Probably she didn't say "show" in russian though. Some things are getting lost in translation here.
She laments that The Chronicle doesn't credit her as doing actual work by describing what she does as a "show" instead. (implying that a male is doing the actual devops work behind the scenes)
Except that by saying that it's a "one woman show", they are giving her all the credit for the site, and that's what a fluent English speaker will understand. It's not The Chronicle's fault that she misinterpreted the article.
Translators move things into idiom all the time; "one-man show" (gender is easily swappable) is an idiom that comes from stage, refers to single-actor plays where one person plays multiple roles, and comes with connotations of skill versatility and industriousness.
I read her lament, but it seems to be based on a lack of understanding of the idiom. In English, the phrase "one-person show" implies nothing other than the efforts of a single person to produce something great. There is no denigration nor implication of anything else in the idiom.
Yes, it sounds like she is misunderstanding it in this case. "One-woman show" doesn't imply that it's just a facade, fake project (which she seems to take from "show"), it's just an idiom to say it's something that one person does (not a team).
There is not, though. No native speaker of English, which the newspaper of record in Houston, Texas, might be forgiven for assuming make up its primary readership, would ever assume that anything described as a "one-man show" must have a woman hidden away doing all of the behind-the-scenes work.
The idiom means "the work of a single person," and that's it. Nothing else.
If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.
Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money.
The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice.
So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file.
Does that seem like a fair price?
So universities pay twice.
The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses.
That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays
2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays
3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays
4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays
So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription.
For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.
Somewhere between step 3 and 4, I assume the publisher gets hold of the paper and acquires a license to resell it? How does that part work and why do universities/academics support it if they could just distribute it for free or via an open journal? Is it solely to get the "kudos" of being in particular publications?
The authors give the rights over to journal when they submit the paper. The authors depend on publishing in high impact-factor journals for tenure and continued funding.
Not all academics support it and several groups have opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing their own journals and conferences.
I can see a possible future where only a few holdouts rely on 'prestige' as a decision criteria, while a majority of academic fields/groups have switched to open access... and the former get only more and more vocal about the decline of science, or some screeching point.
It's 100% due to the traditional model of measuring academic performance through the number of published papers weighted (very, very strongly) by the "reputation" of the journal they're published in, justified by the importance of curation and peer review to provide quality control.
Historically, this model grew because the journal publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print and distribute copies of the articles.
My impression is that it is a offshoot of the metrics mania of the 1990s
I am one person watching the world go by but I think that there was, is, far too much emphasis on things that can be counted.
People became afraid to make subjective judgements of quality. They demanded data. So whatever was the thing they counted, it got maximised. Quality is a slippery concept and it is harder than counting.
Judge scientists by the number of papers they publish, and they will publish a lot. A manifestation of the quantifying fetish.
Not in academia, but have watched the debates over the past decade or so...
It really seems like it's the inertia of existing administrators that haven't shifted away from judging papers based on the prestige of the journals they get published by.
Once the prestige factor goes away, and authors are judged primarily on the quality of their work, the publishers will lose their stranglehold.
Of course, that means a lot of entrenched interests losing revenue streams, so it's going to be a long struggle of grassroots change vs regulatory capture combined with reactionary pushback.
You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect there will be some project management (following up on peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers, etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will need to collect some money. My view is it should be small in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in the world.
This sounds like there is currently a mechanism for winnowing the crap, but we currently don't really have this either.
On the contrary, because researchers are driven to publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper over and over again with minor modifications, or just go conference shopping until they get an acceptance.
With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up automatically.
Watson and Crick published papers only every couple years. This wouldn't work today at all.
Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.
Even if there was a "Netflix" of scientific papers, a few years after its prime all of the publishers would notice that it's far more lucrative to make their own Netflix and take all of their content for themselves again, forcing people to go back to Torre- I mean, Sci-Hub.
I think that what some outside of academia might miss is that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific output by the entities that grant you funding and career prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not the distribution problem.
Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia and the industry, I can only support Sci-Hub. Publishing as it works currently is an incredibly time consuming and expensive process funneling tremendous amounts of tax money into the poc?ets of publishers.
To some extent the whole situation reminds me of the video and music content piracy era in the early 2000s. I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix for scientific papers in the near future.
I hope that there will never be a "legal-streaming" equivalent.
These papers have been paid for already, through the salary of the people that wrote and peer reviewed them.
There is a theft happening, but it's not the way commonly portrayed.
It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community, universities and tax payers, and the politicians and bureaucrats are complicit.
The only reason why people publish with these journals is so that they can get funding for their projects, because the people in charge of distributing these funds are using "most prestigious papers" as the only metric and often have a revolving door relationship with publishers.
The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses.
That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
We need to build a better research system, that cuts out the leaches, and distributes money to researchers more fairly.
