> somebody not familiar with how research publishing
Yeah and not able to use google about his own work.. The debate is pretty clearly explained everywhere.
That said I have, more controversially, the same opinion about movie piracy. In general don't understand how you can feel good defending Goliath vs David. (The cinema industry never earnt so much money so far, at least pre-covid).
Ironically, xeroxing books is a pretty similar case, in that it's commonly done to school and university textbooks, because publishers are running similar rackets. It's hard to ethically justify fighting that either.
It might be. At my university all material was made by the profs at the school and distributed for free. But I've heard of schools where teachers force students to buy the books they have themselves written.
My point wasn't that xeroxing books is good or bad, just that coming up with arguments against it is easy and so is for research paper piracy. Having worked for a while in research, I absolutely condone what sci-hub does and used it many times.
I'm not sure how that fits within the counterfeit rule. If they weren't the real papers at scihub wouldn't it be all OK? The issue seems to be that the problem (according to publishers) is that the real papers are available not behind a pay wall.
The issue here isn't that the users of scihub are being defrauded by thinking they're ordering Prada and instead getting knockoffs.
Not saying I endorse scihub BTW, just that the excuse given doesn't jive at all with reality.
Interesting point. You could argue that a (good) counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag or Rolex provides the same functionality as the original, without the 90% tax to the rights holder.
So, maybe the situation is quite analog: The paper you download is actually more or less the same as the original, but you haven't paid the rights holder, so it's counterfeit.
It isn't. You're getting literally the same paper.
It's like I bought a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags and, for some reason, decided to sell them off for a fraction of a price. If you bought one from me, you'd buy an original bag, not a counterfeit one.
Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before.
If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fraction of a fraction because there's 1) YouTube and 2) Spotify et al. You can listen to music all day with ads and not pay a cent, or you can pay a reasonable fee and get all the HQ music you can eat without ads. Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's another conversation.
Just trying to ban pirate sources is a wonderful dream for publishers for sure, but there's no way it can work. Scientific papers are just too easy to share, the need for them high, and the current pricing too insane for it to be otherwise.
This case is unlike movie or music distribution in there has been convenient online distribution of papers since arguably the dawn of the internet (ok, maybe "convenient" came later).
The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that moved.
Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and precluded any kind of pirate culture.
But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen, the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of momentum for moment.
Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted) the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.
This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to review papers, but one battle at a time.
Also when I was in academia (masters). If my university didn't subscribe to a journal (and it wasn't available via an inter-library loan (In the UK you can ask for a journal from another university)). I would just shoot an email to the author asking for a copy
Edit: Actually I usually sent emails even when we did have a hard copy but no online access. Just because I couldn't be bothered to find the physical copy
I think an appropriate solution is getting the prestigious reviewers of top journals to quit and move to open access model funded by the government. The difficult step is convincing the bureacracy at different levels (universities, govt) and of course preventing lobbying.
We screwed content makers with mp3s, which allowed publishers to follow suit. We changed the paradigm. This is a bit harder because schools pay for content not the researchers directly. It’ll be harder to force change.
> The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor...
I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and politics the same way:
XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it should be more efficient and productive, people should choose it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest without coercion or propaganda. But, of course, that never happens.
One problem with this idea is that collective action problems exist. I truly want this new world, but my employment and promotion decisions are based on the old one (closed journals are older, and most of the prestigious journals are old and closed, and to get a job that's where I need to publish). Critically, the same is also true of all of my colleagues. So we all submit to the old journals, which thereby retain their prestige. In many ways, it's similar to platform economics, with Elsevier in place of WhatsApp.
(I'm also not sure that awesome == efficient + productive, but that's a different issue).
yup, awesome will need to include charisma and deep pockets to bootstrap. then again I can see a smooth transition from an extant system with an oddly benificent CEO, but I can be delusional like that.
if awesome = neither effective nor productive then we're going to get mass starvation and mass death, or at the very least feudalism, and that doesn't sound nice
I know of no competitive natural system that's more wasteful than its competitors
When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us she was going to die. If she’s believed to be terminal anyway, why not prescribe a relatively well known drug and see if it helps?
I’m happy to say our daughters prognosis has improved greatly since she started this treatment. Without SciHub she might not still be with us.
Sure, my wife loves talking about her (it was mostly her, honestly) struggle to get the best care for our daughter, even at a “good” children’s hospital, I’ll send you an email.
At first blush I laughed at the hashtag, but it’s not too far from the truth. With the a la carte model of $30 a paper there is no way she could have read the literature. My wife would read the papers slowly and look up words as necessary.
We read about a surgery that could potentially help our daughter, which the head of neurosurgery declined to do. We then said we’d take her to another children’s hospital (it turns out our insurance actually wouldn’t have covered that, but we didn’t know we were bluffing) and he begrudgingly agreed to perform the surgery. Had to get the expert who is a professor at Washington University to give a second opinion recommending surgery before it happened.
Most of the doctors really didn’t like my wife, there are notes about her obstinance in our daughters file. But our daughter is doing well, and I’m glad I married someone so doggedly persistent.
Thank you! She’s doing great, at six months the doctors said she wouldn’t make it to a year. But she is two now and her retired engineer great grandfather built her a little custom wheelchair that affords her a lot more freedom and mobility. At first she’d only go on the wood floors but has gotten stronger and wheels around the carpet now too. She has a five year old sister and they play together all the time.
> After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it.
Were the other four too lazy/orthodox to read the papers you're referencing? Or they read the papers and still thought it wasn't a good idea? I'm going to presume that the former is the case, unfortunately.
Or didn't want to take the risk of using a somewhat experimental medicine (perhaps justifiably so, I don't know the details), or maybe the evidence is still promising but otherwise still very thin. Or they just didn't have the time to really research it as they also had dozens of other patients.
