring the actually used ones).
The insurance company had upwards of TWO THOUSAND developers working... and the software was incredibly bloated and slow crap. It's mind boggling.
I have a NAS which I could probably open up and seed a lot of Scihub content from. But what are the odds that something bad would happen to me, and how bad? Like, a fine? or a raid and jail time?
if you are in a developing nation, which most of users likely are, then seeding or downloading illegal torrents won't be any problem. But I don't know about others.
I'm not sure I understand the concept of paid access to scientific research, so I'd be grateful if someone with more knowledge of the topic could explain it to me.
Governments fund universities, people donate large amounts of money to universities, and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is. Why are they charging for access to research at these institutions then?
You are completely right that the current system is nonsense. It only exists, because back in the day there was no internet. Scientists needed publishers that would print and distribute scientific results. But publishers might deny publication in their journals if they thought the science is not good enough. Thereby the publishers established a reputation system. For example, it is really hard to get a scientific paper accepted to the journal Nature. But if you manage to do it, a lot of people will assume that it is good science.
The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals.
And lastly, science needs funding. If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about.
> If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about.
Not only is this correct, but it is the origin of peer review as we know it today.
Despite what most academics assume, peer-review itself is a relatively new concept in science. Nearly all of the most incredible scientific discoveries were not subject to peer review as we know it today.
Peer review was in fact created in as a response to a decrease in scientific funding in the 1970s. It was a deliberate attempt to create credibility in order to bolster funding.
I find it somewhat absurd that the current state of peer review is considered a pillar of "good science", when not only has most of the greatest science done without it, but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis. And in general the vast majority of publish work being questionable garbage that only remains unquestioned because of a culture of fear around question the corner stone of artificial credibility created solely to increase funding.
> but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis
The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized that ~half of published results in many fields fail to reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My impression was that this goes back as far as you care to look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to reproduce. So the only new thing is that we noticed this, which is a step forwards, not back. Is there reason to believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?
It's not that older studies tended to be more accurate. It's that peers worked together in seclusion via lots of back-and-forth letters and collaboration over years, only "publishing" when they and their peer group were sure they had something worth sharing with the wider community.
This is how science was done up until some time in the 1970s. This is how real groundbreaking science is still done. The publishing prestige economy is of little actual value.
And this is why it's hard for newcomers to switch to open access journals. Because they cannot easily afford not to have well known journals in their publication list when applying for positions. Because the people in charge probably don't fully understand the applicant's research, but they think they get a good sense of quality by the names of the journals
So if I understood correctly, it's more about using the name of the journal as a verification of the study the scientist is doing, since the person funding them probably won't understand the research. Am I right?
> The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals.
Just because some bad science gets in doesn't mean it's 100% useless; perhaps the bad science we're seeing now is 1% of what we would otherwise?
I have no real insight in this, so I can't really judge how useful it is, but it's not an on/off switch, and as you've stated here it strikes me as a fallacious argument.
I would argue that the publish or perish culture coupled with a creation of funding focused peer-review system in the 1970s has lead to much worse science.
There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get published because peer reviewers either don't understand or misunderstand the work being done (even Geoffrey Hinton has complained about this).
Then on top of that we have vast amount of research that cannot be successfully reproduced, and this has been happening for decades. Largely because we have created a culture of 'rubber stamp' science.
The correct publishing paradigm has lead to blander and at the same time quite often garbage science.
You're not wrong. There was a legendary librarian named Jeffrey Beall who cataloged a whole little industry of predatory scientific publishing. Here's a quick article that mentions his work:
https://publons.com/blog/bealls-list-gone-but-not-lost/
It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted. It's a mess.
It's not common for researchers to find that no journal at all will accept their paper, so it's not like there's a bunch of bad science being done that we just never see.
The result of getting rid of the reputation system of prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal possible, many researches will lower the quality of their research. But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.
My main concern with abolishing journals is that the need for prestige in science wouldn't disappear overnight, and instead of trying to get into prestigious journals, to only way to get that prestige bonus will be to do the social climbing to associate yourself with prestigious researchers.
> But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.
Or clickbait and algorithm gaming. And social networks would be even more important. You already allude to getting associated with big names. It is already common to get one in the author list to get accepted in a “good” journal.
There are already too many papers being published on many subjects, so you tend to follow closely what comes out of a smaller community, and recommendations from the bibliography databases. Honestly, the problem is more with how research is evaluated by institutions and funding bodies than with the publishers, as greedy as they may be.
But even compared to other publishing, like books. From my experience books sell for less (both paperback and e-book), and also a significant chunk of it goes to the author. Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?
Also, as you mention, newcomers need the reputation given to them by journal, but I don't understand how this is a stable system. In theory, well established scientists, who give the journals its reputation, should be able to easily migrate to an open journal, and therefore make the whole system collapse, no? Do these large publication have any sort of deal to give big researchers on their journals?
No, scientists get paid (usually) by their institution. Often, they'll even have to pay to publish ("page charges", charges for illustrations, etc.), and also to make it openly accessible (although to be fair, at that point their works aren't sold anymore; the author's payment is the source of profit).
Even established, tenured scientists will often need to obtain grants and will still be judged by where they publish. Though there's also, of course, quite some institutional inertia and people just not caring, since it doesn't affect them personally. And of course, there are also a lot of (established) academics who do care.