And as a bonus we'd also get rid of the paper mills.
I'm of a separatist mindset in situations like these where the entire ecosystem has turned corrupt. It can't be legislated because legislators are part of the problem as you say.
So you need an independent organization that can fund and provide the resources needed by researchers, and which disregards publication in the corrupt publications. You also need a publication that can support free access.
Something like a hackerspace on steroids, perhaps.
In theory, if you can get enough momentum behind this sort of project, then libraries can turn that license money towards this project and accelerate the research that can be done, where rather than padding publisher's pockets the fees are going directly towards supporting research.
> It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community, universities and tax payers, and the politicians and bureaucrats are complicit.
Not really. The publishers provide hardly any value, definitely not commensurate with their prices. So why don't the scientists simply walk away? Why not publish on the internet, why not simply upload to arxiv.org?
It's because funding through quasi government agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) is tied to your publication record, which is evaluated in "impact points", and those are actually tied not to your own publications, but to the journals they appear in. So your funding as a scientist depends on you publishing in these expensive journals.
It's actually the politicians and bureaucrats stealing from the tax payers, funneling the money to the publishers, all the while claiming they are funding science.
As a scientist, you have little leverage in this fouled up system, but it is your civic duty to use it: Please refuse to review papers for commercial journals without appropriate payment. You owe it to your fellow scientists to not subsidize predatory business models.
Here's an insider's view from having worked the tech side at a small scientific publisher. Prices are too high and the model is flawed [-1] but your opinion is not accurate, the publisher did a tremendous amount of work:
First a distinction, two types of editors: The publisher's editors, each of which handled a batch of journals. The journal editor, who did not actually work for the publisher. The publisher's editors were well educated in the fields they covered, though usually not specialists or researchers in their own right. The journal editors were typically researchers themselves, and being the editor of the journal was not their primary work.
-The publisher's editors organized individual journal editors, helping to find new ones when one left, keeping them on deadline, etc.
-The publisher's editors processed submissions to the journal working with criteria set by the journal editor to perform an initial review for off-topic, low quality, or otherwise flawed submissions.
-The publisher's editors coordinated an enormous network of peer reviewers and the logistics of getting them assigned to submissions and also staying on top of them for deadlines in submitting reviews & feedback.
Other publishing staff:
-performed proof reading & copy editing
-did the layout & type setting
-They used professional color matching labs for all color images, which itself was $100/image (tech for this has probably changed and made it cheaper) [0]
-They managed every aspect of the actual printing of the journal, dealing with printers, reviewing proofs, coordinating a final round of review by the journal editor and authors.
-warehousing copies for expected distribution over the life of the journal, re-prints when something was more popular than expected, and all order fulfillments to individuals & libraries. [1]
-They handled all of the financial logistics, from collecting subscription fees to paying the journal editor and handling royalty fees for decades after a journal was printed & back copies were purchased.
This setup might seem strange, but consider that for the journal itself, the journal editor is often a researcher themselves with very little interest in the mechanics of putting together a publication. They handle reviewing which articles that published and coordinate on the peer review process, and a bit more, but the lion's share of the work of actually turning raw, non-peer reviewed submissions into a printable journal was either coordinated by or directly done by the publisher. All of this cost a lot of money. (Incidentally, the publisher I worked for was ultimately purchased by Elsevier a while after I left, but then Elsevier had to take over all of this.) [2]
[-1] My own opinion is that research funded by the public in some way should have part of the grant dedicated to publication costs. This would keep subscription costs to a minimum and also ensure that not just positive results were published.
[0] Of course this would only apply to printed journals. If you were viewing them online you had to deal with whatever combination of monitor idiosyncrasies and color profiles available, and the difference could be large. It was obvious why they went through the trouble of paying for color matching on print versions.
[1] This was before print on demand was much of a thing. These days it's probably easier to manage
[2] This isn't always how it works. It was where I worked, but for a large publisher like Elsevier there are different models. It's definitely how it works for journals owned by Elsevier. More independent journals may do more of the work themselves, but they may also contract Elsevier to do it. Elsevier may simply license the rights to distribute a journals. But someone has to do the work outlined above.
Whether it was done by the publisher or someone else, the work has to be done. If not by the publisher, then it's reflected in a lower share of the sub fees for the publisher.
But my point wasn't to say the high sub fees are okay, it was to rebut the idea that publishers add no value, when that is often (though not always) incorrect.
IIRC, the small publisher I worked for had net profits of about 10% on $5 million in revenue. Not unreasonable for handling pretty much every aspect of the process apart from final decisions on article inclusion and a few other high level details.
Even when I worked at the small company though, we hated Elsevier. Elsevier are little better than extortionists saying "nice library collection you have there. Shame is something happened to it. How about you pay us double this year?"
