Subscription Journals Are Doomed Because of Sci-Hub's Big Cache of Pirated Papers, Suggests Data Analyst (sciencemag.org) 100
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous -- and, according to a U.S. court, illegal -- online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub. Their findings, published in a preprint on the PeerJ journal site on July 20, indicate that Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is "even higher" than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub's reach is greater still, with instant access to 85% of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97% of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub's servers -- meaning they can be accessed there for free. In a chat with ScienceInsider, Himmelstein concludes that the results of his study could mark "the beginning of the end" for paywalled research.
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The university libraries will still keep paying the subscription fees, and researchers will keep paying for the privilege of surrendering copyright.
Elsevier's business model isn't going anywhere.
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This. Apart from universities or other research organizations who's buying scientific articles? I know I as someone not associated with a university I can theoretically get access to research legitimately by paying far out the ass for a journal subscription or individual article, but even if I was one of the five or six people out there regularly in this situation (and scihub wasn't a thing) I'd just drive to the nearest public university library and grab it for free off a computer there. Or, worst case,
Re:The Beginning of the End (Score:5, Informative)
Later I needed access to some medical papers - which are often even harder to obtain than regular science papers. Again my university did not have access. I had to go across town to another university. But of course I could not logon because they restricted access if you were a student from another institution. In the end I had to hustle and find a computer in their library that was very antiquated located near the printers. It luckily did not have a login requirement. I loaded up about 15 papers onto my flash drive. And it was very scary because the foreign institution was (and still is) so strict about this. I am reminded me of the death of an MIT student. MIT is and was so IP obsessed that it assisted in pushing one of its own to suicide.
Now I am no longer affiliated with a university, But I do pay lots of $$$ in taxes to the federal government. Somehow paying for the research now, having done previous research for free, and later for graduate student slave wages does not privilege me with the right to obtain papers. I asked many people if there was some way I could pay as an individual a modest fee (of about $500 a year) to get access to all the typical journals for noncommercial use and was told no such program existed. I even called multiple libraries about this. I later needed some information for urgent personal reasons from a journal article and forked over around $45 for it.
When I brought up how unfair the system was to other people I was either politely ignored, told to stop complaining, or told that IP was necessary and that without high fees the journals could not survive (which is false). Fast forward a few years and now Sci-hub has provided a way for people like me to obtain papers that I have in one way or another already paid for. And suddenly Nature and Elsevier cry crocodile tears. But because they are rich and powerful, people don't condescend to them and insist they stop complaining. The power of campaign finance contributions is so overwhelming.
The system is broken. IP is out of control - it's even corrupted university faculty who blab on about their own intellectual property and restrict the supply of their lecture notes even when they would not otherwise make money from them. There are many papers demonstrating the over indulgence in IP restrictions. One showed that the optimum copyright should last a mere seven years. Knowledge should be freely available as much as possible when its creation has already been paid for.
And we could incentivize new idea production with a lot less IP. Drug patents are another example of how it is abused - pharmaceutical companies charge what the market will bear. And that means monopoly pricing. Screaming "free market" will not help you. Giving someone a legal monopoly is not laissez fair. If you are going to give someone extra privileges, there have to be protections to prevent abuses. Lots of people urgently may need journal access like people with rare diseases. It's hard for policy makers on the state or municipal level to make good decisions without ready access to journal articles - I see this firsthand as someone who serves in local government.
So until there is a realistic alternative that allows wide distribution of knowledge we are stuck with sci-hub. It's almost impossible to have reasonable discussions because all major news outlets are in love with copyright and IP generally and th
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Seizing the domain name has been tried, with limited success. You can also access the website directly by IP address.
Re:What the hell is the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
If they want it gone, they can simply seize the domain name or add filters. I keep hearing news about "controversial" sites which "somehow" are still up no matter how many news articles are written about them about how illegal they are. If they actually want a site done, it's gone within seconds.