In addition, established scientists are rarely the first author on papers. It's usually a grad student or postdoc who does most of the work and gets first authorship. A publication in a top journal can literally make or break their career.
If someone decides that their group won't publish in top journals, they're hurting their own students, which probably discourages people from doing so.
> No, scientists get paid (usually) by their institution
I didn't say they get paid, I'm talking specifically amount the money flow to these journals. Does the funding from the research/scientists come from the profit the journals make, or from outside funding?
Ah sorry, I misunderstood. Often they're indirectly government-funded - for example, in the Netherlands we have the NWO ("Dutch organisation for scientific research"), which distributes government money to researchers and institutions. In the US you have e.g. the NIH. Additionally, there are private funds like the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
Funding flows from those organisations to the researchers, and from the researchers to the publishers. And from the publishers to their shareholders.
> But even compared to other publishing, like books. From my experience books sell for less (both paperback and e-book), and also a significant chunk of it goes to the author. Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?
One data point: we were 3 authors who worked for several months on a chapter of an authoritative book in our field. We got €100 to split. Of course, we get fuck all for our papers.
> Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?
No. And most of the time, if you want a paper that's behind a paywall, email the corresponding author and they'd be delighted to know that someone on the planet actually cares, and then email you a pdf, copyright be damned.
Honestly, sci-hub is the best website of the last decade; I use it every day. It works better than the publishers' websites (that I have legitimate access to). It's just excellent. It's founder should be made a saint.
Indeed. The horrible phrase is 'copyright transfer agreement', which is typically a condition of being published. My experience is that the better journals are more of an arse about copyright. I've just written two book chapters and spent maybe a day getting permissions to reuse published figures, sometimes including my own (!) in other works.
On the other hand, publishers have very little power when it comes to enforcing their copyrights when the author of an article decides to make it available on their personal web page. I have never met a researcher who refused to provide a copy of a paper when asked, despite technically violating a copyright by doing so. Academic publishers know that if they start threatening researchers they are playing with fire -- their business model is already obsolete and is only kept alive by institutional inertia, and the last thing they want is for researchers to find the motivation needed to ditch the publishing companies (the technology is widely available, now it is just a problem of politics and of organizing a community to change).
>also a significant chunk of it goes to the author.
Many (most?) books through publishers don't earn out their advance which is probably low 4 figures in most cases. In practice, writing books is either a hobby or it's a reputational side-gig for you day job whether self-employed or employed by some organization.
It's an important topic that I see in many places.
Old system had to certify a certain level of quality to exist due to structural constraints (fragile business, cost of production/operation). Now that the costs are fading away, the danger is to end up like bad social networks who just do whatever because it's free and people waste years until it's obvious it doesn't provide any value anymore.
But there are significant sums invested to fund research. In many ways it's a similar transaction to the VC. An investment into 'bad' research does not help the university or funding council reach their goals e.g. to raise their own funding or contribute impactful research to science. Hopefully, they are diversified enough for the bad eggs not to matter
Imagine if the tobacco industry convinced the world to call cigarettes "Cancer Reducers", even though they're literally the exact opposite. Now imagine the tobacco industry also bought every single newspaper, tv network, book publisher and media publisher in the world.
That's exactly what has happened with the Copyright/Patent industry. They convinced the world that these should be called "Intellectual Property", even though they are the opposite of property rights.
It's rotten to the very core (like slavery, there is no reasonable term limit—the whole idea should be abolished). About 1% of the population understands the truth (like SciHubs), but the rest go along with what they are told. Understandable, the brainwashing begins young and is pervasive (all Disney children's movies, for example, start with an FBI Warning threatening jail time if you go against the system).
It was that previously these publishers were printing and distributing journals, before the internet.
Some of the journals are naturally more prestigious than others. Academics want to publish in these famous journals. The name of journals they publish in carries lot of value for an academic's career. (That's what matters for the big head dudes who manage funds / promotions, they don't understand all these open access stuff.)
Thus, the publisher has a monopoly or oligopoly on high value journals, new open access free as in libre journal cannot establish itself.
Even if you're a well meaning academic who wishes not to contribute to this oligopoly, when you are young you don't want to risk your career. When you're old there are other young people under you and you don't want to risk their career.
The big ~~head~~ belly dudes in positions of power are ones who need to understand this.
It's not nonsense, but it dates from an earlier era and we may not want to continue in the tradition. In the past, professors who wanted to preserve a report of their work sent drafts off to publishers who reviewed, edited, typeset, printed and distributed. There are still plenty of people in this chain who do the work and aren't paid by the government. They get their paychecks from the subscription revenues to the journals. These are still, usually, paid indirectly by the government from the so-called "overhead" charged on grants. You can think of this system as "reader pays".
As more professors developed the ability to typeset their own work with LaTeX and email/ftp/http, the costs of the old system have started to become more difficult to sustain. Some researchers do the typesetting themselves but the richer ones hire their own production team to produce better LaTeX reports. You can think of this model as "writer pays." Either with time or money.
I think both sides have strong points. The old system is expensive and slow, but it does produce a very well-curated record of what happened. The new system is generally cheaper, but only because the researchers handle much more of the workload. I also worry that research will disappear when people retire or move on. A professor's web page may be really convenient, but they tend to disappear or die from bitrot after time. I also think the "writer pays" model tends to encourage over-producing some basic research notes that might not be ready to publish yet.
>and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is.
Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size of their research grants.
