I wish I had Sci-Hub as a teenager. Many times I was interested in some algorithm, but got presented with Elsevier's "you shall not pass" page. Very frustrating to know the knowledge exists but being unable to access it with no recourse.
For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field.
But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.
When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely?
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power.
If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.
"I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers"
This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers.
At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers
Not that much. Nature sends me paper versions of most of their journals for free (so does Blood, so do some others) for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of getting me to read the ads. It's fine, I suppose, but I preprint all my papers anyways (some go to Nature-brand journals, most don't), and honestly their editing isn't even playing the same sport as, say, NEJM (which really does add a lot).
Most of the time the versions on *Xiv (not just my papers, but most other authors' too) are at least as good as the ones that get published in vanity journals. Sometimes they're better, since there are times that a topic really is complicated enough to take 50 pages and 30 figures. Rarely, but still -- it's not like the same 30 figures aren't just crammed into "panels" (smaller, harder to read figures) in glamor journals (or tossed into the supplement; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... is one of my favorite figures of all time and it's stuffed into an "Extended Data Figure" FFS!).
Chan-Zuckerberg and the Simons Foundation pay for bioRxiv and arXiv respectively, seemingly without much trouble, so I contend that publishing papers isn't actually that expensive, certainly relative to the benefit of doing so in a way that is accessible to the public who funds most of them.
Where "academic profiteering" is not profiting the academics, they were already paid by us through our governments to do the work and neither see nor expect
anything from these fees (if they did they would be going through their institution's Tech Transfer office).
This extortion is inflicted by non corporal parasites.
And sorry the costs of copying and storing bits grows smaller every day, as it has since forever.
> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering?
As an academic, I hope that it is reasonable to claim that it is not academic profiteering; it is publisher profiteering. Academics don't see a dime from (and often spend many dimes on) the usurious fees imposed by publishers.
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, ....
Does it?
The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.
Not that much human progress honestly. Most of the people who push the progress ball forward, do so not just because of access to information. They need to be in the right labs, receiving the right training, surrounded by the right mentors etc.
I would also say that the blooming "bookz" (ebook scanning) community around a decade ago was instrumental in making much knowledge accessible, especially to those in poor or developing countries who wouldn't be able to afford even a single book or access to a library with them.
Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...)
I feel obliged to point out that a 17 year old and/or an interested amateur absolutely has the option of emailing the author, and will find most academics very responsive. I concede though that they may not be aware of the option, or might find it intimidating.
This method is extremely slow. You have to spend 15 minutes to write a nice email just to get a paper three days later that after looking at for five minutes does not appear as helpful any more as you hoped it to be. Sci-hub is much more efficient.
Researchers go through tens of papers before they find a paper they find relevant to their interests. To go through a 2-3 day process per paper is a drastically inefficient.
> don't even know they exist
That's the worst part. In truth, the 17-year-old amateur has most of the same options (especially library and asking the author). But it might never occur to them that the library will have it, or that the author will happily email them a copy.
If you live in the Midwest, that "local" university library can easily be 4+ hours away.
Writing the author is a fine idea and could lead to some great correspondence. It could also be a huge time sink if, like me, you look at a few dozen papers on the topic only to find one or two are really applicable.
> In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.
And a screenshot of some of the search results on science direct, beautiful. Plus I'm imagining the blog writers grinning with glee when they were provided/discovered this.
Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:
The DOI number of the paper you're looking at. You just need to set $doi to a string that contains the DOI. (In bash this would literally be doi=<some doi string>
A DOI is a bit different than a standard identifier such as a ISBN in that there are multiple 'registries'[0], and they need to be paid for
(it is as good as it gets for persistence aspirations these days)
Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects.
This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.
it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.
> We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible!
Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.
There's also sort of an issue from a bunch of open access publishers acting like con-artists - charging researchers made up fees to publish in their made up journals. A certain librarian made a rather useful list of "predatory" open access publishers:
https://beallslist.weebly.com/
Well for one, open access requires the Internet. The closest thing to "open access" prior to the Internet was the willingness of universities to allow unaffiliated members of the public to walk into libraries and read the journals stored there. It took the Internet for there to even be something to figure out.
Beyond that, it is just the general time needed for society to adjust to a new way of thinking; people, scientists included, do not start questioning the status quo overnight.
> Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?
The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it.
And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.
The publication infrastructure should be implemented and funded by the governments, preferably, as part of some international agreement to share the costs. The only valuable service that traditional publishers do provide is acting as a trusted authority that verifies publications. The rest (distribution etc) is already provided almost at no cost by the internet. Apparently, when there's such an oligopoly of few for-profit organizations, there's no good for anyone except them. Since a big part of research is paid by the taxpayers' money, they have the right to replace the dysfunctional market with a niche communism and run their own government publication agency.