Then they did not articulate that viewpoint very well. They also completely neglected to provide any justification. I stated a claim and provided extensive detail to support it. Replying with a comment that boils down to "nope" doesn't add anything to a conversation.
Is the cost added by the journals justified by the ultimate difference in output? It ultimately depends on your goals, probably. In my opinion, a good competing system would more or less completely eschew physical copies and save that process for anyone who is willing to take on the costs associated with that. And ideally, the peer review process would be independent from publishing, since that seems to be the invaluable service that publishing companies provide.
Sci-Hub and arXiv are merely distributors. Like a movie theatre for a movie. Elsevier is like the movie studio that actually produces the movie after authors write it. The question of marginal value is missing that point. It's looking at the fact that, under this analogy, Elsevier is the movie theatre and is blind to the fact that it is also the movie studio.
One way or another the work has to get done. Shifting it from one pile or person to another doesn't change that. You can live without some of the steps I outlined, but quality can suffer then. Not in all cases, but some. I've seen plenty of HN links to arXiv posts where it's clear the authors had little sense of the best way of presenting their material and therefore have a harder time communicating their work.
What marginal value do you place on having new scientific knowledge more clearly and consistently communicated to other researchers? That's what publishers do.
Subscription prices are certainly way too high compared to the cost, but saying the add little or no value just tells me that a person probably doesn't understand what publishers do, or that "researcher" skill sets don't always overlap with the skill sets to perform the work I outlined above.
Good points. I'm not implying that publishers add no value; I agree that they add some (but charge far too much). I'm just trying to find a way to determine the values of their different inputs.
So what is the value of a paper journal over a website? That the pictures look better?
I love how you compare a scientific journal to a cinema. It really brings your point home. But you're wrong: Science isn't entertainment. (I have experienced both NPG and AAAS treat it as if it was, though.)
In the traditional model, journal editors and the referees do most of the work, for which they are usually not paid.
> The publisher's editors organized individual journal editors, helping to find new ones when one left, keeping them on deadline, etc.
Most journals have an editorial board and they are generally much better in finding new journal editors because of their contacts in the field.
Keeping deadlines is only important when you are printing separate issues. When you have a journal that consists of an electronic stream of articles, deadlines are not a serious issue.
> The publisher's editors processed submissions to the journal working with criteria set by the journal editor to perform an initial review for off-topic, low quality, or otherwise flawed submissions.
This can also been done by the journal editors. AFAIK all rejections I have ever seen were done by journal editors.
> Other publishing staff:
>-performed proof reading & copy editing
>-did the layout & type setting
>-They used professional color matching labs for all color images, which itself was $100/image (tech for this has probably changed and made it cheaper) [0]
>-They managed every aspect of the actual printing of the journal, dealing with printers, reviewing proofs, coordinating a final round of review by the journal editor and authors.
>-warehousing copies for expected distribution over the life of the journal, re-prints when something was more popular than expected, and all order fulfillments to individuals & libraries. [1]
>-They handled all of the financial logistics, from collecting subscription fees to paying the journal editor and handling royalty fees for decades after a journal was printed & back copies were purchased.
Most of these tasks are no longer needed when the journal changes to free electronic publications.
Fortunately, that seems to be increasingly popular.
> papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally
There is a legitimate argument in the value added of curating research into journals. The publishers don’t do this. But simply eliminating that curation mode is unlikely to be feasible.
Sure, I'm not saying these journals should be abolished, i merely want the papers to be available for free.
You might still want to browse the journal to see what is hot right now.
Having to wait for an author to email you a copy isn't a viable solution. Even getting authors to post a free copy, which is NIH mandate is often overlooked...
You're not wrong but that system only works on a very small scale. Do you really think the authors would be amenable to answering 10000 emails with the exact same request?
In general, an averagely successful paper in most disciplines will get 200-250 readers. It’s only when there is outsized media attention that there is any issue.
And luckily, for those cases today, sci-hub is available.
>I hear they generally are "freely" available, just email the authors and ask.
I didn't downvote you but the way contracts work, the researchers are not allowed to share the final published article that was professionally edited and typeset by the journal. What they can legally share are the preprints and manuscripts.[1]
Yes, some researchers may ignore the contract they signed (wink wink) and share the final published pdf. IME whenever I asked for a paper, I got the preprint -- which means the author honored their publishing contract. The preprint is fine in most cases because it will have the main idea of the research. However, it's often missing the pretty graphs and illustrations that the journal adds.
“Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time.
If accepted for publication, we encourage authors to link from the preprint to their formal publication via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Millions of researchers have access to the formal publications on ScienceDirect, and so links will help your users to find, access, cite, and use the best available version.
Authors can update their preprints on arXiv or RePEc with their accepted manuscript.”
there still is an issue with older articles that authors don’t have PDFs of, or whose authors aren’t in the field anymore (or even died). That problem will stay, but _if_ authors start putting their publications on arXiv, their university server, etc. en masse, also will get smaller over time.