I was trying to point out how high tuition for universities is. I'm not sure if this is a US-specific problem, so I won't comment on that, but my point was universities receive so much money to conduct research, and then put that very research behind extremely expensive paywalls.
If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your explanation). So - the government pays professors for their research, and then this very research is put behind a paywall, from which....publishers (?) make money?. I apologize, but it simply does not make sense to me, it seems extremely counter intuitive.
It's a mess at every level, that is definitely true. I would say that it does not make sense from a public policy perspective. Public money does pay for the research, so the public should benefit from the knowledge.
The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low.
Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.
Meanwhile BigPharma uses science developed using funds collected from citizens, and charges insane prices for some drugs to those same citizens. The system is really crazy.
The universities aren't the ones collecting the money. In fact, they the main targets of the extortion.
Most professors care mostly about prestige (reputation for being smart, wise or innovative) and would prefer to ignore or disdain the economic and legal aspects of life. OK, that is a little unfair: most profs want to focus on their specialty and sometimes don't pay enough attention to how their actions interact with the law and the economy to affect university libraries far away.
Academic publishers, e.g., Elsevier, give professors prestige in exchange for the professors' assigning copyright (legal ownership) of the professor's writings to the publishers with the result that a university library (which is typically far away from the publishing professor's own university) must pay the publishers to give its students and faculty access the academic literature without constantly running into the paywalls that people who are not students or faculty run into.
I think prestige is a very unfair characterization. It’s my belief that most people just want their research to be seen and engaged with by their peers (it is, of course, the fundamental purpose of producing a paper). Universities however want prestige, and enforce the policy “publish or perish”.
The problem is still as you say — the only way to do so reliably is to give up your ownership to a prestigious journal (because prestigious journals are widely read by the relevant folk).
Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub first (or through some new filter), who’s going to argue? Every CS researcher will immediately add it to their reading list... because they want the good shit
I am an academic researcher (math). Unfortunately, prestige hits the mark.
Whenever I am being compared with my peers -- for raises, for possible grant funding, if I apply for a job at another university -- people will look at publication lists and see who has published in "good" journals.
And when you say that "prestigious journals are widely read" -- honestly, journals aren't really ever read as such. Researchers will look for individual papers they're interested in. The choice of journal is a signaling mechanism and little else.
It is true that universities want prestige... but, honestly, tenured faculty don't often care too much about what their employers want. What a panel at a granting agency thinks of my record, is more important than what my department chair and dean think.
Your idea that e.g. Stanford should order their faculty to publish on SciHub is an interesting one. For better or worse, university administrators don't tend to have or exercise much authority, and any attempt to order faculty to do anything is likely to be met with fierce resistance.
I wonder if this could be solved by a sort of collective contract:
A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't actually go into effect until it has signatories of n% of top universities (ivies, UCs, etc).
Therefore, the awful transition (of an individual university being disadvantaged) can be alleviated. Once the contract goes into effect, the pressure is directed towards the other party: those who don't publish open access will need to justify it.
> Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub first (or through some new filter), who’s going to argue?
Unfortunately, if they have staff that also intend to, or should prepare for, working somewhere else after Stanford (which is very common in an academic career), then those are likely to revolt.
You could see this happen with the introduction of "Plan S" in many European countries, where researchers were afraid that "top" journals were no longer accessible to them and that that would hurt their standing in the field and future opportunities in, primarily, the US.
> It’s my belief that most people just want their research to be seen and engaged with by their peers (it is, of course, the fundamental purpose of producing a paper). Universities however want prestige, and enforce the policy “publish or perish”.
The two are one and the same. What you call "Universities" is simply "professors at the universities". Department policies for tenure are set by a bunch of professors. The dean of the college is always a professor. There's no "us" vs "them".
Sure there is. Developers have very different goals and responsibilities than their managers (regardless of whether they were once developers themselves).
The dean serves a different master than the researching/teaching professor. It would be absurd to assume their incentives and goals are always the same, or even aligned.
The difference is that managers ultimately have to answer to a different type of crowd (consumers, shareholders, whatever). External pressures play a role. At universities, it is professors all the way. The people who are on NSF grant committees are professors. Journal editors are research professors.
There is no external pressure on these people. NSF grantors don't value Nature publications because they have to answer to the public. They value it because they value it.
If a professor becomes a dean or head of NSF, and they decide to make changes to what is considered prestigious, the only opposition they'll get is from their peers.
I agree that it was harsh for me to focus on the desire for prestige. It would've been kinder of me to focus on the need for the professor or apprentice professor to remain employed and, like you say, to have a positive influence on the community of professors.
I can't speak for "most" professors, since I haven't done any kind of scientific survey. However, I work in academia, and every professor I personally know hates Elsevier, and wants to get away from them in any reasonable way.
But when the journals that literally define their field are monopolized by Elsevier, there's only so much they can do for the time being. To avoid them, they'd have to accept their research being ignored, their careers stagnating, and their ability to continue to do their jobs properly being threatened.
SciHub is missing an opportunity by not providing a platform for researchers to self organize and run the peer review process directly on SciHub (or a new sister domain safe from interference). That would give them immediate legitimacy.
Couple funny stories about Elsevier. I published with them, and created an account. They started sending me spam advertising new journals. So I logged in and unsubscribed from all their mailing lists. Reliably, exactly one year after unsubscribing I get spam from them. When I go to unsubscribe I find a new category of mailing list, opted in automatically.
One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed.
