
The War to Free Science - rdudekul
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls
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sci-hub
> One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan.
> Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and
> hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.

FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub
links: [https://sci-hub.now.sh/](https://sci-hub.now.sh/)

~~~
dTal
Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of
manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the _actual_ DNS system that
necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?

~~~
ocschwar
The actual DNS system is vulnerable to domain registrar takedown requests.

~~~
ur-whale
namecoin tried to work around DNS centralized failure modes such as this. sad
it hasn't taken off.

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_Ender
While open access seems great, and the reasoning behind it is inline with my
ideals, I still have problems with "gold" OA, which seems to be what is being
referred to within this article:

>Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just
means the paychecks come at the front end.

Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far
too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the
publication of independent research within such journals.

This was mentioned in the article:

>In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big
reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they
push the publishing costs on the scientists.

However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold
OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:

>Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They
often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.

However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being
everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the
authors do.

Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as
industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in
pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed
"e-publication bias" (bottom of
[https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf](https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf),
also see
[http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544](http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544)).

Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that
this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is
sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea
behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they
now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as
possible regardless of quality.

While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that
Gold OA is a good solution here.

~~~
Vinnl
Unfortunately the term Gold Open Access has been co-opted by the publishers.
When the OA movement was using the term, they meant "published open access by
the publisher, rather than posting alternative editions elsewhere (Green OA)".
The publishers then started using it to mean author-pays Open Access.

Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way
you do above - whereas they usually intend for the fees to be low or non-
existent, for authors. Some have started to use Diamond or Platinum OA for
that, but it's hard to get that to stick now.

The point is: there are definitely Open Access models possible where
publishing does not entail thousands of dollars of publication costs. This has
been proven by many quality journals already.

~~~
_Ender
Sure, but unfortunately this is what it's become. I generally use the
Green/Gold/Diamond split, where my own preferences go along the lines of
diamond > green > gold. 'Diamond' journals exist, but they are rare.

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murphysbooks
I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open
access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody
will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I
would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only
place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand
until their next mortgage payment is due."

~~~
nrf1
Seriously.

This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and
said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access
and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."

~~~
detaro
You probably need to explicitly ban publishing in publications with publishing
fees, otherwise money from other sources will be used to pad out the
difference.

~~~
nrf1
No, that's letting the perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Outright bans make open access harder; editing+publishing with reasonable
quality and archival levels of access guarantees can be cheap but it's never
free.

Just limit it to a very reasonable $/page. Even upper bounding it at some
obscene amount like $10/page would be a vast improvement and a completely
trivial expense (you don't want to know what plane tickets to IJCAI cost this
year...)

To clarify, I'm saying any research funded by the NSF should have this
requirement imposed on all publications regardless of funding source. I.e.,
DON'T say "NSF $ can't be used for more than $X in publication fees", say "NSF
$ can't be used AT ALL if you ever pay more than $X in publication fees".

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pieter_mj
This is a war every philanthropist should be waging.

Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science
Free, Forever, For Everybody.

There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science
(imho).

More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock
it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.

Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill,
you pay everything, we nothing.

~~~
Vinnl
The Gates Foundation incidentally is one of the strongest voices in the push
for Open Access. As a large and influential scientific funder, they were one
of the first to demand research they funded to be OA, and recently one of the
first non-founding parties to sign up for the strongest push for OA so far:
Plan S.

Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it.
It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates
Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard,
it's doing very well.

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tagh
>But there’s a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed
scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals.

That's blaming the victim. It's not the academics who are prestige-obsessed,
it's the universities that assess and rank their staff by publication counts
within such journals. Most academics I know just want to keep their job.

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musicale
Elsevier seems to be a slowly self-correcting problem.

~~~
dmitrygr
They've been around for 139 years so far. Too slow of a correction, methinks

