
The Robin Hood of Science - salmonet
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science
======
beloch
While at university, you just take having free access to journals for granted.
When you leave academia the withdrawal hits you. A lot of journals will make
an article free _if_ the author pays extra. (For those unfamiliar with how
journals work, you submit your work, they get other scientists to review it
for them for free, and then they charge you to publish it if the reviewers are
all happy enough). The result of this practice is that you don't automatically
know if an article will be possible to view or not. You can't just say, "Oh
that's in Journal X, there's no point in looking it up because it won't be
free". You have to check and be randomly denied!

The effect of this is that you can no longer freely follow the rabbit hole of
an interesting chain of references, nor will you read articles outside your
bailiwick for fun because they popped up on a blog somewhere. Even if you
carefully restrict the journals you're interested in reading, subscriptions
will total several thousand per year. Single articles will be priced at
$40-50, which is just nuts when you're reading for curiosity. Even if it
pertains to your job, it's a chore to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to
make your company pay for it. The end result is that, once you leave
university, you're cut off from legally obtaining access to a lot of
interesting stuff. How does restricting knowledge in this manner serve science
or industry?

In physics, arxiv is pretty freakin' awesome... for _recent_ stuff. If you're
following a reference chain, you go off the reservation pretty darned quick. I
admit, I've been guilty of using some slightly more labor intensive means of
obtaining articles without paying for them, but it's a pain. I honestly hope
somebody succeeds in making all of history's scientific publications freely
and easily available online in a very permanent way. Hell, that research was
practically all funded with public money anyways! Why should private companies
like Elsevier be collecting money for research Schrödinger conducted on the
public dime before anyone alive was born?

Sci-Hub is new to me, but it looks promising. This is something the world
needs.

~~~
chockablock
It's not a complete solution, but you can walk in to many _public_ university
libraries without needing to have a university affiliation and use their
computers to read/print articles and/or go find the print copy of many
journals.

At the UCSF libraries here in San Francisco you can walk in off the street and
browse the stacks and use the photocopiers without showing any ID. You can
also use a workstation for one 2h session/day for free to access online
journals and databases. You can also pay $100/yr for borrowing privileges (up
to 5 items at a time).

[https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_pub...](https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_public_computer)

[https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/borrowing/privileges](https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/borrowing/privileges)

------
entee
No question scientific publishers are effectively a racket. The problem is
that as a researcher you're stuck. If you want tenure, you need a publication
in a big journal. There are a few that are open access in some domains,
notably biology, but even there Plos Biology et. al. doesn't quite have the
cachet of Nature/Science/Cell.

In other fields, it can be even harder to find a good open access solution. In
chemistry for example, I can't think of one. You can pay to have ACS or other
publishers make something open access, but that's more money out a
researcher's pocket that's not going toward better science.

Sure, publishing has costs, but nowhere near what gets charged. Also, much of
the labor of reviewing papers is also provided to publishers free of charge,
scientists review each other's work for no fee before acceptance in a journal
that will charge dearly for it.

We as tax payers pay for this work, the people we pay to do it are caught in a
catch-22 situation where they can either hand over their work to someone who
will charge an arm and a leg, or be pushed out of science.

~~~
greeneggs
The researchers deserve some of the blame as well. In physics, at least, and
certainly in some other fields, there is a strong tradition of posting
preprints to the arXiv or other similar free archives. The journals, including
all the top journals, accommodate this---they have no choice.

You mention chemistry. I don't know anything about chemistry journals, but
given the precedent set by other fields, I feel that chemists don't have a
good excuse for locking their research up behind paywalls.

~~~
ylem
Some chemistry journals do not allow you to publish if you place a copy on a
preprint server like arxiv. The key to this battle will be funding agencies.

~~~
tomp
Well... you could still make the copy available _after_ the article was
published.

~~~
adrianN
If you don't mind breaking your contract with the publisher.

~~~
tomp
What can they do against it?

~~~
adrianN
Sue you for damages.

~~~
tomp
You mean, all $0 of them?

~~~
___ab___
Stop being obstinate. You know exactly what the parent means, and that
publishers can sue authors who distribute the works for which they (the
publishers) own copyright.

------
nycticorax
I don't want to defend Elsevier, but this article was just egregiously one-
sided. Surely an article like this should examine whether this model is
sustainable, or what it would really mean if these for-profit publishers
disappeared. (Some of them, for instance, employ full-time editors to sift
through papers and pick the best ones. How does this sifting happen in the
brave new world of universal free access?)

Also they quote "Robin Hood" thus:

"Elsevier, in contrast, operates by racket: If you do not send money, you will
not read any papers."

Ummm, that's how most businesses work. If you want a sandwich, you have to pay
for it first... Not all businesses are rackets.

"Robin Hood" continues...

"On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and
sending donations is their free will. Why can Elsevier not work like this, I
wonder?"

Ummm, because they're a for-profit company, and their officers have a
obligation to try to maximize profit for their share-holders?

Again, I don't want to defend Elsevier, but I think a better article would
have acknowledged that there's more than one side to this issue.