There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.
As a possible hypothesis test, next time, could you leave the new opt-in in place for a month before unsubscribing?
If that reliably then has a new list added exactly one year later, it is a strong signal that it indeed based on you unsubscribing. But, if it instead happens at 11 months, it is a string signal that new lists are added at a specific month/day.
I mean, I would not be surprised if it happens one year later, due to Elsevier tracking when you unsubscribed, but this is a testable hypothesis, so testing it would be a Good Thing.
I think it's extraordinarily unfair to think of this as extortion. The professors have always been free to publish wherever they like and they each chose the copyrighted journals. Do we say that a fancy hotel "extorted" the fees from the guests who chose to book a room?
Some young researchers often claim that they feel pressured by the system to choose the so-called prestige journals. This pressure is coming from older researchers who are making a decision from their experience. They don't need to reward journal writers but they do. Indeed, the open access professors could announce that they will penalize the tenure reviews for those who publish in copyrighted journals. But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that, for all of the costs, the copyrighted journals do a good job curating the information.
The copyrighted journals do a terrible job curating articles, something which has been demonstrated repeatedly by people who managed to get utter nonsense through the peer-review process. I have seen Springer editors introduce spelling, grammar, and factual errors into published papers. Never in my career have I seen an academic publisher add any positive value to any part of the research process or community -- at best all they do is put their own worthless name on a journal, and at worst they have negative value.
University administrators, grant-writing bodies, and others pressure professors and graduate students to publish with specific publishers. It is not because those publishers are more trustworthy; it is simply inertia, institutional tradition, and credentialism. It is the same attitude that leads some companies to turn away candidates who never completed a bachelor's degree. To give an example of just how bad this situation is, we sometimes hear complaints about people citing the IACR eprint version of a paper rather than the "officially published" version -- not because they are any different, nor because there is something better about the official version (in fact the eprint version typically includes details that are absent from the official copy), but simply because European universities use citation counts to judge professors and only consider citations of articles published by specific publishing companies.
Academic publishers have raised their fees even as their costs have greatly declined. The number of journals that are actually printed and distributed on paper has been shrinking, and the cost of distributing over the Internet is almost a rounding error. Yet in that same period of time the publishers have increased subscription fees to the point where some university systems could not justify paying for the subscription. These companies have outlived their usefulness and they know it -- now they are trying to extract as much money as they can before the business model completely fails.
I agree that it is unfair to call it extortion. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
>But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that . . .
They don't realize any such thing: they're just doing what benefits them personally (e.g., surviving as a professor or apprentice professor) at the expense of the broader ecosystem.
It is a problem of coordination: if the professors, students and the governments and foundations that fund research acted in unison (and were sufficiently informed and clear-thinking), then the entire academic literature would probably be available without restriction (like, e.g., Wikipedia is) on the internet by now.
Such an arrangement would satisfy the values of the professor, students, etc, better than the current system does. But it is hard to get there because it is hard for 10s of 1000s to act in unison.
If I give you the choice between a bullet through the head or a slap in the face, it'd be ridiculous for me to claim that you were free not to choose the slap in the face.
Sure, it's not the publishers themselves that are de facto forcing researchers to publish with them, but they do make use of the fact that they're being put in a position of being a rent-seeker, and they lobby a lot to keep it that way.
Of course, the question is not "who's to blame?", but "how to change this"? And indeed, the publishers aren't too relevant to that question - it's the incentive structures that should change.
(Disclosure: I contribute to https://plaudit.pub, which aims to change these incentive structures.)
I'd also like to add that journals are becoming less and less relevant in some ways. Most of the journal clubs I have attended don't discuss the latest e.g. Nature, Science papers, they talk about the new stuff on arXiv that week. Add to that the fact that increasingly often the code used is on GitHub, and the data (if available) is hosted somewhere else, journals look less and less important to the process.
Of course the bar is lower for arXiv, and the papers are often a little shoddier. But my point is that journals are no longer central to process of keeping up with science.
It's how it has evolved. Journals with good reputations have been taken over gradually since the 1970s by a few larger publishing companies such as Springer, Oxford Journals, Wiley, etc. There are only very few independent journals left in my area. I think it's similar to what the record industry did with record labels. Large publishers did this by luring the journal editors in chief with "free" offers of all kind such as access to editorial systems.
Now for these publishers journals are basically constant cash-cow. Typesetting is done in India (nothing against that) for the lowest possible rate (lots against that). The rest of the work is done by academic volunteers.
The EU has launched a huge open access initiative to the extent that in the future no funding will be available for research published in closed journals, but this doesn't help researchers like me when in their area almost all reputable journals put their articles behind expensive paywall.
You can buy yourself out of this extortion by paying 2000 - 3000 USD per article, but only universities from rich countries can afford it. In a sense, the current situation makes it worse because it increases the imbalance between research in rich and poor countries and sometimes even between privileged and disadvantaged researchers in one and the same country. (For example, some of the researchers at our institute get open access fees paid because they know the right people. The system is not based on merits of the researcher or publication.)
I live and work in Portugal. We have some paid access to a way to small selection of journals. To be honest, I don't even know how to access them from home during Covid times, our IT department doesn't know how to setup a VPN. Even at work it often fails to work, and the accessible journals change from year to year. Everybody uses Sci-Hub for everything anyway.
Without Sci-Hub I could just give up my research - currently on explainable AI, metaethics, nontraditional decision making - and become a waiter.
