
Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads - dredmorbius
https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-users-cost-asa-journals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-downloads-and-thats-ok/
======
covertlibrarian
For those who support sci-hub's mission and would like to help ensure it can
never be taken away, you may be interested in the following project to lay the
groundwork necessary for a widely-replicated, decentralized version of the
repository:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library_genesis_project_update_25_million_books/)

All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library
genesis project and made available as torrents. Currently there are just over
80 million articles included in these torrents. The total size of the archive
is around 70TB. The link above also refers to the library genesis books
collection, which is 33TB.

This effort has seen tremendous interest in recent weeks; the books collection
(libgen) is now widely replicated, but around a third of the scimag articles
collection (i.e. those from sci-hub) has only 1-2 reliable seeders and needs
more before it can be considered safely backed up. If you have the resources
available, I would encourage you to consider assisting. Previous discussion of
this project is at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222)

Looking forward, the next step is to find a suitable way of providing
accessible, truly decentralized access, without relying on a single point of
failure (i.e. a web interface). Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential
mechanism, but there are many ways this could be done. This is a challenging
but important problem to solve; with the data available, there is now an
opportunity for developers to address the access issues. There may come a day
when the sci-hub website goes offline, and it would be good if a fallback is
already in place at that point.

Aaron Swartz may no longer be with us, but his spirit lives on. It's now up to
us to carry on the fight for which he paid so dearly.

~~~
m-p-3
I wish I could help, but I cannot afford at least 70TB even for myself..

~~~
kanzure
Then this comment isn't for you, but rather other HN readers.

If you believe in the importance of science, and if you're a software engineer
at FAAAANG, then you can afford a 75+45 TB (scihub+libgen) hard drive array.
If you are making $300,000/year then a $5-10k hobby project to store distilled
human progress is something that you could make financially possible for
yourself.

Consider doing this, because this might be the last opportunity to get a
relatively complete copy. Just having a copy and letting it sit for 10 or 20
years can be hugely valuable to the world, let alone your community.

~~~
jacquesm
And of course you can partner with some other like-minded folks.

~~~
kanzure
For sourcing drives probably better to go with buying external 10 TB drives
(and shucking them). Make a JBOD.. I dunno.

A quick ebay search right now shows used LTO8 drive for $3K (same as new),
LTO7 for $1.8K, LTO6 for $0.5K, LTO5 for $0.15K. If you shop around, you can
find much better deals.

Here are some tape costs:

LTO-5 (1.5TB/$19.60 = $13.07/TB) LTO-6(2.5TB/$22.58=$9.03/TB) LTO-7
(6TB/$57.95=$9.66/TB) LTO-7 type M (9TB/$57.95=$6.44/TB) LTO-8
(12TB/$134.25=$11.19/TB)

Breakevens:

    
    
        LTO8=300T
        LTO7=300T
        LTO6=75T
        LTO5=50T
        LTO4 and below=never
    

Of course without a tape robot, no one should be using LTO5--there's some
personal inconvenience cutoff for everyone.

------
GlitchMr
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper.
Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other
options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or
inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a
subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few
times when asked).

Publishers don't prey on individual users, they prey on universities. They try
to get them to pay for journal access. Non-academic clients? Not profitable
enough for us, go away. Scihub threatens this business model, because
universities may decide to stop paying that money because Scihub exists. It's
much more convenient than bothering a random person to provide you a paper or
inter-library loan which makes this an actual risk to them.

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
My roommate is a student with full access to basically all journals. Funny
enough, he still uses scihub because it is easier to use.

~~~
m-p-3
This is a big reason why piracy exists even when something is available
through official means.

Those offering a paid services should always ensure there is a benefit and
convenience compared to piracy. Valve and Steam wouldn't be here if it was
clumsy like in the beginning. Gamers like that getting a game is just a click
away, that it installs and checks all the required dependencies, keeps the
game file updated, allows you to preload and keep your game saves in the cloud
(when possible).

------
TheOperator
Journals cost the general public access to science while having an even more
questionable value than most copyright holders who at least bother to do
things like remaster their old properties or develop new drugs. May they burn
in hell.

Sci-hub means I can read the latest science about my disability without $40
paywalls on top of a mediocre paper which give eye-poppingly low margins to
the actual authors. Papers which ironically often discuss how society makes
disability a problem by throwing unnessecary barriers in front of the
disabled. That yarn on about how the disabled lack autonomy over their own
healthcare.

