
Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub - chei0aiV
https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2016/03/03/some-radical-thoughts-about-scihub/
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jordigh
I was recently playing the 1995 space exploration game Ascendancy. One of the
structures that you can build on a planet is an internet. The effect of
building this on a planet was to double a planet's total research output.
That's how the internet was viewed in 1995 by starry-eyed game developers.

I wish we returned to that 1995-era optimism of what the internet was about.
An internet should have made traditional journals obsolete. It shouldn't be
taking this long.

~~~
ktRolster

      > An internet should have made traditional journals
      > obsolete. It shouldn't be taking this long.
    

The futurists failed to see the negative value points of advertising, and how
it drags everything down into a pit where "you won't believe what happens
next."

~~~
brianclements
For every starry-eyed and future creating technologist, who really does see
the best-case scenario for what current and near-future technologies can
accomplish, they need to always be shadowed by a team of altruistic
business/PR/advertising-savvy advocates who can remind them how the worst
among us are going to screw it all up so that our hero-geniuses can bake
safeguards into the systems they create from the onset.

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dude01
Awesome, TIL: the U.S. ignored international copyrights in the 19th century. I
don't think most Americans know that either.

~~~
mirimir
Indeed. And this quote is priceless:

> As one Senator said in voting against the [1888] bill [to recognize foreign
> copyrights]: “An international copyright is simply a monopoly … what is
> known as protection, or taxing the people to make a few persons rich … It
> seems to me that there can be no excuse for carrying this restriction upon
> human knowledge.”

It was a gradual process. Also, for context, it wasn't until the mid-late
1800s that private corporations were legitimized in the US. Corporate charters
needed to specify what public interest they'd serve. Canal and railroad
corporations were the first. And it wasn't that long before railroad
corporations has bought the government. So it goes.

~~~
dredmorbius
Ecomist Ha-Joon Chang (Cambridge University) makes this point quite eloquently
in several of his books, notably _Bad Samatarians_ , which rather convincingly
guts free-trade rhetoric.

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dalke
I know this has been talked to death, but there's an aspect I haven't seen
addressed.

This piece says "and in disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the
copyright holders." Others say something similar.

How many of those articles in SciHub are not covered by copyright? For
example, if the author is a US government employee, then there is no
copyright. I've seen many articles with a footnote that says it isn't covered
by copyright because of that, though I can't tell if it's even 1%.

There are also articles which are just the schedule for an upcoming meeting.
(This is especially true in the older literature.) These aren't covered under
copyright because there is no creative input.

I don't think it's enough to be really significant, but it does make me wonder
what the reaction would be to a no-copyright-applies version of Sci-Hub.

It would still be in "disregard of the rules imposed on distribution by the"
distributor, but at least it would help tease out which complaints are due to
copyright infringement and which are due to breaking a distribution agreement.

~~~
jrochkind1
> For example, if the author is a US government employee, then there is no
> copyright.

Mind-twistingly, it's not covered by copyright _in the U.S._, but probably is
in other countries.

~~~
dalke
If that were the case, then the publishing companies are violating copyright
law as there is no copyright transfer agreement from the author or employer.

~~~
jrochkind1
I don't really know what you mean.

But here's the wikipedia article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government)

Which says:

"This act only applies to U.S. domestic copyright as that is the extent of
U.S. federal law. The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the
copyright to those works in other countries."

With a couple cites. You can google more about it too. It is the U.S.
government's position that they do hold copyright to such works in other
countries, and I believe they have generally succesfully enforced their
copyright in other country's courts. (I don't know if they have ever failed in
other country's courts, on the grounds that U.S. law says the U.S. goverment
can't hold copyright? I'm not sure what bearing such a U.S. law would have in
another country's courts, which is the whole idea).

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woodandsteel
It's crazy how expensive science journals are. Philosophy journals are much
more reasonable, typically 35-50 dollars a year for an individual
subscription. That gives you some idea of what it actually costs to produce a
journal.

Unrelated point: with 50 million articles, I wonder if Sci-Hub is looking into
ipfs. That would solve the danger of getting knocked off-line by legal action.

~~~
julie1
Philosophers still don't understand that value of of information is not the
total sum for the articles available but the relevant one?

Funnily enough the keywords are making search way more efficient than google
learning algorithms.

Anyone could now write a good search engine for this problem now that I think
of it with some xhi². With a good tokenizer we could even use scholarship
keywords to tag the rest of the internet.