Under what jurisdiction would they seize the domain names? Sci-Hub operates under many domains, including those in .ac (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a group of islands in the South Atlantic), .bz (Belize, a Central American country), .cc (the Cocos/Keeling Islands in the Pacific), among others. Of those, .ac has a connection to the UK due to the islands being a UK territory, and .cc's operations are run by VeriSign, a US company.
The site itself is hosted in Russia, who is unlikely to care about US or EU takedown requests.
It's also available over Tor, so good luck.
Seizing the names isn't really feasible.
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So, two cruise missiles, then.
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I see your redundancy and raise you a US carrier group.
XD
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Re: You know what else has a big cache? (Score:1)
So that would mean you never get any action
Opportunity cost (Score:5, Informative)
I have access to pretty well every journal I need through my university's library. I still use Sci-Hub. One DOI entry and I can have my paper. 5 minutes of bullshit and jumping through menus to get a preview and abstract, then still need to hunt around on the individual page for download link (if it exists - if its offered as a PDF, not some protected web reader nonsense).
I'll stick with the pirate way.
Re:Opportunity cost (Score:5, Interesting)
Different AC.
I'm in a similar situation, except my university's library doesn't subscribe to all the journals I need, or they have odd restrictions. For example, for some of the major journals in my field, university staff and students can access current and past PDF copies of papers back to around the year 2000 or so. Previously-published papers, even when they're available as PDFs, are not available because it costs more for our university. Thus, I have to go to the paper archives, find the printed journal, find the article, and photocopy it. Insurmountable? Not at all, but why waste 30-60 minutes of my time when I can just copy-paste the DOI into Sci-Hub and get the PDF right away?
Other papers are in conference proceedings and only available in paper form in libraries in foreign countries. Yes, I can (and have) requested interlibrary loans, or have staff in the foreign library find the paper, scan it, and email it to me (my institution pays for this), but why should this even be necessary? Again, DOI in Sci-Hub and I have a PDF. Done. Same result, a hell of a lot less hassle.
Don't even get me started on review articles in huge publications that cost a thousand dollars or something for 1,400 pages of content that you don't want and 6 pages that you do, or journals that keep papers from the 1960s and earlier behind paywalls. Journals that charge you $6 to "rent" a paper for 48 hours (no saving, printing, etc.), $15 to be able to save it, and $30 to be able to print it are complete bullshit.
Gabe Newell of Valve said this about game piracy, and it applies just as well to scientific literature:
In this case, Sci-Hub is far more valuable in that it provides what I want, immediately, and in a convenient form. The fact that it costs nothing is secondary.
Re:Opportunity cost (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that it costs nothing is secondary.
Gabe was talking about games at the time. In this case, the pricing is so absolutely outrageous - private researchers could easily pay $100 for 24 hour access to a specific paper, and they may have to go through dozens or hundreds of papers to write their own work, even if they aren't even cited - that it's nearly impossible to do research or even simply keep yourself informed without an organization with a much larger budget backing your efforts. So here, it's very much an issue, as is the fact that in most cases the research is paid for by the general public, in part or in full, never mind the fact that copyright law is currently grossly and dangerously distorted in favor of large corporations.
Sci-hub makes it possible for the people who paid for scientific research (the public) to actually access that research without paying a private company that these days does little to nothing to actually earn a fee that's probably well over a thousand times more expensive that it should be.
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Preach it v(what Gabe said).
After a very belated cabinet upgrade I finally joined the ranks of tv streaming service users.
In every measure if usability it's worse than the Pirate Bay.
With the Pirate Bay (or Amazon music), I search for what I want, download a file then play it anywhere, anyhow I like.
With NowTV it is much worse. First, I can't just go a la cart : I have to sign up for a service because it's designed to keep me paying even after I've lost interest. Second, they've decide that me giving them m
The Internet Is a Publishing Platform (Score:2)
There's no reason why peer review can't be done online en masse by all scientists. They could even rate papers on their credibility.
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Because that works so well on Yelp.
Having a PhD doesn't magically turn you into someone who's *not* petty, childish, ignorant, and completely willing to attack someone's work out of personal animus or a desire to punish thoughtcrime.
