
Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience - ingve
http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/
======
robertwalsh0
By and large, the academic publishing industry operates in such a way that it
ignores the internet ever happened. The internet says, "Hey, you don't have
'Kant's Third Critique of Judgement in your inner-city school library. Here,
let me tell you what it says" the academic publishing industry says "whoa-
you're not at an institution that pays us money - you don't deserve to know
what this says."

They try to make it seem like they do so much to push knowledge forward - but
they take the paper you wrote in MSWord, take credit for the peer-review, then
make it into a PDF and ask for your money.

The internet is going to destroy them and they are running scared. How long
can you sustain a business that relies on paywalling PDF files?

~~~
_lpa_
Asking for your money here refers both to a potential reader, and the the
author of the article.

~~~
notalaser
The latter is a point that's often forgotten, and is very true. I used to do
research a long time ago, prior to deciding I'm not quite academia material.
If I ever get nostalgic, I literally have to pay between 30 USD and 100 USD
just to get PDFs of articles that _I_ wrote.

Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process
is extremely toxic to learning.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Disclaimers: I live in another country, and I research in digital forensics --
that has quite an open community.

In my situation, I've never reached anywhere near that point. All my works are
available for donwload as PDFs, and even if they weren't, my research group
keeps a repository where we can re-download/point/email anyone who asks for
them.

We haven't published in IEEE journals (yet), but as of our countrys law, we
are the authors, and we hold rights to our work (for example, distribution) as
we see fit. As a matter of fact, per a "new" law (it's a few years old, but
it's becoming effective now), we _have_ to keep that institutional repository
I mentioned earlier.

My question is: how is your situation, and how were you forced into this
ridicule thing of having to pay for your own work?!

~~~
notalaser
Mine was in electromagnetism. Far less open. I don't live in the US, either,
so perhaps the legal situation here would allow me some recourse. I just
didn't care enough to investigate, academia is something I've long put behind
me :-).

As for your questions:

1\. There are publishers which require you to relinquish all your rights to
distribution, copying etc.. In other words, they basically own every right to
the final work. This is usually circumvented by just distributing the latest
draft for free. IIRC, one of our papers was published in such a journal. We
did receive _a_ copy of the journal, which I obviously don't have, it's in our
lab's library.

2\. For the others, there's no way for me to say "oh, hi, I'm this paper's
author, can I please have a copy?", and in at least one case, we didn't
receive a copy of the journal it was published in. Some publishers are nice
and give you a pre-print PDF of the article, so that you can actually
substantiate your claim that you published it if your institution requires
more detailed bookkeeping. But many skip straight to giving you the middle
finger and telling you how you can buy the journal if you want it.

I'm hesitant to give publishers' names because this was long enough ago that
a) my memory is a little foggy and b) things I say may no longer apply.

So basically, at this point, neither me, nor my former colleagues have
physical copies of the journals themselves. I didn't care enough to save the
PDFs (nor am I likely to care soon -- that's why I only find it funny in a
moderately annoying way), and my former colleagues aren't allowed to send me
the final articles in PDF format, either, at least under the paper equivalent
of EULA.

~~~
sflicht
Genuinely asking (not snark, and I am not a physicist): what does it mean to
conduct research in "electromagnetism" more than a century after Maxwell? Did
you study superconductivity? Electrical power beaming? Magnetic properties of
weird alloys?

I ask only because I thought people who study these things are more likely to
say they research "electrical engineering" (if they want to be general and
applied), or "condensed matter physics" or maybe "materials science".

I'm really just curious about the relevant terminology / sociology of
academia.

~~~
notalaser
Uh :-). I said electromagnetism because it sounds waaay less pretentious than
what it was generally termed -- computational electromagnetism -- and because
claiming it was microelectronics, while technically correct, was somewhat
frowned upon at our university because we were in the wrong department for
that. Politics and whatnot.

We were doing research on simulation and model extraction techniques for
passive structures in very high-frequency (think 30 GHz) integrated circuits.
At these frequencies, the lumped-element approximations break down, so you
can't describe the functioning of passive devices in the familiar manner,
based on Kirchhof's equations et co.. That means SPICE-family tools can't give
you proper results anymore, and you kind of need them to design the circuit.

The "proper" way to do it is full-wave simulation; unfortunately -- especially
for very wide-band devices -- that's computationally very costly (simulating
the behaviour of the device at a specific frequency isn't very cheap on its
own, but we're talking about simulating it for a whole range of frequencies,
which could span tens of GHz). You could plug those results into SPICE, of
course, but running these simulations took hours, sometimes even days, for a
single run, which is completely impractical. It's also not the level you want
to work at when designing circuits -- where you're solving "circuit problems",
not "field problems".

So what we were trying to do was:

a) Figure out how to make the simulations faster and more accurate, and

b) Figure out how to extract a model from them, i.e. an equivalent circuit,
which could be readily used by the design engineers.

We did that through a combination of things like running as few simulations as
possible and extrapolating, running simulations in parallel and so on. It
wasn't some major scientific breakthrough, but then again, I worked there
during my 3rd and 4th year of university; it was the most difficult kind of
work I'd done until that point.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
Sounds very interesting, thanks for sharing :)

------
msvan
Civil disobedience is an important form of democracy. Maybe in the future,
when all of our calls, messages and identities are monitored in full by our
benevolent overlords, we won't be able to practice it anymore. Right or wrong,
faraway anti-Western countries have served as counterweights against the West
for Snowden, Assange and Elbakyan.