There could be any number of reasons; without more details, I think it's quite a leap to immediately assume they're "lazy/orthodox to read the papers".
The evidence is thin because there’s very few children with the condition. A good number of them die by holding their breath. Very scary. It’s a complication of an already rare disorder. The medication has been around since 1966 though, it’s clonidine/catapres. The first doctor she mentioned it to just rudely corrected her on the pronunciation rather than give any actual feedback on whether or not it could help.
I think you’re absolutely correct about having dozens of other patients. My wife wrote a long email, that was forwarded to the doctors, citing various articles with links to the medical journals and the doctors couldn’t thank her enough for it. It wasn’t until that happened that someone prescribed the medication for her.
It's quite a leap unless you have worked extensively with doctors before and seen the behavior first hand too many times to count.
I get why it happens: they have to deal directly with patients who 99% of the time are not research capable and if they claim to be research capable what they really mean is that they've been sharing conspiracy theories on facebook. Doctors build defense mechanisms against the nonsense (authoritative tone, dismissive attitude) that grate on academic sensibilities. They can be slow to come around but eventually they usually do.
And you’re right, that’s exactly what happened. My wife wrote up a set of concise notes with citations and asked if the social worker could forward it to the doctors. We met with the doctors a few days later and they thanked my wife over and over again for the document, and the conversation totally changed from one that felt adversarial to one that felt much more collaborative and productive.
As the doctors cycled out though it sort of reverted to the mean, back to the authoritarian stance you expect from doctors, since NICU doctors were constantly rotating out.
I'm going off my experience with doctors that I know personally. There's definitely a personality type or an attitude there that shuts them off to things that a layperson will bring to them even if it's based on good science (only they haven't studied it before).
Past experience is to blame for that. A lot of doctors blame patients for bringing utter bullshit that they scraped from Facebook or YouTube as the next Gen therapy.
For instance, I have a background in biochemical engineering, my fiancée is a cancer surgeon, 4 cousins are doctors, and another 3 cousins married doctors. Yet the entire family collectively believes in homeopathy, unani medicine (Greek medicine) and other hogwash like cupping therapy, save for a select few. The last time I visited one of my relatives, they were ingesting some ayurvedic (Indian medicine) concoction that was later found to contain arsenic. One of my friends is daughter to two doctors, yet her Dad (a former Indian Army doctor, so not the run-of-the-mill kind) still spouted nonsense on Facebook like "burning Turmeric powder and inhaling it would prevent COVID".
It's easy to understand, after all this, why doctors tend to be generally skeptical of laymen bringing them some new "breakthrough". Not much to do with personality than with what they see as a daily occurrence. Of course, one way to sift the chaff away from the grain would be to demand that patients bring in scientifically published papers, at which point most patients would scoff at you for not supporting their viewpoint.
> "burning Turmeric powder and inhaling it would prevent COVID"
This kind of bullshit is too prevalent around here, sadly. And telling that ayurveda is pseudoscience instantly makes you "anti-national" and what not.
They had “read” them. The first time she mentioned the drug to a doctor he just snippily corrected her on the pronunciation but nothing else. My wife carefully documented everything the paper said in a “Cliff’s Notes” sort of version with links. The next meeting we had with them they were much less hostile, it was like night and day. I guess they were impressed by her careful note taking. Even so the doctor who did prescribe it sort of acted like it was his idea, my wife kind of rolled her eyes and just let him keep thinking that.
The way we think about it is a doctor has what, 15 minutes (if that) to spare thinking about our daughter languishing in the NICU. My wife spent literally all day, all night, ruminating and worrying about her. I had just started a new job, (I was unemployed when she was born!) and honestly poured myself into that position, maybe as a way to avoid living at the hospital (I’m not proud of it but that’s what happened). But it is weird we had to get the pulmonologist to prescribe a medication that’s something the neurologist should probably be prescribing.
Doctor's dislike when patients come in having tried to figure out something about their condition or treatment on their own. It seems to knock them out of their routine.
I have personal experience with this as a patient and a family member of physicians. I wish I didn't know what docs say and think about their patients. It's a really unfortunate characteristic of the US medical system.
It goes further than that, it challenges their ego and the feeling that they know everything better than the patient does. This is not unique to the medical profession, but there the damage is immediate and sometimes fatal.
Is lazy really the right word? I would assume doctors have an incredible amount of stuff to continually read up on and a large amount of patients that would all individually benifit greatly if the doctor read alot of papers about their particular ailment. On top of working large hours. I would assume only specialists would be able to really try to read everything for a patient like that without "skimming"
There's a company that is not public but working in this space, I cannot recall it's name. They use NLP to diagnose patient condition by ingesting raw information/text from medical books/papers. You describe how you feel and any other information that you have in an article, and it gives out possible conditions and prescription.
AFAIK, they still recommended that you go to the doctor, but you could use it as an extra to check the diagnosis yourself.
But their point was they have all the data coming out in new papers, and the system studies it constantly and is always kept up.
There was a talk about medikanren which can make deductive connections from a database of facts extracted from medical research. The speaker used it to find a treatment for his son's rare genetic disorder.
When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the doctors.
My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be sure to do your own research and talk to many doctors about your findings and treatment options. Do not blindly trust the medical community. They are years behind the current state of knowledge in their field and just do not have the time and energy to spend per patient to get the best outcome.
My wife has the sharp mind of an engineer, but she was humble about reading the literature slowly and deliberately. She knows she’s not a doctor. However she was firm in asking the doctors questions about what she read, getting clarifications and not being satisfied with answers like “this is how it’s done” and would keep asking until things were explained. The doctors thought she was just obstinate against any procedure which was frustrating. She used the doctors as a resource, then made the most informed decision she felt she could. We got second opinions from experts at other children’s hospitals.
