
Science’s pirate queen - ColinWright
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit
======
hugofirth
Frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer
money:

\- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries)
do the work for free.

\- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.

\- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy
editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.

\- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money)
are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done
well this is _extremely_ time consuming.

\- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who
produce their product _millions_ of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and
Open Access fees.

\- Finally finally, none of the Authors are _ever_ paid for their work. Not
that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.

The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this
system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.

I’m not normally one for beating the “nationalise them” drum, but if there has
ever been a case for businesses to be dismantled and put in public hands it’s
these parasites.

Sincerely, a Scientist :-)

~~~
panic
I agree, though a simpler solution than nationalization would be to legalize
what Sci-Hub is already doing. It shouldn't be illegal to post a PDF on my
website when the author wants it to be read freely and isn't going to to get
paid for it anyway.

~~~
smhost
better yet, just abolish copyright and replace it with some automatic
compensation system for the original author.

i don't know if "society" would exactly be better off if 100 film studios were
all competing to make the best avengers movie, but it would certainly be good
for creativity.

~~~
big_chungus
> better yet, abolish copyright

That's a serious argumentative leap to make. Do you really think that's the
best solution for this case, or do you maybe have a pre-existing position on
this issue which you believe this instance supports? The easiest option is
likely to pass a law that publicly-funded research is publicly accessible.

> automatic compensation system

Could you detail this a little further? I'm not sure exactly for what you are
advocating.

------
_emacsomancer_
There's a reference to one of the 'value-add's of commercial journals being
copy-editing:

> "For example, most of PLoS ONE’s editors are working scientists, and the
> journal does not perform functions such as copy-editing."

But, in fact, in my personal experience, the for-profit journals don't really
do copy-editing anyway, but in fact _introduce_ new errors into the paper
which then the author has to pain-stakingly track down (or not).

~~~
vihren
I have just submitted an article to an Elsevier journal. They have some non-
functional web interface so that you can edit the article yourself. My biggest
problem was fixing the tables, because they looked really bad after the
automated copy editing. There was some text on the interface which said
something like "This will not be the final version of the tables", or at least
that's how I understood it. Well, I clicked submit and without any real
editing from a human on their side the article was published. Now my article,
which I have put so much effort in, has messed up tables.

~~~
whatshisface
Who cares, everyone interested will just read your pre-print. :)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Right. The reviewers who did the peer review were unpaid; readers will read
the pre-print. What value does the publisher add?

------
dmix
The biggest problem for these sites is maintaining consistent domain names.
But they always still seem to find a way.

The author also did a AMA/FAQ style post on their website about the background
of Scihub: [https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/sci-hub-and-
ale...](https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/sci-hub-and-alexandra-
basic-information/)

~~~
scarejunba
Fortunately, there's
[https://whereisscihub.now.sh](https://whereisscihub.now.sh)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Or look at the Sci-Hub Wikipedia page.

~~~
Vinnl
If you look at the source code of the linked site, you'll see that WikiData is
its data source. It's just a more convenient interface.

(Tip: /go automatically redirects you.)

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Right. The Wikipedia route is just convenient in not having to remember a
particular address (e.g. in case you're not on your own machine).

------
peter303
Clever hacker Aaron Swartz was hounded by authorities for doing something
similar, contributing stress that lead to his suicide.

~~~
dillonmckay
I used to have a much higher opinion of MIT.

~~~
peter303
Epstein another scandal tainting MIST's eternal begging for money.

------
kipchak
For anyone curious, she posted a few entries on her blog with corrections
regarding The Verge's article.

[https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/02/16/corrections-
to-...](https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/02/16/corrections-to-the-verge-
article-about-sci-hub-part-3/)

Personally Sci-Hub was invaluable when doing some exploratory research on Free
Space Optics.

------
bllguo
under the academic publishers' system, now that I'm out of school I don't even
have access to a paper that I coauthored. very thankful for scihub and
Elbakyan

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Stealing your own work! Have you no shame!...

~~~
creative-coder
That's not called stealing then, is it ? Have you no sense!...

~~~
_emacsomancer_
At least one of us will need to check their sarcasm detectors.

------
eecc
She’s a hero. Elsevier should be smothered, you can go spit on it’s doorstep
at Amsterdam Sloterdijk.

And they’re here only because copyright royalties are undertaxed here in NL to
“help the creative industry”.... bloody perverse newspeak

------
Iv
Alexandra Elbakyan is probably one of the individuals who did the most for
science in the recent years. And she is considered a criminal. We live in a
crazy timeline.