~~~
khedoros
> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore.

Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of
the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase
visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The basic problem with the "original formulation" of civil disobedience is
that power structures have evolved to thwart it.

Things that should by any right be a civil case or misdemeanor are instead
charged as multiple overlapping felonies in order to coerce a plea bargain,
which is effective to deter all but the most dedicated from demanding their
day in court. Then the court won't allow you to make the case for jury
nullification or any other argument that the law is wrong to the jury, and
prosecutors will be allowed to exclude anyone from the jury who is sympathetic
to the idea that juries shouldn't convict when they don't agree with the law.

You can only make the case that the law is wrong to the judge, and no matter
how stupid the law is the judge can only agree with you if it violates the
constitution. Which plenty of very, very stupid laws clearly don't, so you
become a convicted felon without having had an opportunity to make your case
to anyone with the power to do anything about it.

In theory the outrageous nature of that process should inspire the public to
demand change, but have we passed Aaron's Law yet? [1]

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law-
reintroduce...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law-reintroduced-
cfaa-didnt-fix-itself)

~~~
Retric
The natural response to that is civil disobedience without actually getting
caught. As a first approximation a single person operating alone could
probably do around a billion dollars worth of damage without directly
inflicting physical harm on anyone. Get a few thousand people to do the same
and individually there going to be less effective, but things break down. Keep
pushing and government becomes meaningless.

However, people are generally fat and happy. A surveillance state in wall-e's
world just does not mean the same thing without the downtrodden masses which
have fueled past revolutions.

------
return0
I've said in a previous comment, sci-hub is pure civil disobedience of the
noble kind. In fact i thought it would be impossible to ever sue her, because
there is no moral argument that can outweigh what she offers. I use sci-hub
all the time because my institution doesn't have access to all the sci
journals, and i want access to ALL the knowledge for which millions of
taxpayers have paid for (but they don't know where that knowledge ends up).
Its the perfect complement to open access journals, for the (i believe)
transitory period until we do away with impact factors and citation factories
for good, like we did away with alchemy and phrenology.

I hope this increased publicity won't lead to shutting down the site or freeze
its paypal account.

~~~
jessriedel
According to MLK, civil disobedience is only just when you accept the
penalties prescribed by law.

~~~
Barrin92
Admittedly MLK probably didn't foresee that people could go to prison for
downloading information from the internet.

------
Cyph0n
What an amazing woman. She tries to downplay her accomplishment by mentioning
in the comments that she was only responsible for grabbing over 20 million
papers. Nice try, but that's still a remarkable job!

Edit: not sure if the commenter is her, but she's done amazing work
regardless.

------
logicrook
Although everyone seems to celebrate it, I feel a little uneasy about this.

The whole publishing scam is _not_ about giving (or restricting) access from
research to peons, it is to justify sucking the money of public institutions.

When the situation sucks for people, they get motivated to try to change the
system. It is already hard enough for people to try to change things, because
research is hard enough, and then if you start to refuse publishing in
unethical journals the next idiot is going to do it as well as you would.

Comparatively, many people are for the status quo regarding copyright in
general because they know very well that piracy is an option. At a RMS talk,
the (university!) crowd mostly unanimously cheered when he said "yes piracy"
and booed when he said "... thus we have to change copyright". He was then
asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".

~~~
devishard
> He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".

What if they did?

It's the lie of all middle-men that they are necessary to the process.
Composers didn't stop writing music when the concept of a noble benefactor
died: the business model changed. Architects didn't stop building beautiful
buildings because religions couldn't afford giant churches and kings stopped
building palaces. Movies will continue to be made if Hollywood dies, and if
history is any indicator, the art form will develop more rapidly once it's no
longer hampered by outdated business models.

------
3pt14159
Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading
their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because
if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure
that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?

~~~
acveilleux
SCi-Hub used hacked or shared university account to abuse the university
proxies to get content. For big research institutions, it's an annoyance. To
small colleges and university library it is a major headache that can get the
whole university locked out from resources the library is paying dearly for.

Source: My partner is a librarian at a smaller university, this happens every
few months and they lose access to major online platforms for days if not
longer every time.