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True, but what does having a publisher acting as a grossly overpriced intermediary contribute? It's become abundantly clear that many (most?) don't do any vetting of their volunteer reviewers, much less their paying submitters.
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Because that works so well on Yelp.
Having a PhD doesn't magically turn you into someone who's *not* petty, childish, ignorant, and completely willing to attack someone's work out of personal animus or a desire to punish thoughtcrime.
That's why peer reviews have to show and sign their work, as well as being in the same discipline as the reviewed paper. But there is no reason this process cannot take place on cheap public websites (not those 'open access' sites where reading is free but posting a paper costs thousands). Those are run by traditional publishers in a last-ditch attempt to keep their model afloat.
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Oh, yes. Far to many bad papers get published and far too many good papers turn out to be difficult to publish. I have gotten contacted by conference chairs several times by now because I was the only reviewer that rejected a paper, but apparently was also the only one that actually read and understood it. (None of these got published.)
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Hmm - this might actually be where the real threat to their business model lies. I mean if you're actually citing a paper you may want legitimate access to it - but if you can search, skim, etc. most papers far more conveniently for free, and then only legitimately access the ones that will be useful....
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Paywalled research is just a bad idea.
Yes, I understand that the peer review and publication process has to be paid for, but restricting access to the fruits of scientific progress -- and therefore also limiting further progress! -- is the wrong way to do it.
My guess is that we'll transition to an "author pays" model. Researchers employed by institutions will have their fees covered by their employer. Researchers who don't have that option are already disadvantaged under the current model, so the fact that they'll still be disadvantaged isn't so terrible. Plus they'll still be able to publish in free online archives that accept non-reviewed and unedited work. Really good work should find it fairly easy to get someone to fund the peer review and editing required to get it into a journal.
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And the net result will be that good papers naturally float to the top through citations
That would be awesome, but I'm not so sure. People rely on journals to curate the content because their time is limited, and papers that don't get found don't get cited.
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From what I've heard the quality of such curation tends to be distinctly lacking. Meanwhile, Google tends to do a pretty good job of finding useful information.
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Worse, I've gone looking for relevant publications.
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I understand that the peer review and publication process has to be paid for, but restricting access to the fruits of scientific progress -- and therefore also limiting further progress! -- is the wrong way to do it.
In my field (physics and meteorite research), peer reviewers work for free. They're not paid by the journal, though I'd argue that they should be paid at least a reasonable fee for their time and expertise.
And yes, the publication process must be paid for, and that's quite reasonable. Still, the journals charge far more for subscriptions than the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, distribution, and a modest profit.
Personally, I prefer to publish in the journal maintained by the scholarly society relevant to my field rather than the other major journal in the field that's published by Elsevier, even though the latter has a slightly higher impact factor. The society journal is essentially the journal-of-record for the field and their publication costs are quite minimal. They contract with an outside publisher (one of the big publishers, but who's remarkably non-gangster-like in their operations) to actually handle the printing, distribution, and online access, but otherwise maintain control of the content and policies, and strongly push for open access.
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The reality is that can all be done far better by public universities. A global link of all public universities sharing content between themselves and the public. Distributed and mirrored keep the resource impact down on individual universities and that pool can also work to create open content, open reference material, making it far cheaper for students (free versus wasting thousands of dollars).
Need free to read and publish (Score:2)
My guess is that we'll transition to an "author pays" model.
Which is arguably just as bad as paywalled research for exactly the same reason. Now those without financial resources will be unable to publish their research for others to find.
What we need is to revert back to the original scheme from whence the current journals grew. Scientific societies published collections of papers but as the task of collating, refereeing, assembling into volumes and then publishing grew to be a major task publishing companies took over.
However, modern technology makes all of
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It certainly shouldn't be under copyright for 70+ years! That's BS given the level of public support and the fact that a publishing business would go under if they couldn't make their money back in 20 years or less.