I feel sort of sick remembering one meeting where they told us our daughter would get 24 hour nursing care covered by insurance if we got her a tracheotomy, what a weird carrot to dangle in front of a parent. I think they thought what they were suggesting was the best medical choice but a baby with a trach needs 24-hour care because it can’t even cry when the tube is in its throat.
> My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be sure to do your own research
I would alter this slightly to "have a trusted advocate do research and talk to many doctors". The person with the life threatening diagnosis may not be in the right frame of mind to advocate for the best treatment. Should you ever find yourself in the hospital, having a capable ally alongside you can make a world of difference.
Very wise, and it's important to remember that no matter how 'in the right frame of mind' you are normally, you are basically a different person when coming out from general anesthesia.
I had a doctor mis-diagnose a very serious eye infection that could have led to blindness on one side as... a stye. And recommend I treat it with hot compresses.
Luckily I'm obstinate and finally saw a specialist who correctly identified it and treated it, but it's critically important to be very active in your own medical treatment. Get second (and third, and fourth..) opinions, raise lots of questions, push back (politely) against things that don't seem to make sense.
Is it possible to find, say, a private doctor that is able to give more personal care than a GP at a typical hospital? Whenever I talk to a doctor about my symptoms it feels like they're just doing triage. I can't really blame them for that, but I would happily pay $$$ for an experienced professional who truly cared about my health. I have no idea if such a thing exists though (outside the sphere of the very wealthy, of course).
I pay $150/mo to be a patient of a local "concierge" doctor in Sacramento. This is a D.O. that previously had a regular insurance-based practice. Appointments are free, usually on time, and can run 20-30 minutes. Labs and prescriptions can still go through my regular health insurance.
I myself have used SciHub this very week to understand a medical condition that is taking over my life, before seeing a very expensive private specialist soon.
SciHub gave me access to valuable information that helped me understand my condition and the right questions to ask my doctor next week.
> It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us she was going to die. If she’s believed to be terminal anyway, why not prescribe a relatively well known drug and see if it helps?
Because according to EBM nothing exists and nothing works unless it's proven with a big RCT.
SciHub got me out of a bad procedure (serious enough that I'd be put fully under), or rather a series of bad procedures. Reading all of the papers on my condition gave me another effective option that not only 1) avoided the procedure, but also 2) if I had gotten the procedure, it's the kind of procedure that would have to be repeated every few years when the symptoms reoccurred. Turned out that a far cheaper, less arduous treatment could hold off symptoms indefinitely. I'm grateful to Elbakyan every day, and am also long past when I would have probably had a second or third occurance.
I'm not quite in that rough shape but I have several medical conditions and for years I just stared at summaries and "Pay just $40 to read this article" and the article would be a freshman level essay about the sociological implications of illness. Now that sci-hub exists medicine is accessible.
Anybody who wants to take it down is declaring war on the sick and disabled. Shut down Elsevier instead because they're an organization of long corrupt middlemen.
My mom bought thousands of dollars worth of journal articles so that she could self-diagnose a serious lung condition that doctors had missed. They ended up studying her case at the Mayo clinic.
>Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before.
Maybe I'm just older and have less free time, but public trackers seem less and less useful every year. And private trackers have a huge barrier to entry.
Pirate Bay is a great tracker of last resort .. and when I look for something rare I can't find on a public tracker, it usually showed up on Pirate Bay.
> Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's another conversation.
Maybe, but part of the reason content creators will keep getting screwed is that there’s no way to pay them equitably with $5/mo subscriptions. Prices would have to rise. So it seems that the market alternative to piracy is gross exploitation.
I'm not saying it's right, in fact I will state the opposite - content creators are getting shafted on royalties - but it's always been this way for music and books and all content. Most content creators got a shitty deal on physical media and continue to get a shitty deal on streaming.
I don't accept as a given that my $10 a month subscription that I use to stream as few hours of music can't be fairly split with the publisher and the creator.
The value of content creation has dramatically declined because the barrier to entry has fallen so low. I find great new artists every week and would never have to listen to the same song twice (if I chose).
I can write a song, make a movie, and take photographs all from a pocket computer and publish globally instantly.
Gabe Newell was known for taking this stance if I recall correctly, describing piracy as usually a service problem and not a pricing problem.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Prices of software can be adjusted based on the user's location. Steam does this. It is of course subject to abuse but most people pay the asked price.
Will the new American administration (I'm not an American and should have no bone on American politics, but this is how the world works) will significantly enable Twitbookgle to exert powers they did not under Trumpism?
Trump repeatedly chastised them for their censorship policies and the threat of additional legislation was always over their head. Now that the politicians in power are the ones allied with the tech giants, there's little stopping them (the tech giants) from going full 1984.
If anything I feel its more likely that they will face additional scrutiny. My understanding is the Democrats want more anti-trust laws, and are more likely to break up the big tech companies. Not sure how that might affect Twitter, but Apple, Google (Alphabet), Facebook, and Amazon are probably going to face a lot of additional issues.
This might have been political posturing. The Obama administration was very cozy with SV and there's significant influence from big tech on Biden's administration[1]. Only time will tell.
What limits did Trump admin put on them? They bullied them into up weighting Conservative content and down weighting Liberal content but I doubt that changes.
Not clear why the downvotes. This is literally what happened despite Trump winning in 2016 before this re-adjustment of weightings. I am sure the slide deck will come out in FTC, congressional or court hearings in the next few years.
As someone who was paying attention to the old days of online censorship (2000-2010) when the RIAA/MPAA were the big baddies, yes, it's going to get worse. Biden unfortunately was/is the the MPAA's man in congress for many years.
At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix laws so that it becomes either legal or useless. That's no easy task, but it's much better than having scientists from all over the world rely on it while simultaneously pretending they are dangerous criminals.
SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect.
Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all.
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.
I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!).
SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has.
SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership.
We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough.
My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
> But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances).
And to extend my thought from prior comment:
> Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
> I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
There are more than 20 already (more like 2000) when you start counting national/university-level preprint servers. As I said, Google Scholar already indexes all of these sites, with many nice features.
Personally I'm very fonf of exploring the two "citation light cones" emerging from one articles - those cited by the article (past) and those citing the article (future).
> Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
I think you're absolutely correct about this. But what I'm proposing (many repositories, indexed by search engines, together giving complete coverage) is exactly like that. A single archive, Sci-Hub style, is more like what Google is trying to do with AMP.
Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges.
Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin.
My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
I should have clarified - I was referring to net margin, not gross, as net margin is what you'd discuss in this context. While gross margin is useful in some industries, it isn't useful for many companies discussed on HN, and you can't compare gross margins across industries. When people say "Walmart has a thin profit margin", they're not referring to Walmart's ~25% gross margin, they're referring to their ~3% net margin. (Apple's net margin is ~18%, gross margin ~38%)
If you're looking deeper into a business's financials, gross margin can be a useful metric, but for the layman gross margins are usually used for misleading purposes. For example, gross margins can be easily Tweeted to make the point that "this evil business is making money hand over fist by selling xyz", or to indicate that a business is doing better than it actually is (Uber and WeWork, for example, have positive gross margins.)
If you want to know the number representing how much Walmart paid for that chair vs how much you paid, you want to know the "markup". Markup is the difference between the cost of something and the price it is sold for. Confusingly enough, this is represented in different ways in different industries: some represent it as a fixed amount, some as a percentage of the total cost, and some as a percentage of the selling price. If you buy widgets for $4 and sell them for $8, your markup is $4: either (8-4)/8 = 50% of selling price, or (8-4)/4 = 100% of cost.
Markup as a percentage of cost can range from several hundreds of percent (luxury goods) to ~15% (grocery stores.) Restaurants usually mark up food around 60% and drinks around 75%-400% (markup 300% of cost = $6 beer that cost $1.50.) "Keystone" pricing is when the markup is equal to the cost (meaning the ring on sale for $10k cost them $5k) - and is common in many industries including the jewelry industry, although fancier jewelers charge far more and budget sources charge less. Car dealerships, funny enough, have a lower markup than people might expect, between 2 and 5% of cost for economy base-model cars and 15% for high end cars. You can add in a few more % when you start to additional features to the car. (Dealerships these days often make most of their money through financing, service, accessories, warranties, and selling used cars.)
It's very interesting to see historically high markups evaporating with direct-to-consumer sites like Aliexpress. But I've rambled enough in this comment already :)
Elsevier have a lot of businesses and services outside of journal publishing that they no doubt sink a lot of money into. I'm guessing they also see the writing on the wall for their old business model and are funneling a lot of cash into trying to find new, more future proof, revenue streams
I interviewed for a job at Elsevier near Camden Lock (London) years ago. I said the location was great if I decided to get a tattoo. Didn't get the job. Thank you Lord.
Do many Elsevier journals provide copyediting on the part of the corporation? Many of the big scholarly publishers today expect the burden of copyediting and even typesetting to fall on the author or unpaid editors, and then the unpaid authors or editors are expected to provide camera-ready output to the publisher.
My fear is that after the big for profit journals are smashed, they will be replaced by ideologues working for pennies because of the influence they get to wield. A few billions is a small price to pay imo.
> Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money.
Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of a paywalled work), without being selective, and without copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do it much more cheaply than Elsevier.
I agree arXiv and Sci-Hub are useful. In the case of arXiv it does indeed cost money to run but not much as they are taking in PDFs and storing them without review, copy editing or curation. And that is fine. But arXiv has not replaced journals still. Getting work disseminated has not been an issue since the dawn of the internet. And that is not expensive either.
The service Elsevier provides albeit at a high margin and predatory business tactics is more than just archiving and displaying a PDF. And Sci-Hub is stealing the extra value they provide by curation, and peer review facilitation. We might agree with it since they aren't a nice company but the costs of copy editing, curating and reviewing those papers is not being done by Sci-Hub they are just doing the cheapest part of the process by being a repository for paywalled papers. They aren't being more efficient publishers by getting the value add part for free. Someone has to pay for that part. And if Sci-Hub just hosted non pirated work that was not reviewed or copy-edited it would be just as laudable as arXiv.
If that was true we would not have any physics journals and many math journals. We'd just have people peer reviewing arXiv. Peer review is a lot more complicated than people think to find the right reviewers, minimize conflicts of interest, prodding reviewers, reviewing their reports. Also having editors read submissions first to see if it is even worth sending to peer review. This costs money and is not free. And it is why we have not seen a free model of this supplant journals.
This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.
The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.
IME, the publisher provides extremely limited support to the academics who do this work (filter/select papers, recruit reviewers, organize reviews, etc). The professors involved are generally doing it as a public service to their field. The publisher provides modest amount of support and support staff, totally out of proportion to what they then charge for access.
I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of this journals for a better of the decade. I personally know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not do anything more than it.
I do not know the case of every editor for all journals. Just sharing my direct knowledge as an employee of a large not for profit society. We did indeed pre pandemic have ~100 editors coming in the office not for free. THey now work remote not for free along with others around the world that are paid.
Not you but just in general sometimes HN is hard if you post an observation or direct experience that is not in the hivemind. You get downvoted for things even though they are well reasoned and true. I personally don't care if journals get disrupted there are indeed a lot of problems. I work in tech, I will have another job tomorrow. I was just making the point that we don't just have free scientists doing work and then upload PDFs to the internet and charge for them. If that was the case we could have journals for a few hundred dollars a month rather than the 10s of millions we spend. I also too think we are honest, do good work, are thrifty, and provide a good service.