~~~
catacombs
She's named a criminal by those who stand to lose money from Sci-Hub, aka the
greedy publishers and suits who try to profit off the scientific community.

~~~
pen2l
Nature, Science, et al. have two important jobs:

1) Being a good filter, increasing S:N, so you don't have to waste time
sieving bullshit yourself

2) Choosing pretty fonts, promoting good stylistic standards and guidelines
(which scientists, unfortunately, usually tend not to do great on if left to
their devices)

It is I think an acceptable argument that charging an exorbitant price for
articles is a bit of a scam, but I don't think it's fair to say that they
should earn 0, or that the value they create is of 0 price. Consider that each
of Science, Nature, Cell employ a couple hundred employees. If you want a good
sieve, you've gotta hire talented editors, if you want articles that are easy
to read and easy to understand, you've gotta hire talented graphics artists.
Suddenly, this doesn't seem so easy and cheap.

~~~
Illniyar
Practically all computer science research is published openly in arxiv.

These papers are self edited and peer reviewed in public. I don't see much
difference from when CS papers where in journals

~~~
Vinnl
There's not any filtering being done there though.

(Though full disclosure: I'm part of a project that aims to help identify the
best preprints, so it's somewhat my thing.)

------
phoe-krk
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332139)

------
jascii
There are few things that piss me off more then finding papers paywalled for
research that was done using public funds.. There should be a law against
that!

~~~
einpoklum
You're forgetting that it's the copyright owners who get laws passed.

That's how copyright began in the first place! It was "The Statute of Anne":
Restrictions on book printing due to lobbying by the printers.

~~~
__MatrixMan__
Was it the printers? I thought it was the church trying to crack down on the
publication of the wrong variant of the Bible.

Even if it was the printers, they weren't copyright holders at the time
because there was no such thing as copyright before the law was passed.

That aside, it would be the authors that were there copyright holders, not the
printers. Copyright has always been about middle-men trying to control the
flow of information.

If it has benefitted content creators, it has done so only incidentally--
because censorship laws are hard to stomach without a little sweetener.

------
xvilka
Elsevier, ACS and Co are just like patent trolls - pure harm and zero added
value. Societal parasites.

------
panpanna
Technically, the authors are allowed to send you copies if you contact them
directly.

Can't we outsource that to a service so authors can work on more important
stuff?

~~~
_Wintermute
That's basically what ResearchGate tried to do, you upload your pdfs and then
get an email saying "Joe Bloggs has requested your article", you can then
click accept and they get sent a download link for your paper.

Unfortunately they tried turning it into a linkedin and stackoverflow for
scientists and it seems like a bit of a mess.

~~~
killjoywashere
And now it's 20 clicks to get that article Free some serious dark anti-
patterns

------
oli5679
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and
locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers
featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send
enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but
instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow
anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only
apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have
been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the
work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the
folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's
outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly
legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we
can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge
while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally,
you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling
download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called
stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't
immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light
and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it
to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We
need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

[https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt)

------
cpncrunch
2018

~~~
catacombs
Quite a feat for a story that's more than a year old to just make HN.

~~~
elcritch
The stories been on HN a few times, in various fashions.

~~~
catacombs
How does it reappear? Wouldn't the site catch the duplicate link?

------
NetOpWibby
This article is from last year. I thought it was new.

------
setnone
kind of open source science that we need

------
jancsika
Dear all fully-baked "let's decentralize the internet" efforts,

Questions

1\. Is the entirety of sci-hub smeared across the edges of your network?

End Questions

------
jonnismash
This is kind of disrespectful to Aaron Swartz:

>Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz

~~~
TallGuyShort
I think the implication is that calling her a female anything is skipping past
her individual contributions as though she's the token female in this story,
hence "reduction". I don't entirely agree that those headlines are a
reduction, but that's what they meant I think.

Edit: maybe "the next Aaron Swartz" is slightly better

~~~
ALittleLight
I don't mean to cast aspersions, but her accomplishments seem far more
impactful then Aaron's.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I think the two both have important accomplishments, but they're not actually
that similar in the details.

------
wespiser_2018
I have mixed feeling on Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. First and foremost, I
recognize it's essential good in providing journal access for all and it's
reformation of academic publishing. However, I can go to Library Genesis, and
download just about any book I want, load it on a kindle, and am good to go!
Does this hurt small time publishers and de-incentivise authoring niche
technical works? Particularly for the niche technical topics, authoring a book
is not possible as a full time job, and I wish there were a good mechanism to
promote the creation of this type of work.

~~~
layoutIfNeeded
I think you’ll find a few people on HN who have written such niche technical
books. Ask them how much money these books made for them!