Heck, papers from the fricking 1800s are easier to obtain these days than papers from, say, the 1960s, because organizations have scanned in their collections and put them on the web for free. The publishers are still asking you to pay for access to articles from 50 years ago. That's nuts. Th
How to mirror? (Score:1)
Need to find out how to mirror Sci-Hub before it gets taken down.
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Right. And please grab me a copy of that paper on midi-chlorians [slashdot.org] when you do.
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Need to find out how to mirror Sci-Hub before it gets taken down.
Every year or so, back up the repository to Wikileaks.
Recently found a publication of mine on Sci-Hub (Score:5, Interesting)
I remembered that at some point in time, a state-funded institution did officially archive my paper. But it took me about half an hour to finally find it, buried behind multiple retrieval forms and links, with no chance to find it had I not looked up its entire, exact title before.
No question, Sci-Hub did the better job of keeping my little contribution to the world's knowledge available to the public.
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This is not true. Many government agencies stipulate the publications must be openly available (e.g., on PubMed). In addition, many scientists make their preprints publicly available, or even their postprints publicly available (even though publishers generally do not allow it).
Where there are problems, it is generally because of the publishers, not because scientists or the government do not want to make the publications available.
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Unless, of course, the establishment is Canada. And then public accessibility is mandated.
http://www.science.gc.ca/eic/site/063.nsf/eng/h_F6765465.html?OpenDocument
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Mostly because they've made a distinction between "freely available" as in accessible vs "freely available" as in beer. While some journals do indeed limit themselves to members and whatnot, the majority of them are happy to sell you a license for any paper you'd like.
Also, most other government data is like that as well. If you make a freedom of information request for example, you usually will be charged a processing fee. And that's just purely a government interaction -- throw in a private profit-driv
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A good amount of righteous outrage, but just enough bitterness and blustering to be worthy of the AC name. Nicely done.
Subscriptions are doomed (Score:3)
Elsevier (Score:1)
Couldn't have happened to a nicer publisher.
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Personally I prefer "Couldn't have happened to a more deserving ____"
Same initial dose of sarcastic irony, plus the lingering savor of literal truth once you realize the actual intent.
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Only if you include the quotes.
There's always genuinely nicer folks it could have happened to - in fact it often happens to them first since they're not as ruthless.
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[x] Rejection not presented in the form of a rejection letter.
Please re-write and resubmit. Don't forget to include the resubmission fee.
e-reader needed or for $39.99/year e-reader pro (Score:2)
e-reader needed (read only no copying windows only) or for $39.99/year e-reader pro that can print / copy with auto citing into your paper (sorry no mac and the DRM system will not work under wine).
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>> Nobody can make a killing anymore
Journals don't pay scientists. So in that case, it will not impede research, the opposite is true, it will make research available, so that's a big win for everybody except elsevier.
As a former library worker... good (Score:5, Interesting)
The dirty secret of the academic publishing world is that it's a enormous scam designed to funnel taxpayers money into the pockets of rich vendors, who have repeatedly failed to do their jobs because they have no competition and act as a monopolistic racket. Let's not even talk about the kickbacks and benefits they give to the people at these public institutions that are supposed to be upholding the public good but are just looking to inflate their budgets and their ego.
The thing researchers love about sci-hub is that you type in the article name, and you get the article. Imagine that! Something the web search industry figured out 15 years ago has yet to make it into the proprietary morass of vendor locked in library IT systems.... because the academic publishing world is hopelessly corrupt and moribund.
There is no opportunity for a free market force to come in and force these leeches on the taxpayers to do their fucking jobs properly - and their job is to index and store information after it has been verified by peer review. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not complicated. It's not rocket science and it's not brain surgery.
Scihub is the best thing that has ever happened to academic publishing. The management and shareholders of Elsevier and the rest of these thieves should be ashamed of themselves. Ripping off the public for decades on end. It's time to stop.
Re:As a former library worker... good (Score:4, Interesting)
I fully agree. One of the reasons I made sure to keep my online rights when publishing my PhD thesis. Had to go to a small publisher for that. All my papers are online as well, for the journal ones (few, that process just takes far too long got CS) as tech-reports with the same title.