If you work for APS, then you ought to be aware that APS is quite exceptional if it pays editors for overseeing the peer-review process. I am fortunate to work in a field where our main journals are still issued by non-profit learned societies, not gigantic corporations like Elsevier, and still the only people who get paid are the proofreaders and typesetters – the editors and peer reviewers have to work for free.
If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here.
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available
Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi....
The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.
SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
I think they meant that people with institutional access to journals still use sci-hub because it is more straightforward than dealing with all the institutional logins, which are especially annyoing when not on the institution's network.
Very true. There were many open access initiative but you get to jump through hoops and links until you may get a functioning embeded pdf viewer (may require registration, data input, waiting time..)
sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.
Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar?
Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols?
This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand the situation.
I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed -- not for an academic research problem or business operation, but to simply understand a health condition I personally suffer from.
Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a paper with their consent.
And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
I give out every paper I've published for free. Well, actually every paper I've published is also available in essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary middleman.
But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
> Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals?
Yes.
Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.
You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access.
This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
So it's mirrored, and the monolithic mirror is broken into chunks, but we still don't have a fully decentralized way of searching for and obtaining one specific paper?
> Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point?
Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them.
Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.
Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded.
Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish.
I think that kind of donation exposure would open you to some legal risks. Now you're some kind of visible commercial entity, not just some random IP address in the tracker response.
These days people do fundraising for all sorts of reason and get money. One could always invent a good story to avoid explaining the real reason behind the gears.
For most of the lay users I help in the community 4tb is immense.
For most of my colleagues (I work on Kubernetes cluster backbends for large companies running streaming services you likely use, among other 'big' data companies) 20-50tb is if you run your own all time backups (usually with ZFS and the like so divide that by 3 for total usable space).
The guys that are running IPtv or other sketchy video streaming and scraping software are hovering around 100TB-200TB in their NAS and none of them actually run user grade hardware... I'm honestly very surprised to hear it referred to as 'smallish'.. At most I'd say 100TB is about middle of the road now days for media horders and small for media content producers.
Now my buddy that worked on the CEPH storage backed at CERN would laugh at any of these numbers... but that's a different ballpark all together..
There's progress indeed, but 4x 16TB isn't cutting it. You'd need extra disks for redundancy, extra space for filesystem overhead (including data and metadata checksums), and a sizable amount of ECC memory.
You don't strictly need ECC memory for that specific task. Torrents have checksums for every file chunk, so even if some bit corrupted because of RAM, it's enough to re-check the files and re-download corrupted pieces if needed.
That said, complete re-check of 64 TB at 250 MB/s would take at least 71 hour. So ECC RAM definitely won't hurt.
I’m not intimately familiar with the interactions between libgen and sci hub but the wiki page for sci hub says it hasn’t been using libgen as a storage backend for a few years now.
Are there any guidelines on what to download if you want to host? I could throw a couple hundred gigs of storage and a decent uplink at it, but if I download and never reach a good ratio I did more harm than good.
You could download and share a part of the archive.
I would gladly do this if a method would be available to load the torrent automatically and set which files are needed to be shared by a specific client.
Twitter is a private business and can ban whoever they want at their disposal. I have been told repeatedly when asking why we don't have due process for this, especially when banning a high profile account.
Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public.
When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub.
And "I'd really like to see paper X" is not my common case. Though it does occur when double checking that I've finally understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search, and I surf, and I find a paper that might have one helpful sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40! And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it's not just greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining something.
It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with Elsevier to make research literature less accessible to the public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry education content, using words like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.
It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it.
This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.
In my university my student library account gave me access to journals so even though scihub didn't exist then I don't recall ever not being able to access a paper. I assumed all universities do this, is that not the case?
Using research literature in science and engineering education is a developing area. Undergraduate life sciences has been a focus, and freshman science literacy. But CREATE-like (Consider, Read, Elucidate hypotheses, Analyze and interpret data, Think of the next Experiment) strategies have also been used pre-college.
IIUC, pre-college has tended to blend in, or focus on, science journalism.
But I suggest there may be long-term potential to use research literature more extensively, and down towards primary school.
Parts of papers can be much more accessible than others. A delightful paragraph in some paper's introduction section. Some photo, or diagram. Some graph. Or parts of a survey paper, or of a 'context of these papers' column in a good journal. There's been work on using more papers, broadly and more shallowly, rather than diving on each. Doing that pre-college, will be tech sensitive.
Tech matters. Small-group collaboration tooling is important. Annotation of papers, by group and instructors, is helpful. Assorted stop-dead friction is amenable to tech fixes - "what does this mean?", "$40?!?", "what parts of this text might I be able to understand [without having to skim it all myself]?".
So perhaps picture some years out, a small group of middle school students, with AR NPC peer support, surfing a content blend, of educational, outreach, journalism, and research literature, with assorted tooling support.
For now, apropos sci-hub... If you think hitting paywalls is frustrating, picture the impact on STEM-retention at-risk students, with little experience, and very uncertain they are welcome here. Or you, now, surfing an HN comment, hearing of research literature being used to teach critical thinking to pre-service teachers, briefly intrigued, which might be gone in a moment, or become the seed a passion project - you google scholar, and... $40 to see more than a low-content abstract. Or sci-hub.
That one is in the public domain, so it's legal for Sci-Hub to distribute it. I've also encountered publishers wanting tens of dollars for trivial items like news items or book reviews, even if public domain.
My fiancee is a doctor in charge of a covid ward at our hospital, and at one point this year I heard about some studies re:vitamin D on radiolab and told her about it. She found it interesting, but told me she didn't have access to one of the studies she wanted to read.
I introduced her to sci-hub and she was blown away. She uses it fairly frequently now.