In a way, you are lucky if the journal has outsourced typesetting to some low-quality shop. Some for-profit publishers demand that the unpaid editors do all the copyediting, proofreading, and typesetting, and just provide the publisher with a camera-ready PDF. The for-profit publisher no longer provides any of the added value it once did. (Only distribution is left, and that isn’t a big deal, because even old-school non-profit learned societies manage to distribute their journals to libraries around the world.)
I know, I have myself provided camera-ready copies set in LaTeX to for-profit publishers - all of this for free, done in my spare time. I was referring to the end-control of the typsetting, which they still provide, and if it's only in the form of outdated LaTeX templates.
Sometimes it's crazy how incompetent reputable publishers are in academic publishing. The for-profit publisher of my forthcoming book has agreed to accept a LaTeX manuscript. It's written and almost camera-ready. But now they told me they don't really know how this works yet, and so the typesetter has to "open it and convert it" to something else, which will be "time-consuming." After three years, they suddenly changed their mind and want me to provide the manuscript in Word!
FWIW, I wasn’t talking about providing a manuscript in LaTeX and the publisher providing "end-control of the typesetting". (LaTeX is generally used for journal publications only in certain STEM fields, and not in my own field.) Rather, I was referring to cases where the for-profit publisher expects e.g. a Word document already fully typeset, and then the publisher does not contribute anything at all to typesetting except its own copyright page.
Historically scientific articles were distributed by printing many copies and sending those copies to university libraries, which acted as repositories of human knowledge. Early on scientists realized that it made sense to collect high-quality articles and publish them as bundles (journals) at regular intervals; the peer review process was developed to determine which articles would make the cut. Printing is an expensive and was historically a labor-intensive process, and someone had to pay for it. The arrangement that was ultimately settled on was that the publishing companies, which were often operated by a particular university library, would charge subscription fees to those who received copies of scientific journals.
What's exactly capitalistic about this? They charge for something they have no property or own. In my experience (and every researcher I know does this) researchers have their own websites where they publish a free pdf version of the research (without the format of the published paper, just a simpler pdf version) or even email it to you if you ask them to (those without a website, for example). I am not sure what exactly is "capitalism" about these journals.
They charge shitloads of money to universities for accessing their journals, these fees are so high that e.g. our university is very picky about which "packet" they buy and limit them to institutions on a case-by-case basis.
The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them.
In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.
The designation that combinations of words are a form of property that can be owned, which then become assets naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the capital meta game and away from those doing the actual work.
To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a vulnerability. Get rid of the concept of imaginary property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand from them.
> They charge for something they have no property or own.
A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here work at and start up.
A better question to ask is - when researchers can publish anywhere (including open source journals) they choose to publish in journals with paid access.
But if you ask why they choose to, they mostly don't have that much choice. Often, rules say "publish in magazine with impact factor at least X" and that's it. The publishers are the gatekeepers of that.
> Following a 2015 lawsuit brought in the US by the publisher Elsevier, Elbakyan remains in hiding due to the risk of extradition; Elsevier was granted an injunction against her and $15 million in damages. Elbakyan and Sci-Hub were again involved in a US lawsuit in 2017, this time with the American Chemical Society. ACS sued the site for copyright and trademark violations, and conversion. Later that year, the court ruled in favor of ACS, fining Sci-Hub $4,800,000 in damages, enjoining further infringement, and prohibiting search engines and domain name registries from "facilitating access" to Sci-Hub.
I know Russia has no extradition treaty with the US, but do they never extradite for any reason? Hmm, from what I'm reading on Quora "The Russian Constitution protects its own citizens from extradition to a foreign country." Interesting, I didn't know that.
Not really. If I murder someone while visiting another country it makes sense I'd face justice in the foreign country, where all the witnesses are. Especially if the legal systems are similar.
It becomes more of an issue where one country doesn't trust the legal system of another country.
> and prohibiting search engines and domain name registries from "facilitating access" to Sci-Hub.
I just searched for "sci-hub" on DDG, Google and Bing, and the sci-hub.st or sci-hub.se domain was the top result on each. I wonder what happened to the prohibition.
It's very nice of the UK Government to give a nice ordered list of pirate sites to use, as long as you take the 30 seconds required to change your DNS or use a VPN.
DNS-o-TLS and bouncing from a UK-region cloud-provider endpoint works for me. Any ISP blocking (internet censorship in the UK is more rife than you’d expect) is either done via hijacking DNS (which D-o-T mitigates) or if you’ve a consumer ISP connection.
> Following a 2015 lawsuit brought in the US by the publisher Elsevier, Elbakyan remains in hiding due to the risk of extradition ...
The perils of Wikipedia: That statement is cited to a Science article from 2016. If the citation is accurate (never a sure thing), Science's writer probably would have taken her word for it - it's not a investigative journalism organization - and even if that's all true, it's from 5 years ago.
Science Publisher Elsevier's reported profit margin is 38%, compared to Apple's 21% – there's lot of cash at stake for them and a big warchest to defend it
For anyone looking to understand the background on the science publishing industry, how it ended up this way and why they will fight Sci-Hub so aggressively, I found this discussion really informative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo&t=8s&ab_channel=...
I'm wondering why it's only 38%. They charge a lot and mostly work with volunteers. It should not cost 62% of what they charge to run a website to host some pdfs.