Leading journals allow publishing preprints on arXiv only as there was considerable pressure. In the quantum physics community (where it was expected to post results on arXiv), a journal not allowing arXiv was not considered. So either their de facto allowed, or even started officially to do so.
I don't remember the exact dates, but Nature (who had been hesitant for a long time) gave in as well. They resisted a long time as they were (and are) considered a badge of honor.
> These papers that have been paid for by tax payers and peer reviewed for free should be made freely available legally.
I strongly disagree with this. Labor has value, and we shouldn't let capital alone dictate ownership. The people who do the research are more important than the bureaucrats who signed the checks.
Sci-Hub is probably the best thing on the internet, but the fact that some rando had to create it doesn't speak well for the state of our world. If humanity weren't dysfunctional, academic institutions would have beaten Elbakyan to the punch back in the 1990s.
I expressed myself poorly. The fact that aspects of Sci-Hub are illegal is the reason I wrote the comment. In a perfect world, academic institutions would have combined their efforts to provide a viable equivalent to Sci-Hub legally. Whether that means buying out publishers, or making do with a small selection of existing papers and focusing on future publications, I don't know.
That "not being legal" is a corruption, a continued acceptance of lobby dollar bribes to maintain the situation. Or the lawmakers are so capitalistically corrupted they do not see the problem and think paying multiple times for publicly funded research's information is acceptable.
Atheism was illegal. Homosexual acts were illegal. Democrasy was illegal. Studying and voting for women was illegal. (And actually all of these are in some places in the world.)
Very often to progress, as a civilization, we need to change what is legal and what is not.
Having worked as a researcher all my life in academia (but not in the industry), I can not support Sci-Hub. I know it's an unpopular opinion but I think it's the wrong approach.
As scientists, I think we should be held to especially high moral standards. And there are two questions one should be allowed to ask:
1. Is is right to publish research results funded by tax money behind a paywall?
2. Is it right to circumvent a paywall to access publicly funded research results?
And to me, the answer to 2. is imply 'no'. I know that most people, especially here on HN, do not agree with that view. Perhaps they might think that a 'yes' would immediately follow from a 'no' to question 1.
But I don't think it does, and I'm not even sure my answer to question 1 would be a 'no'. Perhaps one could think about another question first: should researchers turn to a professional publisher to get their research published, and I think at least some years ago there wasn't much else you could do. Now, of course, there are digital platforms such as arxiv but their acceptance also depends vastly on your field. In any event, such platforms can also be thought of as a publisher, anyway. The main service provided is organizational: publishers don't review the research contents (they're not qualified for that) but they organize external reviewers; publishers provide discoverability because they are a well-defined source known to the community. Are there alternatives to that type of work? Sure! But there is an added value in what a publisher does.
So then in a follow-up question, we can ask whether a publisher should be compensated for their work. And to me, it is pretty clear that they should be. Of course, there are different ways this could be implemented but that decision is up to the one running the business, ie., the publisher. I can think of more customer-friendly ways than to make me pay for every single download of a paper. On the other hand, there are lots of other businesses where I don't like the way they make money - tough luck for me, I guess.
Now, I think this last point is very important, especially before you go and hit that downvote button (unless you already have): I can think of better ways (for me!) how research publishing should be realized. But I don't think that from that it follows that I should be able to or even have the moral right to circumvent publisher paywalls.
Perhaps it's wrong to charge for access to publicly funded research results but I don't think the second wrong of circumventing publisher paywalls makes that right.
Oh, and here's a little subtlety I don't see discussed very often: if I do research funded by UK tax money and publish it, should that paper be freely available to Americans too, or only to UK tax payers?
> So then in a follow-up question, we can ask whether a publisher should be compensated for their work. And to me, it is pretty clear that they should be.
Nope. Peer review is a kind of quality filter (in theory but seldom in practice), but that does nothing to solve the question of “is this a paper worthy of publishing”. That question gets resolved by the publisher/editor of the journal long before the paper makes it to peer review.
Peer review is mostly a requirement but some have professional editors as well, which is a paid position. Costs for OA journals are almost always borne by those successful at getting through the process which means that any costs are related also to the rate of rejection. For journals groups like Nature, that may mean an OA cost paying ~10-20x the actual cost (plus profit margin) due to a high rejection rate.
Broadly the reason this has stuck around so long is that what publishers are assigning to journals is a vague notion of trust. They are incentivised to keep "high quality" articles in their list as that's what people want to be listed in. The recent discussions around reproducibility tie in with discussions around clickbait news, in that the incentive of citations is not identical to the incentive of quality.
Peer review isn't free to do either despite one part of the labour being free, PeerJ increasing their costs is a good overview of this.