The idea that government-funded health studies are inaccessible to doctors during a pandemic is patently absurd.
I donated ~$300 to SciHub and encourage you all to donate as well. Please give what you can, her bitcoin address can be found at the bottom of the homepage.
Also please post somewhere your support of her with your real name, and reach out with kind words. Every PhD I know relies on this site, but more importantly 10x+ more people I know who are otherwise "outside" academia rely on this site. How many of the world's best researchers in 30 years will have turned out to get their start in research not thanks to Academia but thanks to SciHub? My guess is most of them.
And make no mistake, people are trying to have her killed.
"Elbakyan may be working with Russian military intelligence. The story says she may have been stealing US military secrets from defense contractors"
I just copy/pasted this horseshit from Elsevier’s website right now.
Let's provide her with the support and strength to win this war.
I mentioned Elbakyan and sci-hub in my PhD thesis acknowledgements. Hardly anyone will see it but it still felt like a little two-fingers to academic publishing.
What a shame there aren't more decentralised services like email, the web and Usenet (which is now pretty much dead).
Twitter can do pretty much what it wants to who it wants, and they don't have to give a reason.
Maybe you get banned due to an algorithm mistake. Or an individual contracted by Twitter who doesn't like what you said. Or maybe they misunderstand what you said due to cultural differences.
I found my time on Twitter was fighting against a US-biased culture, and what I consider friendly banter with friends can be misconstrued as abuse by some random moderator or algorithm.
Yes and? Sci-Hub is a resource whose value transcends American IP orthodoxy and their contributions to Twitter are a gain for humanity. If Twitter can platform totalitarian governments that commit crimes against humanity why not a mere IP violator?
Yup. Private citizens and organizations can do many shameful, reprehensible things, such as engaging in arbitrary (and legal) censorship, such as what Twitter does.
Only assholes decide unilaterally for other adults what they're allowed to see and read.
Sure, but once a platform is read by billions of people and is influencing what they think, I believe it is reasonable that people discuss about the opportunity to regulate this kind of stuff.
Let’s suppose sci-hub distributes unauthorized content. It’s still not counterfeit. In the physical world I believe this is called the grey market.
It’s legit, just not via official distribution channels.
Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating content and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that Twitter HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy. They are not beholden to their users or any other oversight.
I chceked their counterfeit policy[1] to confirm; it's pretty clear and hews to the plain meaning of the word:
> Counterfeit goods are goods, including digital goods, that are promoted, sold, or otherwise distributed using a trademark or brand that is identical to, or substantially indistinguishable from, the registered trademark or brand of another, without authorization from the trademark or brand owner. Counterfeit goods attempt to deceive consumers into believing the counterfeit is a genuine product of the brand owner, or to represent themselves as faux, replicas or imitations of the genuine product.
An unauthorized copy simply isn't counterfeit unless it is promoted as official. There's a legit copyright argument, but Twitter's rules (correctly) don't apply unless the copyrighted material is on Twitter.
> Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating content and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that Twitter HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy.
The suppression of speech is the symptom here, not the root problem. I doubt Twitter is doing this because they have an axe to grind against SciHub. Likely, an executive got a call from the journals and then told the moderation teams to figure out how to ban them.
I think the root issue is that tech/media companies are becoming a bit of a shadow-government where people with influence can shut down their competitors. And the journals probably feel they were entirely justified in "lobbying" Twitter, since SciHub is violating their copyright.
This isn't new, businesses have always made private agreements to screw each other, and the only reason we don't have smoke-filled back rooms these day is people don't smoke much. What's new is that big information / infrastructure / financial platforms are a far more influential feature of the modern political economy.
Nevertheless, the account itself is not distributing either fake products or copyrighted products (one could argue the service which uses Twitter for comms, violates copyrights, but not the Twitter handle itself.)
I mean, why not ban the accounts for all accused criminals? There should be a firewall between the content of the Twitter account and the entity(ies) behind the accounts.
I really loathe how they are deciding what is permissible to say (as well as determining what IRL actions are non-grata and affect status of the a Twitter account. (We don’t like what we heard second hand that person said or did, so we’ll suspend or terminate account).
Twitter is a for-profit US corporation. If you have enough money they will literally do anything you want, as in this case. In my opinion, if they need to update their terms of service in order to make that easier they certainly will do so either after they take action or immediately before.
I don't think there's any reason to expect Twitter to honor the right to free speech as described in the US constitution as they aren't associated with the US federal or any US state government. Any management of content on the site will be done only to the extent that it benefits Twitter monetarily.
In my opinion, there's no good reason to expect anything different.
Yes, I suppose as laws stand this is correct. However, given the typical use case of the service, I reluctantly would like to see them regulated as a Telco who cannot deny services.
It’s become the miss “Goody Two Shoes” bully network, unfortunately.
Hackernews comments were generally onboard with Twitter banning Trump for controversial tweets that can be considered as incitement.
As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that disregards and breaches copyright.
If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer areas (Trump), you shouldn’t be surprised when they do the same for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub).
It scares me that these big tech companies are becoming arbitrators for what many people see. The worst part is that it is allowing the US oligarchy to further influence the rest of the world too.
> Trump who has been very clearly violating twitter TOS on a daily basis
How has Trump violated Twitter's TOS on a daily basis? It feels like every policy that has been put up is typically put up specifically for Trump.
I don't see how people can post photos of Kathy Griffin showing a decapitated Trump head as being kosher, or CNN's Como saying violent protest is constitutionally protected, and claim Trump is violating TOS. It's hypocrisy.
Posting election misinformation violates Twitter ToS, and since the election he has posted something violating that policy (in their judgment) if not every day, very close to it. These policies have been around since before the election [1].