Elsevier is a pretty big company offering lots of different products and services[1]. I suspect even Elsevier is smart enough to see that the current publishing business isn't sustainable and are trying to pivot into something else. The profits from their publishing arm (which is undoubtedly a lot more than 38%) is no doubt financing a lot of that pivoting
They invest in making clinic decision support software to make research accessible
to doctors, etc (it’s practically also making decisions for them at times).
Source - have attended an Elsevier CDSS Sales presentation for HCPs
Distribution costs are negligible when you just make the PDFs free to everyone, but publishers spend a bunch of money on access control, security, and web interfaces that make you jump through hoops to download the actual PDF while doing everything possible to convince you to read the papers through their (possibly "social"/"collaborative") online platform instead.
That "hacker HOWTO" is horrible, and infused with ESR's ridiculous political ideas. I can think for myself; I don't need and certainly don't want a document which tells me what I should be like, especially not one written by some guy who is advocating for the literal execution of politicians by armed citizens.
> I can think for myself; I don't need and certainly don't want a document which tells me what I should be like
That document is not meant for you; it's meant to give prospective hackers an overview of the field. With respect to politics, the document explicitly says:
> The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive political interests — two of them are defending free-speech rights and fending off "intellectual-property" power grabs that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term projects are civil-liberties organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into an explicit political program with suspicion; we've learned, the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and distracting. If someone tries to recruit you to march on your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, they've missed the point. The right response is probably “Shut up and show them the code.”
Interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of the hacker spirit.
If only the world had many more Alexandra Elbakyans, and fewer Elseviers. Humanity as a whole would be a lot better off without the capitalists ruining everything with their insatiable greed.
> interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of the hacker spirit
There is quite a difference between giving voluntarily and being expropriated.
> would be a lot better off without the capitalists
That's less capitalism, but rather monopolism and nepotism (actually a "government failure" in the view of public economics). If there were real competition, these publishers could not afford to charge such margins.
Yeah, like that horrible capitalist company that funded the research lab which invented the transistor, Unix and C. We'd be so much better off without it out its 'capitalist, profit-driven creations'. (AT&T, Bell labs)
Despite your unnecessary sarcasm, this is actually a good example, seeing as the company was eventually destroyed by the US government for abusing its monopoly position.
They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre, but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the point where the government had to intervene.
Yeah, because unlike everything else ever invented in history, if AT&T and Bell hadn't done it, no one else ever would have, and there's also zero chance another wouldn't have done it any better.
Where can I file for my damages as a reviewer? I have lost more than 2000 hours reviewing papers for for-profit publishers and they never gave me a single penny.
edit: Heck many of them they did not even give me free access to their journal to check references from the papers I was reviewing for them. I had to rely on SciHub to do so.
Your comment brings focus to the question of why reviewers agree to do these unpaid reviews in the first place. I assume your comment is in jest, and you were fully aware of the unpaid nature of the work. But what was your motivation to do it anyway and spend 2000 hours on it?
I personally do peer review because I am part of a research community that requires it -- 9 of every 10 articles I review are absolute crap, and the community is better off if only 3-5 reviewers waste time reading those articles. The only way to avoid a free rider problem is if everyone agrees to participate, so I participate. It is also a good way to build a career in research -- reliable peer reviewers will eventually be asked to do more visible things like chair conference sessions.
Would it be nice to be paid? Maybe, although to be honest I would rather keep money out of the process entirely -- I would like to continue having peer review be voluntary, and go further by also scrapping the publishing companies (who add nothing of value to any article I have written or seen in my entire career). In my field (cryptography) we run a preprint archive on a volunteer basis and it would not be a huge step to introduce a formal peer review process (there is already a minimal review process where the eprint vounteers reject papers that are obviously crap). We only bother with Springer because the European professors demand it (more precisely, their universities demand one of a handful of publishers, and Springer is least bad of the bunch).
When I do peer review, I don’t think of it as providing free service to the publisher, but as providing free service to the scientific community. I’m indirectly paid to do so by my employer. IMO employers of scientists should strike deals with publishers to get compensation for peer review from them.
This is like asking an open source maintainer what their motive was to contribute to an important piece of software, since it’s going to be hosted on a for-profit entity like GitHub. The motive is that reviewing is necessary to make science work (and secondarily it’s required for promotions etc.) The problem in this setting is that Elsevier is part of the equation and demands copyright ownership, which makes it much worse than hosting on something GitHub. Unfortunately “just stop contributing” isn’t a good answer, because that would throw out the baby with the bath water, and scientists care very deeply about the baby.
Refuse the service to the community that one is embedded in?
I see how one can justify reviewing for certain publishers, e.g. because they publish predatory journals or their shady business practices, but refusing to review any papers would be pretty much freeloading on the scientific community. Sure that's not an option.
And that is why I want iOS Time Capsule. I want my own Data to stay in my property. Right now you have to buy a Mac to do backup if you want that. Since iTunes on Windows somehow has a much higher chance of creating corrupted iTunes Backup.
Location Services being on systemwide sends your location 24/7 to Apple. It's not just GPS reception, it also uploads the list of wifi MAC addresses it can see, with signal strengths, to improve its location fix.
Is this confirmed or are you just saying it because it's technically possible?
Edit: Yes, this is confirmed in Apple's privacy policy for location services.
"If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations."
A lot of people have porn on their phone, and none would be able to prove its provenance. I wonder if one day Apple will be required to detect all underage model photos and delete the person’s entire Apple account.