(disclaimer - work for a company (digital science) that's related to publishing in that we analyse and combine the data, and we're owned by a larger publishing house (holtzbrinck) but I have no horse in this game myself)
There is also quite a split between "should be compensated for their work" and "asking 30-50€ for a single paper download is a reasonable compensation".
For me personally that is way past that into "unethical" territory, and that justifies it. I'm very much in favor of solving the issue through different ways long-term, but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
I don't think that unethical behavior can simply be justified by some other unethical behavior, especially when personal opinions are involved.
Analogies are often not very useful but consider this: there's this traffic light close to my house and even though there's usually not much traffic, the red phase is much, much longer than any other light I've ever waited at. I don't know what they were thinking but it's crazy long. I go there multiple times each day and I don't want to know how much of my life I already wasted just waiting at that light. For me personally that is into "unethical" territory, so I started just running that red light now. I make sure, though, that I only do it when there's no chance for an accident. I'm very much in favor of solving the issue through different ways long-term, but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
Maybe here's a better one: there's this really good bakery close to my house. They make everything fresh from scratch, and the smell alone when you walk by is absolutely amazing. Their croissants especially are to die for and there's usually long lines in the morning. I love them too, because they're really heavenly but they come at a price point. I mean, it's always been a bit more than I could/should afford but they're so good! But last month, they even raised the price by another pound. It's actually quite ridiculous now - I mean, do they make their croissants out of gold? There should be a law against such prices! And I know that each day, they have to throw out a handful of croissants at the end of the day that they couldn't sell, probably because of the high price?! For me personally that is into "unethical" territory, so now I just started quickly running into the bakery, grabbing one of the croissants and booking it. That saves me a lot of money, and I can enjoy those beautiful goods again, hmm! I'm very much in favor of solving the issue through different ways long-term, but until then, meh. But YMMV of course.
Okay, at this point I'm starting to regret that I upvoted your comments as bringing a good perspective into the discussion if you are just trying to bring ridiculous strawman to anyone engaging with arguments. plonk
I had a feeling that the previous comment would possibly not be well received. My intention was not to make a strawman argument - that's why I added a clear caveat about the limited usefulness of analogies.
The point was perhaps a bit childish, I admit, but then again, the HN audience is very diverse with many different backgrounds. Many may be intimately familiar with academic realities, others might not and simply get triggered by the old "evil publishing corporation against freedom of information" trope.
The two examples were meant to target the latter end of the spectrum, and judging from your comment, they probably failed at what I had in mind: to allude to the fact that there a multiple parties involved here and they are coming from different perspectives and they have different interests in mind. That's where the analogies end, of course.
Sci-Hub is certainly convenient. But convenience does not justify everything.
P.S.: A potential evidence that my point about the different backgrounds of the HN crowd may have been correct is the fact that my "analogies" post is the only one that has more upvotes than downvotes.
"[T]he question posed is whether a hypothetical monopolist can profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price in the product market as defined. If the answer to the question posed is yes, and the price increase would be profitable for the hypothetical monopolist, then the market is correctly defined, and from here the analysis could go forward to determining whether antitrust laws are being violated if the company at issue has too much market power." (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/hypothetical_monopolist_test)
There is a very large gap between fair compensation and greed driven profits, we are currently at the far end of that spectrum on the 'profits' side of the scale.
That is a very abstract thought, one that could possibly lead to a very interesting philosophical discussion about society.
In the mean time, however, we live in a market economy where publishers exist, and they are a business. Of course they are interested in customers, and yes, they would be scientists and students.
Am I saying that that's the best way to organize academic publishing? No. What I'm saying is that I don't see any justification for circumventing paywalls within a society that adheres to certain laws and regulations.
I believe in a system where the people can critically assess and evaluate all laws and regulations and has the power to get them changed. I don't believe in a system where people can just pick the laws and regulations that suit them and choose to ignore the other ones.
> I believe in a system where the people can critically assess and evaluate all laws and regulations and has the power to get them changed. I don't believe in a system where people can just pick the laws and regulations that suit them and choose to ignore the other ones.
Fair. For the record, I don't believe in neither of the two systems that you describe, or rather... I don't think that those descriptions are meaningful.
i.e. you describe what "people can" do... you might intend "can" to mean: "have the ultimate power to", but to me that's obviously untrue (if people had the ultimate power to change regulations for the better, gerrymandering wouldn't exist, if people had the ultimate power to ignore law and regulations, police wouldn't exist).
What you describe could be true if you mean "can" to be "are allowed to". But obviously people are never allowed to do something as a blanket rule... and thus those statements are less universal, and much less interesting (People can change laws and regulations, as long as they have the support of mass media and the establishment. People can ignore law, as long as LEA turn a blind eye to it)
What is more interesting, is defining what people -should- do.
If people can critically assess all laws and regulations, should they change them?