~~~
Robotbeat
Zero margins. Scientific authors get exactly zero money from academic
publishers. In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to
publish, i.e. if it's open access). Zero or negative. They get exactly zero
dollars of that $40-per-article fee. Which is why authors will often GLADLY
give you the article for free if you email them.

Scihub is in a legal grey area (not really legal, so I can't technically
advocate for its use in my position), but in a way it's automating the normal
process of asking researchers for a copy of the paper, thus saving the
researchers' time. (Researchgate is a more legal version of this, but with
much less access to papers.)

~~~
Vinnl
> In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish,
> i.e. if it's open access).

Not just if it's open access: sometimes authors have to pay "page charges" or
have to pay extra to include illustrations.

------
xiphias2
,,I do not, however, contribute anything to the system; I free-ride off their
criminality''

The writer has to constatly remind me that running the proxy is a crime, but
using it - even if she knows that it's not the legitimate way to get the
information- is not.

This may be true, still I don't like the tone, as clearly sci-hub is providing
the huge value to people, not her.

I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used
in practice faster _because of_ sci-hub.

~~~
logicallee
I don't use sci-hub, but the framing "Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals
thousands of downloads" presumes something: it presumes that without sci-hub,
ASA journals would have thousands of more downloads.

This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv
and the like; perhaps sci-hub _brings_ journals thousands of downloads they
would not have if sci-hub didn't exist.

As I don't use it I can't say if this might be accurate, though.

~~~
piracyadvocate
>This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use
arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads
they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist.

There was that study in EU that said piracy actually helped the game industry.

There is also what the author was commenting, sci-hub is easier to use than
the legal alternative. We go tour researchers stuck in bureaucracies, to
access papers funded by taxpayers! As Gabe Newel said, to fight piracy, you
provide a better service (Steam was the biggest hit to game piracy, and so was
Netflix for series and movies), instead of that, what we see is more
control/bureaucracy being added.

edit: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/22/eu-suppressed-study-
pira...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/22/eu-suppressed-study-piracy-no-
sales-impact/) it's an old study (2013), but I doubt the situation got worse.
In videogame land the greatest example is The Witcher 3, easiest game to
pirate, has it was distributed without DRM, you could just copy your friends
installer. It was still on the top of steam most played single player
game(which requires the key to be unique), won a lot of awards, and got so
much exposure that netflix has released a TV show...

~~~
catalogia
It's hard to imagine how a legal service could be better than Sci-hub. You
could make it as good as sci-hub, but how could you make it easier than _"
paste DOI -> PDF is downloaded"_?

Steam beats video game piracy because video game piracy requires shit like
having a torrent client or having a friend who has a copy already. Video game
piracy was never as easy as sci-hub.

~~~
edraferi
Just make it _as good_. Add legitimacy at the same level of convenience and
you win.

~~~
sitkack
I'd pay $10 a month if addition to pasting a doi -> pdf, that I could also
search backward and forward along citations. I'd love to be able to download a
paper and everything it references.

~~~
DennisP
Iirc that's pretty much why TBL invented the web, so you could click on
references in scientific papers. It'd be nice if we could actually do that.

------
type-2
My university gives me access to many journals but i still use Sci-Hub. I will
never download adobe digital editions just to view a pdf.

~~~
ailideex
And last I checked it does not work on wine and there is no Linux version.

~~~
bmaupin
It does work on wine but requires some work to get it running:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=6326)

------
anilakar
Using Sci-Hub is still faster and easier than logging into the university VPN
or web proxy (which breaks HTTPS sites).

~~~
m1gu3l
might be worth looking in to split tunneling if you can do it. my other
solution for this at a previous job with an annoying multi-network setup was
to have a vm run the vpn and then squid proxy anything i need out to the main
host.

------
gumby
Even though I have access to the full Stanford library collection I go to Sci-
Hub first. The UI is so much easier.

Is there seriously _anyone_ not employed by the giants (Elsevier, Bertelsmann
et al) who opposes sci-hub?

------
danmg
Maybe I would care about the plight of academic publishers if I got royalty
checks for all the articles I've published over the past 20 years.