~~~
reality_czech
If you don't want to defend Elsevier, then don't. The research was paid for
with our tax dollars. The public has a right to read it. The academics who
write and review the papers are not paid by Elsevier. The only value Elsevier
provides is choosing which papers to accept, and organizing physical printing
of the articles. A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field
could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web
server with some PDFs... and in some fields, that's what's starting to happen.

~~~
foldr
> A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily
> choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with
> some PDFs.

This is a little naive. Running a good journal takes a lot of time and effort
(not to mention a little bit of money).

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Are you familiar with [http://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-
launches-ar...](http://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-launches-
arxiv-overlay-journal-1.18351)

~~~
foldr
I'm not saying that it can't be done. But I think it is an open question
whether we can move to a model where all journals work this way. It inevitably
means academics will have to spend time and money on things that they didn't
previously have to spend time and money on.

~~~
reality_czech
Academics already have to keep up with the literature in their field. It is an
important part of being a researcher. You don't want to spend your time on
something someone has already done, and you want to cite prior work.

In practice, paper selection is done in a bottom-up fashion already. An
individual lab usually decides whether a paper is worth publishing. A minor
conference decides which of the papers submitted to it are worth featuring.
Bigger conferences look at the results of the minor ones. And so on. There is
not a guy at Elsevier whose job it is to read the entire internet. Like the
rest of their business, it's parasitic off the publicly funded university
research system.

~~~
foldr
I know how the system works, I'm an academic myself.

If you really think that no-one employed by journals is actually doing any
work, I'm not sure what to say. The reality is that editing and publishing are
time consuming, and that if this work is not being doing by paid employees of
journals, it's going to have to be done by someone else.

Paper selection is not really the issue. That is largely done by (unpaid)
reviewers in any case. It's everything else that goes into running a journal
that's potentially going to give rise to problems.

Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible for a group of academics to get
together and run a journal entirely by themselves. I think it's less clear
whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals.
It's very easy to confuse work that's easy with work that's quick. Yes, it's
easy to set up a website with a few PDFs on it, and it's easy to forward
papers to reviewers, and it's easy to come up with a LaTeX stylesheet for
papers, etc. etc. But maintaining all of that stuff and keeping it running
smoothly eats up a lot of time, even though there's nothing fundamentally
difficult about it.

~~~
effie
> I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all
> current traditional journals

Yes, it's less clear because we don't have that kind of system yet to see. We
need to try it. Perhaps we'll find we do not need all current traditional
journals. Perhaps we'll be fine with online archive for all academic
publications and a good search engine.

------
biehl
Legacy science publishers are one of the best examples of copyright fail - how
times have changed such that the current rules are no longer aligned with
reasonable goals of current society.

------
nycthbris
Isn't this effectively what Aaron Swartz got in trouble for?

~~~
Forbo
Except I don't think he actually released any of the documents he was
collecting. So what Aaron was doing was far less condemnable. This is just
out-right disregard for the copyright law.

And I love it.

------
mighty-fine
Is it possible for anyone who wants to to just mirror the entire database? How
big is it anyway?

~~~
hyperion2010
If each article weighs in at 1mb (probably an overestimate) then 1mil papers
weighs about 1Tb, so for their currently reported 47mil papers you are looking
worst case at 50Tb. If we assume they have about 50% coverage (which seems
reasonable base on this article [0]) then 100Tb total under the 1mb avg. I'm
guessing that number is quite high because the true average will be
significantly less than 1mb and compression could bring it down even more.

0\. [http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-
outpu...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-output-
doubles-every-nine-years.html)

------
KKKKkkkk1
I applaud what sic-hub is doing, but am curious why doesn't Elsevier simply
block the IPs that sci-hub is using. I imagine that once a university gets
blocked, whoever shared their credentials at that university will get similar
treatment to what Aaron Swartz experienced. I for one would never take that
kind of risk.

~~~
dredmorbius
Numerous journals offer access to researchers, campuses, etc., through various
systems. These are either individually authenticated, or are offered through
campus-wide systems.

My understanding is that Sci-Hub works through "donated" access -- either
credentials or inside-the-firewall systems -- through which it can request
papers. There are other options for feeding papers into the system as well,
and once they're inside, they're then available. Given that most disciplines
tend to have a few highly-cited papers, and a standard Zipf / Power curve,
starting with the most relevant papers and working down will get you a lot of
coverage.

You've still got to keep up with new publications, but that's tractable.

Elsevier would have to deny access to entire academic institutions, or highly-
placed researchers. Given they're already in a hot seat, that's a risky
proposition.

------
jakub_h
Expected LibGen. Was not disappointed.

~~~
dredmorbius
Well, SciHub isn't LibGen, though they're similar in concept. I believe SciHub
_used_ to be accessible through LibGen, but the latter has been flattened a
bit.

~~~
jakub_h
True, but there's a strong connection mentioned in the article.

------
bainsfather
The website is:

sci-hub.io

searching for scihub returned results for other organisations.

Anyone use it much? How complete is it? I just tried it and got the nature
paper about deepmind's go playing program, which was nice.

------
dang
Although we just had
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192),
this article appears to give more information, so we won't treat it as a dupe.