I said, "Hey, you, get off of my cloud
Hey, you, get off of my cloud
Hey, you, get off of my cloud
Don't hang around 'cause two's a crowd
On my cloud, baby"
Unless you tell your iPhone to send everything you have to Amazon, or Dropbox, or iCloud, or Google, or Facebook, or Backblaze, or [insert cloud service subject to Chinese, EU, or US law here].
Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero. Nothing less than that. Let's celebrate her and the memory of Aaron Swartz.
Swartz was pushed to suicide because this oppressive system. Let's fight against this. Let's put our money and time to sustain Elbakyan's effort to open science.
A short term problem with long term benefits. The great gift of Trump to the world was to, at least partly, flush out the substrate that actually runs things. If at least part of the population becomes sensitive to that it was all worthwhile.
Given our mutual swirling down the drain of a total surveillance society any hesitation in the process is a godsend.
I'm somewhat positively surprised that there was a notice at all. This means that even non-US citizens enjoy some rights for being informed about data sharing. Silver lining.
I think you really underestimate the power of smear/ blackmail campaigns and how effectively they have worked in the last century for the intelligence services. This has nothing to do with upholding the law.
Look what happened to Kim Dotcom over US copyright at the behest of the corporate content owners: swat team, extradition hearings, the works. The US penalties are greater than murder.
surprisingly his life is a lot more free and open, than you would imagine, so much that russian politically involved people suspect he has some kind of a deal with KGB(FSB, etc) that he can't talk about.
He wrote that he‘s changing apartments every few months and that he’s always wrapping his face in a scarf as much as possible when going outside. Didn’t sound like a tremendously free and relaxed life. Plus he’s in exile.
Germany could interfere if they wanted to, Kimble just isn’t worth the trouble (few people would be).
There are things you can do, see how Russia is handling these things when their VIPs are targeted for extradition.
Ordinary citizens with no high up political or IC connections never receive any significant state aid in extradition cases no matter what passport they hold. At best your embassy might refer you to a lawyer or help you arrange money transfer from your home country.
No, the law is actually very clear here. What sci-hub does is clear copyright violation. There's no real debate to be had.
Civil cases where damages get into the tens of millions of dollars routinely involve law enforcement. It's no different from a big insider trading case as far as the FBI is concerned.
The fundamental truth behind the protest (and again it's important to realize: sci-hub is an act of protest) is that the law is unjust. Rosa Parks was in clear violation of the written law too.
The reason for the pedantry is that if you imagine this as solely an act of an unrestrained state actor, you won't be incentivized to work for the actual solution, which involves passing laws and otherwise working with the same state you're complaining about.
Think you've misunderstood my point, this is without a doubt a fishing expedition for no real purpose.
Alexandra Elbakyan is already convicted and will be extradited the moment she steps outside the country, there's very likely sealed indictments waiting in the shadows too, the evidence for her crimes are overwhelming and without dispute by anyone.
Things like this are just another chance at a smear campaign, they really don't care about what laws have been broken now, that part is over, all they want is leverage.
Flashback 2 years:
> A former senior U.S. intelligence official said he believes Elbakyan is working with Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, the same organization that stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and then provided them to WikiLeaks in 2016.
As reported in the Washington Post and others. See how conveniently these two seemingly unrelated matters are being connected? Why would a respected newspaper go off on a segue like that?
It definity made New Zealand look like a place where the rule law doesn't necessarily apply fairly. Ironically the rule of law would prevent the US from doing the same thing if New Zealand made a similiar request.
> you really underestimate the power of smear ... campaigns
Not much they can do really. Elbakyan is a Stalinist who thinks the mass killer was a saint sent by God. She discredits herself at interviews and on her personal web-site just fine. None of that matters. People are using sci-hub because it's useful, crazyness of its author is irrelevant.
Your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against. We have to, because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for.
Doesn't seem very likely. What exactly would the US gain except some face value before "Science Journal" oligarchs (which in itself, doesn't seem valuable)? Sounds like a bad deal if the US ever did any favor for them in exchange of one relatively harmless individual.
Sci-hub likely won't even be hurt if they somehow get Elbakyan. She must have had other people to fall back on for the project, who'll continue to keep the website online.
But it wouldn't matter anyway, that other party in the communication could easily be somewhere with phone service but no data. Or someone in the group sms could be on a non apple device. Boom, Just like that, your communications have been sent to multiple carriers, including your own. Those carriers all pinky swear that they won't do anything bad with your sms though. So I suppose it's not that much of a problem. /s
Why would anyone use a public network to communicate in secret? If you have a need for stealth communication with another individual, (maybe you're a dissident or what have you), then you should use the proper techniques. And, yes, keep your data encrypted on your own iPhone. Do not back it up to iCloud. Or Amazon Photos. Or Backblaze. Or Dropbox. Or etc etc etc.
Oh, and never, ever, use Android. You likely don't have the technical know how to make a commercially available android device private.
How do they have nothing better to do than this???? Who is directing them to put resources towards this? How is protecting entrenched academic journal profits a priority for the FBI?
there is a recent interview with her(she rarely gives any)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_I2QQc9Ww
SVTV channel, it's in Russian, youtube automatic subtitles are not bad, so if you must you can use them.
Publishing is not the problem since we have the internet.
The problem is the botched science career system, how performance of academics/researchers is evaluated, how anybody beneath the tenured academic is exploited.