These examples don't appear to be hypocritical to me on the surface, but I am certainly open to more information. Many people are not happy with Kathy Griffin doing that, on both sides. And I am honestly not sure how Cuomo saying that violates anything, could you explain? Or point me in the direction of it? I had not heard about it. If it does violate their ToS, then he should have received a suspension or at least warning too.
While I think the comparison is a bit unfair, it does raise an interesting dilemma. I really don't know what you do in that situation. I don't think their government would be considered the trusted authorities on the matter, but who would be? At the same time Twitter is not a Russian company and does not have a large Russian presence that I know of. Are they under any moral obligation to help maintain free and fair elections there? Where they may feel like they are for the US.
Yeah I just used a more extreme example to make the point.
Twitter is US based but they purposefully operate in a multi-national manner serving users across the world, so it's easy to argue that there is some responsibility.
If Twitter wants to play arbitrator and set that expectation to the international community, what happens when they don't remove "misinformation" in other countries?
Sci-hub by its own admission is a service that breaks the law by providing unauthorised access to copyright materials.
I don't know whether Sci-hub has violated Twitter ToS (on the platform) but it doesn't surprise me that Twitter would want to distance itself from an organization that is committed to breaking the law. A more dramatic/extreme example would be whether we would think it is ok for other illegal organisations/services (e.g terrorists) to be on Twitter if they weren't breaking ToS on the platform, I suspect many would say no.
On Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if he broke Twitter ToS on the platform but you would have to admit that his ban would involve greyer interpretation of his tweets than a black-white ban of a service that aims to break the law.
And I say this as a big support of sci-hub too.
Generally speaking delete Facebook/Twitter/etc, I did and it has been a big improvement to my life.
I agree that HN comments were completely and totally wrong to be onboard with banning Trump AND I also do not agree with banning Sci-Hub...
but the solution isn't screaming at Twitter. The solution is using our freedom of speech and expression to start creating and supporting other services. I know that's hard, but at least in your personal life, try to use ActivityPub services and encourage everyone else to do so. Set up a Mastodon and Pleroma server and give invites to all your friends.
Now I have done this and on my personal server, like 20+ friends have created accounts and to day .. only one still uses them. It will take time, and really only you can take care of yourself.
Also, long-from blog. Follow any friends that blog with and RSS reader. Encourage everyone else to use an RSS reader. Why the hell are we using Twitter when you can follow the blogs and news sites with RSS? You can see which news sites have new articles, rather that letting Facebook and Twitter decide the order and type of information your receive.
Twitter and Facebook and Youtube were argued as the alternatives to the previous generation of gatekeepers.
Ungated media such as Usenet of various moderation-free zones online also fail.
There's an inherent cconflict between complete freedom of access -- a sort of full-body local contact or intimacy, and and of distance, time, and/or scale.
Distribution and scale presume a gating function somewhere. The only remaining question is what the channel biases for.
Twitter has said on a number of occasions [1] that Trump has violated their ToS, but allowed him to stay because it was important for the public to see. That's not a grey area.
In the case of Sci-Hub what part of the ToS do they violate? The message cites counterfeiting, which doesn't seem to apply (unless that's a translation issue?). And if Piracy is a violation of their terms then why are there plenty of piracy torrent websites with Twitter presences still [2]? At least apply it evenly.
Those are certainly fair points but I think getting bogged down in the ToS and details is side stepping the real issue here.
At the end of the day Twitter moderates its own service, which is just their managers and random team members. Twitter sets the rules and can find any justification to ban whoever they want. Do you really think Twitter constrains themselves by their rules? I don't, they will change those rules if they want.
As a major source of information, is that what you want?
Is getting bogged down in ToS details really the important issue here?
If we yell at Twitter and demand them to ban certain content, they are also going to exercise that power when it serves their interests too. You can't have it both ways.
I don't feel like its getting bogged down in the ToS, but I think I get your point.
My main concern is about even application of their policies across the board. If they say something is against their ToS and want to ban it, fine, that's on them. But apply that same thing to everyone. I don't like banning one piracy site but not another. Or banning random folks but not the President. I understand why it happens, just feels more wrong to me than any singular policy decision.
In my opinion: Should they ban misinformation? Yes. Should they ban piracy? I want to say no, but if I am really thinking about it they probably should when actually compared with the other things I say yes to. Makes me wonder what kind of ethics theory there is around these kinds of situations. Probably some good reading out there. Anyone know of any good things to read on the subject?
This doesn’t negate your comment but I would like to add that I support Sci-Hub because I think charging for publicly funded content is just wrong on so many levels. Simply put, the laws need to change; and when/if they do, Twitter won’t have to do this sort of thing.
Social media also needs to be completely reformed so moderation policy and enforcement isn't up to a small collection of individuals living in the United States.
In my experience, those applauding twitter for banning Trump are a different demographic than those who are criticizing the ban on Scihub.
I find both to be an abuse of power by Twitter. Sec. 230 protects Twitter from being accountable for content produced by its users. At the same time, it wants to engage in political activism at an organizational level.
Twitter wants to be the all-powerful Editor-in-chief with power to censor the world's headlines. But, they also want to be unaccountable for the content produced by its platform. That is blatantly hypocritical.
A corporate entity with pure profit motives and without the people's mandate, should not have the power to control speech without accountability.
The important part is not the source code but the content. As for libgen, they provide torrents per 1000 (I think) books, so maybe downloading and seeding those could be helpful? (But I heard they recently created IPFS mirros as well)
Both are important here. When I was looking into it, the data was useless without the source code. The names are obfuscated and impossible to query without the application source plus the map of file names to document metadata.
I would be unable to mirror LibGen and Sci-Hub with what is currently available. I would be ECSTATIC to be proven wrong.
Twitter is slowly being more dangerous day by day.
Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level researcher who haven't used scihub.
We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please stop pushing humanity to backward direction.
Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election.
Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink?
Please check the url at the top of your browser. If it begins with "news.ycombinator.com" you're in the wrong place. Try posting here instead: https://parler.com/
Wow really, pointing out that Twitter won't ban an open Holocaust denier who constantly pushes anti-Semitic falsehoods makes me .. what, hard right now?
Fuck you. I am on the wrong website. This website is a shithole. Ban me, dang. This website is like a Leftist Parler. So's Twitter. So's Reddit. I don't have accounts on any of those sites.
Enjoy your filter bubbles. I'll go back to talking to my loved ones in private chats.
I've got a weak conspiracy theory that Twitter has to take drastic action like this because they're not relevant anymore. I don't know a single person who uses Twitter. I don't know that there's a single proprietary thing about their platform that Parler/Gab couldn't copy. I don't know anyone who thinks Twitter is well-designed.
If they aren't centered in the news like they are constantly, I'm not sure that they wouldn't just fade away to competitors.
Don't worry Alexandra. Twitter are just jealous because their platform is just a toy for imbeciles to shout inanities on the internet.
Very few websites can claim to have achieved more good for the world than sci-hub.
Alexandra for the Nobel peace price! The opportunities she creates to do good in society are unmatched. No sarcasm. Seriously, we should make it happen.
Our country would not be in this mess if antitrust laws were used to bust up Facebook, Google, and Twitter years ago. Our leaders were all but bribed by the VCs and their lobbyists to look the other way while our social norms and sense of right and wrong were destroyed by malicious algorithms.
This is certainly the best advice. Personally I find Twitter to be the worst of the worst forum formats, and it bugles my mind that anyone actually enjoys using it.
I don't see the point of why Twitter or Facebook should even exist if they have this amount of power. You're setting yourself up to being witch-hunted down like in the middle-ages or being the new face of a most wanted poster all over the town square if you say or do the wrong thing.
It's only going to get worse if you keep using social media. Delete your accounts while you can.
I stopped using it. If they Can Block the president then fuck them,,, One way to stop twitter and facebook is for the 75 million people that voted for president trump to stop using twitter and facebook... The consumer can fire any company just stop using there product.
The consumer can fire any company just stop using there products.
I stopped using it. If they Can Block the president then fuck them,,, One way to stop twitter and facebook is for the 75 million people that voted for president trump to stop using twitter and facebook...
In the end this could work out well. People go where the stuff that they want is. I occasionally dust off an old twitter account when I want to reach an org which is otherwise hiding any means of human contact. So if scihub does manage to make a meaningful presence somewhere like mastodon that's all for the good - and just hastens the decline of twitter.
Is there any reason to believe mastodon is “better” than twitter though? I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say about twitter and I’m neither a twitter nor mastodon user but I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues? And it seems like it would come with its own set of issues when it isn’t centralized.
> I don’t really understand how “decentralized federation” solves any of twitter’s major issues?
Scihub can host their own mastodon instance which means they have power of moderation, Twitter cannot impose whatever rules they want to.
Being federated means posts on Scihub can be seen on other mastodon instances. This allows Scihub to allow a select few users to join their instance without limiting visibility of their content as it can still be seen and interacted with through another mastodon instance.
Someone really needs to create an alternative to impact factor that doesn't heavily bias in favor of long established paid journals. Elsevier and other such journal publishers rely on business models that drive up the cost of education, reduce access to knowledge, and skew the incentives of researchers - in short they make humanity collectively dumber and we all suffer for it. It would be in everyone's best interest for researchers to switch over to publishing in free journals, we'd be good, but that won't happen so long as the free journals are labelled inferior to the paid ones, and thus researchers are penalized for bucking the system.
I wish there was a decentralized scalable version of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube.
It would run off our mobile devices and PC sort of like bitorrent.
I am aware of webtorrent (web based torrenting p2p) for videos and such but still nothing in production.
IMHO, the next person that comes up with a highly scalable, decentralized, widely distributed mesh network of devices to securely transfer files between peers will not be a rich man but he would be a hero, I personally would donate a large chunk of money just to keep it afloat for others.
Sort of like a "public funded public utility" software.
What if you could use the existing Facebook, Youtube, Instagram clients and seamlessly be connected to both the "centralized content from FANG" and "decentralized content from FEDIVERSE" ?
If your content gets censored it would be archived on the fallback fediverse, therefore neutralizing their ban hammer?
That'd be very cool, but you then run into the data collection issues of all of those platforms. Many Fediverse users aren't so much concerned with being censored by Big Tech as they are with being hit with targeted advertising.
Really, I'd be happy with a way to seamlessly follow friends / public figures that are on FANG + Twitter, even if it's a one way road.
The scuttleverse [1] comes to mind when you mention this. It allows for creating a decentralized mesh network with communication between each node end to end encrypted. It's able to operate off the grid and allows communication through Lan, Bluetooth etc. Happens to also work offline as the content is stored on your device and any posts you make sync up with others later. I'm not sure about the scalability of it though.
Suppose Bob publicly claims to possess the Sci-Hub db.
Alexandra challenges this publicly by sending a bunch of randomized small "slices" of the db to be hashed.
Bob publicly broadcasts the requested hashes, and Alexandra publicly claims they all match. (Also, assume the hash-checker is publicly available and anyone who dares can use it to check their own copy of the db and verify Bob's hashes.)
If this is the extent of Bob's network activity, can Bob get in trouble in the U.S.?
Intellectual property laws are going to be more deadly than usual in the next few years. The populations of many countries won't get vaccines until 2022 and beyond, it's completely unnecessary and immoral.
Apologies in advance for side tracking the discussion. I came across this post on r/india looking for a volunteer Russian Interpreter for a talk by Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub. If anyone is interested, please reach out to the OP of https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/kpl5l4/looking_for_a...
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