The thing is, I already got paid for all my research by public funding. I consider it highly immortal to ask people to pay for access after that. Personally, I think that publicly funded research should come with a hard requirement that anything published must be free to access for anybody and I expect we will basically get that, as eventually nobody will read the commercial journals anymore and their relevance will go away.
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I consider it highly immortal to ask people to pay for access after that.
Immortal is a bit exaggerated. Copyright usually expires after 100-150 years.
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For Disney, it is currently defined at "now + 20 years", so I would say "forever" is a good approximation.
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Isn't that what Sci-Hub is doing? Are they not the market force?
Re: Netflix Subscriptions Are Doomed (Score:5, Insightful)
Netflix actually do something with their money; they fund original content and pay other producers for access to theirs and collaborate with them.
Scientific publishers don't do any of those things; they work entirely by creating artificial scarcity of a product paid for by others that they don't contribute to; at most they rate it.
Re: Netflix Subscriptions Are Doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
You couldn't have refuted your own point better in a single sentence. You have the entire chain of cause and effect backwards.
You see, the only reason services like Netfix and Spotify now exist is because of piracy. I remember when people, even at this very site, were scoffing and ridiculing the idea of a cheap streaming service. '10 bucks to listen to millions of songs? Hah, the record companies will never allow it, look at the prices on Itunes! Look at how much a CD costs! They'll never agree to such pricing, if you want streaming anywhere, listen to the radio!" But they had to.
You see, record companies, much like Elsevier, have had to face the fat that the service they originally provided, access to information in a physical format, is pretty much dead and the service that replaced it, access to information in a digital format, does not and cannot be priced in the same way. Consumers are not idiots. If you tell someone to pay them 18 euros for a physical album and then tell them the exactly same content over a digital medium with a fraction of the costs of the physical medium costs nearly the same they're going to know you're lying.
If it was up to record companies and movie studios we'd all still be paying 5 euros a pop for 24 hour rentals and 4 times that for downloads riddled with massive amounts of DRM making cross-device/platform playback near impossible. But the advent of piracy gave the consumers a choice that was both more affordable and more to the point better in quality. They groaned and the grumbled, but eventually they started giving in when they realize this is an existential threat to their existence.
And just in the same way, I hope, Sci-Hub will usher in the era of 'Sciflix' where you can pick the fields you want to follow and get access to ALL articles from those fields at a price that's affordable even to private citizens.
"But the publishers will never allow it. Look at how much journal access costs now! Look at the prices of individual articles! If you want widespread access just use your campus network or library!"
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
They did it to themselves (Score:2)
Greed, declining review quality, slow publication, etc. Just like other copyright industries, but probably even more stupid than most. And no loss at all to humanity when these all finally fail. Content will of course continued to be published, after all the authors and the reviewers (the two critical parts of scientific publishing) never got any compensation from journals at all. This will also allow to make a real effort to fix the currently mostly broken review system.
Somebody carried out Aaron's protest (Score:2)
Pirated papers of mostly public funded research (Score:2)
A lot of research is funded by governments, yet the resulting reports should be locked away by some publisher who doesn't contribute any real value.
Good riddance, Elsevier et al (Score:1)
In the times where print was difficult and expensive you had a role. And you filled that role reasonably well, investing in management and editing, in exchange for some pay.
These days you skip management and editing and just focus on *GIMME MONEY*. So it's about time you shrivel up and die. You ceased to be useful.
Right or wrong - there clearly is a need (Score:2)
Whether it is right to make scientific articles, published by commercial journals, freely available - and on the other hand whether it is right to hamper the freedom of scientific research by making the articles prohibitively expensive - is perhaps open to discussion, although I personally think all scientific research should be freely accessible. But it is clear from the popularity of sites such as this, that there is a huge desire (as well as a need) for open access to research. Unless the commercial scie
The sooner they die... (Score:2)
...the better for science.
Ah, the magazine (Score:1)
If **ANY** of it was paid for by Federal funds. . (Score:2)
. . . .why aren't the results available free for any citizen ? After all, we ALREADY paid for it !!