~~~
anewhnaccount
I feel like you're blaming the wrong party here.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
The "blaming" is in your head. People who explain how things happen do not
"blame".

~~~
conceit
Don't talk bullshit.

There clearly is blame put on the proxies

> it [the proxy] is a major headache that can get the whole university locked
> out

Whether either the practice of lock out should be blamed for immoral licensing
or the proxy servers blamed for immoral illicit access, is not properly
explained here.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
Don't talk bullshit.

Just because you think in categories of 'blame' doesn't mean everyone else
does.

For some people there is a difference between causality and guilt.

------
pasbesoin
One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-
reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against
the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort
had revealed some surprising and useful results.

With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such
science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithetical to the
nature of science. I didn't see/read enough to confirm this, in Schwartz's
case. Nonetheless, I think the idea and the opinion are valid.

~~~
austinjp
Tangentially related: is anyone here familiar with automated analysis of
research papers? I feel this is a field that would perfectly lend itself to
machine learning, or similar approaches.

It would require extraction of meaningful data, be therein lies the rub. There
are several large projects looking into collecting/sharing scientific data,
mainly focusing on persuading and empowering researchers to share their full
data sets.

But what can we do where the raw data is not available? Is anyone working on
ways to reliably extract data from the millions of PDFs in research databases?

There are several open-ended questions here. If anyone knows of work in these
areas, or is interested in this, I'd be very keen to talk.

~~~
vasar
Only materials related, but at
[http://www.citrine.io/](http://www.citrine.io/) they do something like that.
I recently attended a talk given by one of the team members (Bryce) and they
seemed to be quite open to discussions.

------
DarkLinkXXXX
I'm surprised there aren't more comments here. Maybe it's because most agree,
and there really isn't much more to be said?

Anyways, thank you very much for sharing.

~~~
acomjean
Authors/Scientist have little problem with getting their work into out there
to as many people as possible. People want the knowledge. So the only ones
really objecting to this are the publishers.

As someone who works at the edge of biology, I have noted that the publishing
business reviews the papers get knowledgeable peer-reviewers(pressed for time)
and then ask difficult questions of the authors. Some papers aren't good
enough, they get rejected. This culling has some value, much as it irritates
the scientists. Scientists are always trying to get their work published/sited
and ranking journals is something that happens with some regularity
[http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-
list-2014_0-...](http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-
list-2014_0-A.html)

Of course, want to download an article on the first genome assembly of
drosophila from 15 years ago... $30. (I can access articles like this though
my work in academia, if I go though the library and cross my fingers the moon
is in the right phase, the the pdf link might show up).

Holding knowledge and parsing it out for profits is somewhat suspect.

Note that anything US government NIH funded since 2005 is required to have
access. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-
access/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/)

for example. This paper, published by a coworker in an official "journal" but
still available for free via pubmed.
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23443684](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23443684)

I get the "joy" of uploading lots of data from screens to the us goverment
pubchem website. I'm not sure anyone downloads it, but its there. They have an
interesting embargo system which holds the data till publication (I've never
used that, some people really care about that stuff)

Researchers in academia also pass around papers. The peer reviewers do to, if
they find something interesting. We've gotten requests for data from
unpublished papers.

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
Great to hear.

I've found another way to get access is to simply email the author of a paper.
Of course, this mostly only works for those still enrolled at the academic
institution where the research took place, but I've had good luck with it.

------
bcook
I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books,
etc.

To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your
moral justification?

~~~
jacobolus
If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something
like $30/each to read.

If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow
cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can
join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons,
such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play.

Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days, trying to
figure out which ones are relevant and which ones aren’t. Paying $3000 just to
sort through and find the 5 out of 100 papers which bear closer scrutiny is
very expensive, even for someone who isn’t “financially struggling”. (No, the
abstracts alone aren’t sufficient for this.)

And it’s not clear that the money is going anywhere useful. The scientists who
wrote the papers never make a profit: all the money goes to a couple of rich
corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
arXiv? I mean, you're looking at preprints, and you might have a higher dross-
to-gold ratio, but can't you do your research there, without the moral
dilemma?

~~~
Obi_Juan_Kenobi
arXiv is great, but represents a very small fraction of the total published
work, is extremely field specific, and old papers are still very relevant. I
find myself regularly relying upon citations from as early as the 1910's.