Unjust laws are obviously not being repealed. Is that the people relinquishing their responsibility, or are there roadblocks preventing that? Who has the power to stop them? How can we empower the people?
If people think that laws are unjust, should they ignore them?
Is that good for society? How do you protect people who are doing civil disobedience?
I certainly mean the first reading of "can", as in "to be able to". You are right, though, that in reality, there are no absolutes. However, by and large, of course people who live in a democracy absolutely have the power to cause societal change - it's just that it's not an easy process and there are certainly parties who are interested in roadblocking this ability for their own benefits.
As for your list of questions toward the end, I have opinions on a number of them. As I'm sure you might have too. A small text box on HN is probably not going to do it for a thorough discussion, though, I suggest we take ourselves a couple of thousands years of time and enough tea to make any progress on them at all.
> publishers provide discoverability because they are a well-defined source known to the community
Could this not be said about Sci-Hub itself?
The purpose of copyright is to enrich public access to creative works. So bypassing of paywalls, regardless of whether it was publicly or privately funded, should be judged against that measure. It does not seem that researchers will stop writing papers just because of a drop in publisher revenue, regardless of the source of funding.
Of course everyone that does honest and useful work ought to be compensated for that work. But note that there is extensive research that publishers earn excess returns, beyond what is justified by their work and risk taking. In other words, they're rent seeking (ie, not creating value, but appropriating value).
> I don't think the second wrong of circumventing publisher paywalls makes that right.
What's wrong with "circumventing" paywalls?
17 U.S.C. § 107
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies … for purposes such as … scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
You have a very principled position, one that I don't necessarily disagree with[1]. However, information is, in fact, power, and the power disparity in the currently legal model, between those with access to a well-funded research library and those without, is very great. And like most power disparities, it is self-sustaining; it will not change without an equally powerful force changing it.
[1] Two provisos: the costs of professional publishing a journal is per-issue; perhaps, per-paper. Not per-copy. A pay-to-publish model would put incentives in the right place, but is fraught with a whole stack of conflicts of interest. Which is being actively exploited. So, ... yeah.
Second, the consumer-pays model actively hurts researchers themselves, who would like to see their research disseminated as widely as possible. "If I do research funded by UK tax money and publish it, should that paper be freely available to Americans too, or only to UK tax payers?" Want to bet what researchers' answer to that question would be?
Fortunately for me, I was a computer scientist. In that field, researchers (almost?) universally make their papers freely available, often in complete disregard of their publishing venue's rules (with no consequences). So, to medicine and physics and what-not, I can only say phtththp.
I hope there will be an equivalent of Apple Music/Spotify/Netflix for scientific papers in the near future.
There is: You can pay Elsevier for an unlimited access subscription to ScienceDirect journals. The only problem is that it costs about $1700 and you have to buy for a minimum of 3 people. [0]
Yeah, it's easy to get jumpy when you are written about in public.
The bigger picture is that she is absolutely doing God's work. As an academic: screw Elsevier. Those guys, once
at the forefront of the printing revolution, are now greedy rent-extracting parasites holding back another communications revolution. The sooner they go out of business, the happier I will be.
The original article presents her in a very bright light, as a smart and brave woman who is engaged in a legal battle against large greedy corporations. And I find the photo quite cool.
I think she is just overly susceptible, and maybe a little bit paranoid (which is understandable for a person with enemies as powerful as hers).
This reminds me of the time when a russian entomologist named a new wasp species he discovered after her in her honor, and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for a few days in retaliation !
edit: sci-hub was blocked only a few days, not months, my memory failed me.
>and she took offense because the wasp was a parasite species, and blocked sci-hub in Russia for several months in retaliation
Sounds like shes the wrong person in charge of sci-hub. Blocking access to ~free knowledge because one is offended is probably even worse...that's the mindset of dictators no?
And Russia is probably her only protection not being assange'd already.
Feel free to run your own Sci-Hub, then. It's not like this is a massively collaborative project that she's the executive decision-maker of; it's largely just her.
She's the one delivering that access. And if you want to define sole decisionmaking power as dictatorship, I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday, too. You're free to provide access to the papers yourself.
>I'm the dictator of the cookies I baked yesterday
Your cookies are not important for the scientific world, and she is NOT the baker of the Scientific papers, just a publisher, and since it's not her content she has even less rights to block a country from partially self made work.
Don't you see the irony in it?
>...to remove all barriers in the way of science (but don't name insects after me)
I think you're side-stepping the point: It is valid to point out her self-contradiction of her ideals.
I can even understand her anger: she's been harassed with lawsuits in multiple countries and companies have probably had her personally investigated in those efforts. Paranoia isn't really even the appropriate word in that case.
But it's still an extreme overreaction and contradiction of her ideals to block an entire country over one person's insult.