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PaulHoule
Scientific publishing is different from other things.

If it is an ordinary book or a movie or something, the creator(s) of the
creative work gets paid for it through royalties.

Scientists, for the most part, receive public money to do research, and then
Elsevier expects to get paid again for what we already paid for. It seems to
me that if my taxes go to support research I should be able to read it, and if
it is the developing or developed world it doesn't matter.

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miracle_code
If we, as the human race, want to avoid upcoming desasters, not that i am
summoning them, neither predicting those, we have an obligation to make
research and its gains available to all mankind.

Financial burdens are a stone in our all way, be it in the taxpayer who funds
R&D, or be it the institutions that want to profit from it.

There cannot be a "middle ground", we all have to stand back for the greater
benefits of free flowing knowledge.

That is a principle of the "web" itself, profit from open data, but also keep
personal data protected. Easy as that.

There will be no win in restricting access to scientific research in the end,
but to keep corporate interest and greed alive. I fear that future.

Edit: Institutions.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Agreed. The next step to opening up research is to make it easier. That's what
we are about publicly to launch over at
[http://www.myire.com](http://www.myire.com) in the coming months. We are
battle testing it with phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials in enterprise
before the launch. After the launch it'll be far easier for any researcher to
do their job and to publish their work.

If you work in research and want a peak into the future email lane (at) myire
dot com and I'd be happy to demo.

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KKKKkkkk1
People keep on saying that academic journals provide no value, since all of
the work is being done by the scientists anyway. I have another take on this.
I think that they're providing a (virtual) meeting place for scientists. Just
like banks, whose job is to provide a meeting place for people who want to
stash away their money in a deposit and other people who need to buy a new
house. From this point of view, the sooner journals stop extorting readers for
reading the articles, the better. The readers are innocent bystanders in this
game, and in any case free distribution of research is in the best interest of
the players (the scientists).

~~~
nefitty
Your metaphor is a bit confusing. Do you mean that both services depend on the
network effect to provide value? The more scientists contribute and take from
a piece of work, the better it becomes, and the more people deposit and borrow
from one bank the more it can provide for new customers. The comparison might
be a stretch but I can see where you were going with it.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
If I saved some money, I'd rather stash it in a trustworthy institution like
Bank of America (bear with me for a moment) than search for someone to lend it
to on my own. Similarly, if I wrote a research article, I will submit my
article to Nature or Science, who will find an esteemed scientist to referee
my paper and give it their stamp of approval. I could try to find such a
scientist directly and ask them to write an endorsement letter for my
research, but Nature or Science are much more likely to be successful at this
due to their stellar reputation.

~~~
alphydan
When you are at the cutting edge of your field (able to publish in Nature or
Science), you know exactly who the peer reviewers are (there is usually only 5
to 10 teams in the world who are experts in your area). So you know it's one
of 20 to 60 people (roughly).

That part is actually very easy. The job the journal does is to randomly and
anonymously assign the reviewer (sometimes not entirely randomly, giving it to
your critics). But all that could be automated (taking into account top
publishers in the field, newcomers to the field, conference publications,
etc).

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wolframhempel
It still leaves the discussion of _“what motivates people in a non-profit
economy?”_. In the science community - probably more than anywhere else - this
is peer recognition (which can eventually be turned into money in the form of
higher research budgets / government grants / salaries).

As it’s perfectly established to compete for peer recognition online
(Hackernews frontpage, Facebook likes, Retweets...) I think Sci-Hub can do
wonders here. Why not introduce “Paper of the day”, “Most read article in
Neuroscience this month”, “most discussed research”?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Your apparent inability to understand how someone could be motivated by
anything other than profit and fame I find more than a little disturbing.

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stegosaurus
Why are these discussions always so short sighted?

People seem to continually tunnel in on tiny aspects of the world.

It doesn't matter whether my car has a carburettor or not. What matters is
that the wheels turn and I get where I need to go.

What matters, is that people who produce research, useful research, are
permitted to eat, to raise families, to learn, to live a generally reasonable
life.

How we do that is the interesting question. Not these myopic arguments about
IP and copyright.

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RRRA
I suggest to anyone interested in this subject to read the book "Piracy" by
Adian Johns,
[http://www.adrianjohns.com/piracy/](http://www.adrianjohns.com/piracy/)