------
swiley
Be careful with piracy in the US:

It’s not enforced by police but if you’re doing science or engineering then
the biggest employer in your field might be the government (DoD etc.) It’s not
all that rare for people to get denied security clearances because of
excessive piracy and that would make it way harder for you to be employed.

This is a huge part of the problem with having laws on the books that just
aren’t always enforced.

------
jboynyc
For context, the author is an American sociology professor who serves on the
American Sociological Association's committee on publications.

He recently came out in opposition to the ASA's official stance rejecting a
proposed federal mandate to make all publicly funded research available open
access. The ASA joined other scholarly associations in opposition such a
mandate.

The author recently discussed his stance on The Annex podcast:
[http://sociocast.org/podcast/the-paywall-and-the-
asa/](http://sociocast.org/podcast/the-paywall-and-the-asa/)

------
mr_gibbins
Good, fuck the journal aggregators. Speaking as someone who has published
papers, I'd happily (and do, via ResearchGate) give them away for free. I made
the noob mistake of putting them up on my own website before being shouted at
by an editor for giving away the 'product' for free.

I'm all for journals, I appreciate there's a cost to keep them going but large
publishing aggregators who take your work for free and have the cheek to make
you jump through hoops for the privilege deserve to collapse. The paradigm is
old and broken.

------
throwaway41968
Oh no, who will think of the poor journal editors' profit margins?

Sarcasm aside, that title is waaaay loaded. It sort of insinuates sci-hub
users are the burden and not the journals.

------
Kim_Bruning
Times change. Sometimes laws -even once good laws- can end up becoming
obviously absurd. When that happens in a democracy, the laws can be changed.

With all the people using Sci-Hub, I wonder if it is becoming possible to make
legislation to either or both

* Declare Sci-Hub and its practices legal outright, and make it the new normal.

* Carve out extra protections for open access to science in general.

~~~
throwaway41968
Also give the woman in Kazakhstan behind it the peace Nobel price.

------
buboard
Consider also the value of SciHub that you have received already: It has made
the authoring of Review papers much easier, and probably improved their
quality since you can parse hundreds of papers faster. No longer do I have to
worry if the publisher's site is accessible from home, if their website is not
down, if i'm gonna have to click 10 links to get the pdf etc etc. A click of a
bookmark and PDF is downloaded. Literature reviews are already hard as it is
(with articles being pdf and unhyperlinkable), paywalls just made it double as
hard.

~~~
rectang
> _(with articles being pdf and unhyperlinkable)_

I'm not sure to what extent this helps, but it's at least possible to
hyperlink to an individual page in a PDF.

[https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf#page=2](https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf#page=2)

~~~
buboard
unfortunately, bibliography , which is the most important kind of link is
almost never hyperlinked.

~~~
petschge
An increasing number of papers in my field have the DOI the cited paper as a
hyperlink to dx.doi.org which will redirect to the publisher website. Note
that this is often done without optical hints (text in black not blue, no
underline) so it can be hard to miss.

------
gexla
Maybe these journals should get together and duplicate the Scihub interface
which pulls from whatever sources the user should have access to.

I have never used these services at a University. Do they even require a
login? Or do you get automatic access just from using a terminal on campus?

~~~
michaelmior
Normally you get access automatically when you're on any machine connected to
the campus network. Most schools also have a proxy server or VPN you can use
off-campus. The Zotero browser plugin does a good job for me of automatically
detecting resources that can be proxied and redirected so things work pretty
seamless for me off-campus as well.

------
jacquesm
Thousands? Millions more likely!

------
Merrill
Journals and papers should be obsolete. New results should be entered into an
AI system containing the existing body of knowledge on the subject and which
can rapidly evaluate whether the new result is consistent with, contradicts or
extends existing knowledge. It would also evaluate plausibility,
reproduceability, methods and materials, plagiarism, etc.

~~~
lolc
Haha if that existed the AI could just emulate infinite monkeys on typewriters
to create papers it could then filter for the plausible, reproducible ones to
publish. Hm, maybe it would have to adversarially train the emulated monkeys
into monkey researchers to get better throughput.

Seriously though our beloved AI doesn't have reliable object permanence yet.
It can't read now and it certainly won't be reading research papers for a
while. Be nice, give it some time to grow.

~~~
jsilence
I for one welcome our new AI overlords!