Imagine your stated mission was to provide cookies for everyone in town because the local cookie factory charged $100 each. Then one kid said they didn't like the cookie, so you banned all kids from eating them.
You'd be within your rights, sure. But you would also be a going back and violating your own ideals.
So, sure, it's her site, her rules, but I think it's fair to expect someone to uphold their principals and be disappointed when they don't.
A lot of the benefit of a site like this is moot if entire countries are banned for petty reasons. Imagine if the US was blocked because she didn't like the former president.
And, quite honestly, speaking about rights in the context of what amounts to a piracy site is kinda ironic.
I agree that it was petty of her but unless if anybody else steps up in her place in a substantial way and fight the major publishers, I think we should be a little lenient on her idiosyncracities. I don't know what the real story behind the block is but something tells me there was a lot of other baggage on her mind prior to hearing about the wasp.
Look, i think she makes a great job. But i hate it when those fanboys cannot see the irony of what she did...i would be proud like hell if a scientist would name a slug after me.
I do not disagree here. That being said, I fucking hate wasps so while I wouldn't hold a grudge over it, I'd definitely have mixed feelings about having a wasp named after me myself.
It is getting a bit embarrassing. Wished she disregarded things about her person. All kind of stuff is going to be said and written about you when your a globally known person. Better, and healthier, to focus on defending the cause and not yourself.
> All kind of stuff is going to be said and written about you when your a globally known person.
There are powerful people who would be happy to imprison or kill her. It's weird to call a revolutionary who is in the spotlight paranoid. A couple of administration changes and a sex or bribery scandal in some place she's never even visited could set off a series of events where she ends up like Assange or worse.
That is already in the works. Sweden has a woman who have already made false statements that she has withdrawn but they are using the rape charges to get her to the US.
Yeah but it feels is neither weird to be called or be paranoid in that situation. Some things that Assange has said definitely comes off as paranoid and perhaps completely off but he also has had more reasons than almost anyone to be paranoid.
When you have powerful enemies and know it you're probably not better at recognizing where they are lurking about than anyone else. So you end up lashing out at shadows. Who can blame you.
Yeah, she's doing God's work and sci-hub is amazing but Elbakyan is an odd person who gets extremely paranoid and defensive, holds weird beliefs and often does things that are over the top.
Being attacked leads to paranoid-like behavior. Your Bayesian filters go all wonky when you know they're actually out to get you.
It pollutes everything in your life; you need to be suspicious of everyone and everything.
The other thing about a constant series of attacks -- without support to field them -- is that you DO misidentify things, and sometimes respond imperfectly. There are 24 hours in a day. Sometimes you'll miss something, and other times, you'll overreact, or just react inappropriately.
Talk to anyone with a stalker.
Now imagine that stalker has a billion dollar war chest, and can hire a PI to trail you on a whim, corrupt government officials, or wield more-or-less infinite resources compared to you.
In terms of weird beliefs, we all got 'em. The difference is mostly with regards to whether others find out about them.
I haven't been in the same position as Elbakyan, but I've been in a sufficiently analogous one that I don't see what she's doing as anything other than human.
Honestly, I'm very close to sending her a few btc. Although my employer would hate me for using it, sci hub is just an absolutely brilliant, internationally known godsend.
One of the things that publishers have started doing of late is just linking the "pdf" button to things that are not pdfs. I have legal access to basically every journal article I could ever want, but sci-hub provides a much better product: you actually just get the pdf with one button, and no telemetry crap either.
Spot on! Thank you for that. Some work I do would be sunk without her and we know there are countless independent researchers who could say the same thing.
I was surprised reading the Chronicle article after her own post. If it hadn't been from the archive.org link I would have been certain they went back and added "Elbakyan, who is originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and coded Sci-Hub herself." after she complained but nope, there all the time.
Also "Pirate Queen"? "beloved outlaw"? They couldn't have made her sound cooler if they tried.
Cool titles, but I can see why she might not want to be lumped in with the general file sharing community.
I don't think open access science should be in the same category as pirating Hollywood movies and cracking videogames.
I don't think pirating video games and Hollywood movies deserve a separate category from "replicating information" to be fair, but facilitated information asymmetry is the quintessemce of most businesses... So
... Yeah. To each their own.
I'm not sure about the entomologist issue but for this article, I feel that some of the issue might be language barrier and cultural misunderstanding.
For example, she mentions this paragraph:
> She said that while she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains pretty much a one-woman show (it’s “mainly me,” she said)
The Chronicle of Higher Education
And criticises it by saying:
> So they lie to their readers that Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’ , and to support this, they seize upon a word ‘mainly’ that I have used to describe my work, as a proof that I am not doing this myself, but getting helped instead.
The use of show in this context is normal and typical language usage, but she instead tries to ascribe the literal meaning to the word 'show' and is offended by it. No native English speaker would interpret "one-woman show" as meaning "Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’ ".