Publishing is just a decoy from this much larger problem.
By publishing i meant editing, which is the only bit missing. How hard is it for major research associations to create publicly funded editorial boards to coordinate the (already free) authorship and reviewing
They are doing this, and they then team up with for-profit publishers to create a journal. Except for the "publicly funded" bit. I am not aware of public funds that would be available for editorial boards created by science organisations.
I remember when those broad search powers and gag warrants were fist introduced, we were told it's going to be used against terrorists, and there's no other way - national security requires it.
Obviously, now national security also requires destroying SciHub. That, or we have been lied to - again, and the liars suffered zero consequences - again, so they will keep doing the same - again and again.
Apart from the solving problem with paywall, Sci-Hub UX is 1000x times better than official journals. It's basically a Google of scientific articles today.
Hey FBI, I've emailed her my support. And I'm a U.S. Citizen. I have great respect for the FBI and law enforcement in general, but on this particular issue you can go fuck yourselves.
Going after a woman fighting to ensure all people, rich and poor, have access to the world's scientific information. That is a slap in the face to the American ideals of liberty and the sacrifices that tens of millions of freedom fighting Americans have made for centuries. Open your eyes.
(Sorry this sounds harsh but im using your words here.)
If you believe America have true "ideals of liberty" and the million of Americans who have died in wars "fought for freedom" I think it is yourself that need to "open your eyes".
I will not argue your point that there have always been many people from American who have not embodied the American ideals. However, there have been plenty that have. And millions more come here from countries all around the world to continue building that great future.
Ideals like:
"all people are created equal"
"government of the people, by the people, for the people"
"Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,"
"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
The bigger point is that there are few countries in the world where I can say "on this particular issue you can go fuck yourselves" to the top law enforcement agency and actually have a % chance of not being shot or put behind bars for it. America ain't perfect, but I've been to about 40 countries and if I had to choose, I'd bet on America 10/10 times.
A) that in itself shows that the whole rigmarole of ostensibly assigning sole copyright to these "journals" is a ridiculously unnecessary charade, and
B) Where are you going to get their contact information from? There would need to be aome centralised registry to connect scientific subjects to author details, Idunno, like some kind of... "Journal" or something?
C) And if you're already going to such a place anyway, then the actual content of the articles could also be there for everyone to read directly, without having to bother the authors with correspondence.
What you're defending is a humongous stupid Rube Goldberg boondoggle.
Given the provenance of most (all?) of the material on Sci-Hub, the copyright issues here seem laughable to me.
Fruitless speculation about the FBI aside, you do have to wonder about the future of IP generally in the world. There's a sort of evolutionary pressure going on right now between different countries' approach to the matter and I can't say that the US-style rules will hold (or more realistically, be imposed).
It seems so absolutely obvious that a jurisdiction adopting a "there is no such thing as IP" approach will have a huge advantage. What's the reason this hasn't happened?
The original purpose of copyright was to encourage people to create works. The theory being that of others can simply copy something where is the incentive to do it at all.
IMHO, there’s something in that for some classes of works, so I don’t think no-IP is a good idea universally. It’s certainly questionably for scientific papers though.
Copyright was done primarily to make money for distributors with the secondary effect being that they can then afford to pay the creators. The copyright compromise was that we would give up our right to copy in order to enable copies, that cost money to make and move, to be available. Take away the cost of copying and distributing and the primary reason for copyright disappears.
That leaves the secondary function of encouraging creation. But turns out creation is not 'original' as people thought and having others works freely available encourages new works much more than promises of monetary gains.
I think it's very possible that this approach was historically important for promoting creativity, but I think it's more likely, on balance, to have the opposite effect as the internet matures.
I mean, that’s pretty much China’s position with regards to other countries IP as I understand it. There’s just a lot of power still held by the nations that do support a US-style approach to IP, so many countries have incentive not to ignore IP laws.
IIRC, even they have been forced to increase enforcement of western IP rights over the last decade, because US has been pressuring them to (back before Trump and the whole trade war thing).
This is a generally applicable answer: IP rights hold power worldwide mostly because the no.1 country that wants them has military and economic dominance over most of the planet.
Chinese companies file a huge amount of patents at the US patent office; 20 years ago, when they didn't have many of their own patents, it didn't make much sense to enforce foreign patents in their own country. But now that China has its own large patent portfolio abroad, it makes a lot more sense to cooperate so they can enforce these patents, too.
Here's my naive take: Tax havens, flags of convenience, etc. are allowed to exist by the international community because they benefit the powerful. A jurisdiction doing this would likely benefit the weak, rather than the powerful.
China have managed it to an extent only because they have the economic clout to resist international pressure.
IP was created to incentivize innovation and publication thereof. No point in publicising innovation when everyone can just go copy it. Some innovations will be kept secret forever, some will never happen.
80 million papers are available on Sci-Hub to its half a million daily users.[1] That is around 80 TB of data, and 2 TB of daily outbound traffic.[2]
Given the fact that Sci-Hub has achieved all those whilst being forced to operate under the radar, I have massive respect for Elbakyan first and then all the others that have helped it survive. Not only Sci-Hub is an undeniable disruption, but also an amazing technical feat that many startups would envy.
[0]: https://greenelab.github.io/scihub-manuscript/
[1]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[2]: 3 articles × each 2 MB × per 400k users ~ 2.4 TB.
P.S. Seed its torrents!