You're only allowed to publish in one.
When you submit an article, you're normally specifically asked to confirm that the work hasn't been accepted / isn't under review elsewhere.
I have so much that I want to say about this - but beyond all the politics and moneyed/tenured interests holding back change, I can see that Jupyter notebooks are the disruptive innovation that will force publishing to modernize. People I work with are producing notebooks that fuse text, formatted equations, code, and interactive figures in a way that looks and feels like a top-quality paper. Except with this paper, you can reveal the code that produced each figure, probe and alter the analysis methods directly, and download the raw data behind the figures (it's an attribute of the plot object! Imagine that!). This format will win. It's too useful and solves too many problems not to win. The only question is whether academicians have the foresight to build in a decentralized DARE I SAY blockchain/smart-contract-based peer review system to circumvent the rent seeking publishers.
* Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian.
* Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code.
* The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.
In computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free.
They are very different beasts.
Arxiv (and most pre-print repos) accept submissions (with filters, like requiring academic affiliation or vouching, and requiring reasonably-formatted metadata), have a moderator do a skim-level review of the work, and then post it.
CiteseerX is an automated crawler, like Google Scholar, which finds PDFs on author homepages and extracts metadata from the PDF. There is no human review or cleanup process, and there can be a long delay before content gets discovered.
As a non-academic who is interested in reading academic articles (and doing personal research), sci-hub is a blessing for those of us without university affiliation and access.
Sci-Hub is so much more convenient than attempting to find things in my university's library system. There are browser plugins that let you click on DOI links, taking you directly to a pdf of the relevant paper.
For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.
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For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field.
But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.
This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers.
At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.
Not that much. Nature sends me paper versions of most of their journals for free (so does Blood, so do some others) for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of getting me to read the ads. It's fine, I suppose, but I preprint all my papers anyways (some go to Nature-brand journals, most don't), and honestly their editing isn't even playing the same sport as, say, NEJM (which really does add a lot).
Most of the time the versions on *Xiv (not just my papers, but most other authors' too) are at least as good as the ones that get published in vanity journals. Sometimes they're better, since there are times that a topic really is complicated enough to take 50 pages and 30 figures. Rarely, but still -- it's not like the same 30 figures aren't just crammed into "panels" (smaller, harder to read figures) in glamor journals (or tossed into the supplement; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... is one of my favorite figures of all time and it's stuffed into an "Extended Data Figure" FFS!).
Chan-Zuckerberg and the Simons Foundation pay for bioRxiv and arXiv respectively, seemingly without much trouble, so I contend that publishing papers isn't actually that expensive, certainly relative to the benefit of doing so in a way that is accessible to the public who funds most of them.
More general: How much human progress has been lost to copyright laws?
This extortion is inflicted by non corporal parasites.
And sorry the costs of copying and storing bits grows smaller every day, as it has since forever.
As an academic, I hope that it is reasonable to claim that it is not academic profiteering; it is publisher profiteering. Academics don't see a dime from (and often spend many dimes on) the usurious fees imposed by publishers.
Why? For what gain?
Wikipedia seems to handle much higher hosting costs alright. Why can't we do the same for open access journals?
Does it?
The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.
Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...)
Do you know a good place where one could find this lots of other stuff? Asking, let us say, for a friend.
You find a local university library that has those or you write the author of the paper
Writing the author is a fine idea and could lead to some great correspondence. It could also be a huge time sink if, like me, you look at a few dozen papers on the topic only to find one or two are really applicable.
Was this worse than before? The option of going to a suitable library did not suddenly vanish. The web just let you know what was there.
Damn, I am impressed!
Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:
And instantly get a local copy of the .pdf. It's a hacker's dream!DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. It is a unique ID number that all mainstream academic articles receive upon publication.
The main function of the DOI is for copy-pasting into Sci-Hub to access the PDF of the paper you wish to read.
[0]https://www.doi.org/RA_Coverage.html
This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.
it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.
Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.
Open access review and channelization is still an open problem. The for profit journals actually do provide a service of worth and note.
Beyond that, it is just the general time needed for society to adjust to a new way of thinking; people, scientists included, do not start questioning the status quo overnight.
The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it.
And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.
* Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian.
* Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code.
* The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
The arXiv (http://arxiv.org) has a good claim on allowing one to extend this "more free"ness to math and many of the physical sciences, too.
For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.