So combine a thin skin due to numerous attack, a good command of English but no mastery of the subtleties of certain words and expressions and you have a recipe for her to seem overly susceptible.
I recall reading about an incident where a journalist with access to North Korea was detained for a while over a phrase that said a guard "barked" orders, as the locals deemed a comparison to a dog rather unflattering.
I have a superstition: I don't see a robust future for Sci-Hub, Internet Archive or Wikipedia. The internet relentlessly turns everything into worthless trash, so Sci-Hub will die, Internet Archive will wind up with Doritos ads and a paywall, and Wikipedia will focus on sponsored articles and deprecate, in one way or another, articles that aren't commercial.
I don't have a time frame for it. I just know that 'this is useful' historically doesn't save an online service (Napster, Ebay, Amazon, Reddit, Twitter, Google Search, etc) from disappearing or turning lousy. The fact that millions of people love Internet Archive and Wikipedia means there's money to made by ruining them.
Having said that, probably she has not faced a genuinely strong attempt at malignment yet, like some people tried to pull off on Stallman (“he is a defender of Epstein and child rapists”) few months ago. I hope she has a support system to fall back on when that happens.
I was just trying to point out that if she considers this as trying to "malign her", then she will have to prepare for much worse attacks later for doing the right thing.
Why? Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right thing.
The first time you're thinking of, he was attacked over a misunderstanding when he wrote about a controversial topic, and people's general resentment of him bubbled over and made it a big thing. The second (more recent) one, he was attacked over unresigning, and because he pushed a lot of people away from Free Software.
Alexandra Elbakyan has, to my knowledge, not really pushed people away from open access science. She hasn't gone to conferences and made pejorative “jokes” about men, or deathists, or eaten her toe jam on stage. Why would people attack her?
> "Richard Stallman wasn't attacked for doing the right thing."
He absolutely was. For defending a dead person who was being accused of sexual assault. Most people won't even take the risk of tarnishing their own reputation given that the accused is dead.
He did that. That's not why he was being attacked (certainly not the second time). I like Richard Stallman as much as the next person, but don't pretend he's a saint. (Although, technically…)
While I have relatively good access options through my university, roughly half of the publications appearing in my Google Scholar alerts are unaccessible. As they are also in fields were use of preprint services isn't common, it really interferes with me being up to date with ongoing research.
As the use of sci-hub is so common, I wonder about the wider implications of the newest articles being inaccessible. Could bibliometric methods be used to quantify this? Missed citations? Less citations for articles published in more obscure journals?
Interesting that no new solutions have come out yet. I'm seeing people getting back to use #ICanHazPDF - not the best way to conduct research when an article is often just a gateway to more finding more relevant articles to read.
This is purportedly related to a lawsuit in India. The thought is that Alexandra is intentionally being as cooperative as possible because there is a possibility of a legal victory in that jurisdiction. The court had asked her to cease adding new material.
She has shown us the way. We can always recreate sci-hub, should the current system cease to function. We even know what kind of budget it takes to set up and operate for a decade: $100k!
How much it cost to operate for its first decade of life is certainly not representative of how much it'll cost for the next given how its archive and usage have grown significantly.
The grandparent implied that'd be the cost to run the site, the parent suggested it's not representative now.
> We can always recreate sci-hub, should the current system cease to function.
The problem is she has also shown us that recreating it may require great personal sacrifice of someone. Would you be that someone? I certainly wouldn’t.
I never see someone speak about it so I'm gonna say it, sci-hub is very incomplete both for old papers from other countries and for recent papers from occidental countries.
The question the HN community should ask itself is: What can be done to improve the sustainability of the scihub project, for example to make it more decentralised?
She started off with a decent explanation and defense of her work... but then fell off completely with the complaints about the photo and the worries about getting 100% credit. I don't know if it's due to the pressures she faces, or if that was her personality to begin with.
We're kind of lucky for having so many precise SDK-, Framework- and Language documentations freely available.
Just imagine how painful it would be if you'd need some kind of subscription from some centralized companies only to find out which methods a class has and what exactly they do.
Does it feel like this to not have access to papers in the scientific community? I can't tell, because I don't read papers. All I need to know is available either freely on the web or in books.
Does it feel like this to not have access to papers in the scientific community?
Yes, it's very frustrating read a paper and see a citation to something that would be useful only to see that your library doesn't subscribe to it. At least if it's a book you can get it by inter-library loan, so that's a little better than journal articles.
"'She said that while she gets some help, Sci-Hub remains pretty much a one-woman show (it’s “mainly me,” she said)' -- The Chronicle of Higher Education
"So they lie to their readers that Sci-Hub run by a woman is some kind of not a real thing but a ‘show’,..."
I'd like to point out that "...a one-woman show" is an expression in American English that does not carry any extra connotations of "show" such as fictional or a falsehood.
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