It's not even close to an alternative.

~~~
tjl
For my PhD thesis I used some papers from the 1800s along with many from the
1900s to 1950s because those were when the foundation papers were published in
one area I was working in.

------
lambdadmitry
This whole story and the narrative of "civil activist Alexandra Elbakyan"
sickens me to no end.

In reality, Alexandra is an avid supporter of Putin's regime and a borderline
fascist (in the original sense of cooperative state). Last year, when Dynasty
non-profit fund (which sponsored thousands of Russian researchers, mostly in
natural sciences) got expelled from Russia because of political reasons, she
welcomed it because "they were against Putin". Here is my translation of her
words [1][2]:

> [Dynasty] fund is one of the main supporters of "Liberal mission" fund. It
> supports, develops and advocates "liberal" ideas. In Russian realities it
> means support of Maidan [Ukrainian revolution], Bolotnaya [location of major
> protests in Russia in 2012], propaganda against Putin and Russian
> government.

She hates liberalism and the West in general. To add to the picture, here is
what she really thinks about Sci-Hub (context: someone questioned her moral
authority) [3][4]:

> We will fight you not only with bans [5], I warn you [6]. … I understand why
> you are so against Sci-Hub - it's one of the projects that Russia can be
> proud of and this doesn't fit into your narrative of "everything is bad in
> Russia". And given that I support the government - it turns into a nightmare
> for people like you.

So yeah, when I see comparisons like

>Actions of civil disobedience like those of Aaron Swartz and Alexandra
Elbakyan

it's very hard not to throw up. No, it isn't "civil disobedience"; she is a
complete, utter opposite to civil activists like Aaron Swartz. Sci-Hub is born
out of indifference to intellectual property, total invulnerability to
lawsuits (Alexandra lives in Russia and Kazakhstan, which aren't aren't very
fond of cooperating with US institutions) and poverty of Russian scientists.
Yet she manages to see it as a "thing Russia can be proud of".

It is very sad that media picks up the accustomed narrative of activist
underdog and completely misses the context of her true views. Doing this,
journalists both distort reality and miss a very interesting and provocative
story of a statist (and probably somewhat mad) woman which found herself in a
right position in a right time to get Western media attention.

[1]: [http://vk.com/wall-36928352_2614](http://vk.com/wall-36928352_2614)

[2]: «Так, например, фонд Зимина являлся одним из основных спонсоров фонда
«Либеральная миссия». Этот фонд поддерживает, развивает и пропагандирует
«либеральную» идею. В Российских реалиях это означает поддержку Майдана,
Болотной, пропаганду против Путина и Российской власти.»

[3]:
[https://vk.com/wall1396880_8792?reply=8796](https://vk.com/wall1396880_8792?reply=8796)

[4]: «Если потребуется — и не только с помощью банов с вами воевать будем,
имейте это ввиду. … Я понимаю, почему вы так против Sci-Hub — ведь это один из
проектов, которым может гордиться Россия, и это очень не вписывается в вашу
пропаганду о том, как всё в России плохо. А на фоне того, что создатель
проекта поддерживает государство — это вообще оборачивается кошмаром для
таких, как вы.»

[5]: She bans everyone who even remotely don't support her views in VKontakte
Sci-Hub group.

[6]: Yep, it seems like a physical threat in the context. Sorry if I wasn't
able to convey it in the translation.

EDIT: formatting, typos

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
So maybe this shows that people don't fit neatly into categories like "good"
and "bad", they can do both, and shades of grey in-between.

~~~
lambdadmitry
Or maybe this shows that bad people sometimes do good things out of
serendipity; sometimes they even get credit and manage to hide their evilness.
It doesn't make them in any way similar to Aaron Swartz, though.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
"evil" people are pretty rare, most people believe they're doing the good
thing. Sometimes they're correct.

------
philfrasty
Can anyone explain why it is not possible to publish your work as a PDF or to
a free/open platform at the same time you submit it to the journal? It this
somehow prevented legally in the terms of the journals?

~~~
chippy
I'd also be interested in this answer. What I have done is email researchers
directly asking for a PDF and they have been happy to give me one. Often some
of the authors have their own site where they add links to their own papers.

Now, is this because these authors are exercising their own right to
distribute their work, and many other authors don't want to expend that
effort? The copyrights don't change after all, so collating these and
redistributing could also be the same as sci hub.

~~~
dalke
It all depends on the terms of the copyright transfer, which is based on the
historic relationship between author and publisher.

It used to be that when you published a paper and transferred copyright, you
received a number of copies of the publication for yourself. You could send
these out to others who wanted a copy. This was especially important before
xerography machines were common, as it was difficult to make your own copies.

Even in the 1990s, an academic researcher might get a postcard asking for a
reprint to be sent in the mail.

So research publishing has long had a tradition where the author has a limited
right to redistribute copies directly. (To be certain, the publisher made the
reprints so this wasn't part of copyright but rather a codified expectation of
the author/publisher relationship.)

This tradition was carried over into electronic publication Why? Consider the
1990s and early 2000s when the transition to electronic journals took place,
and imagine the authors up in arms for having that distribution ability taken
away.

This is why you can get a copy from the author. It's sometimes also formally
specified that author may also distribute a copy on a personal or research web
page. Sometimes this permission is for the author's final draft version, and
not the proof copy used for the publication.

But there wasn't a tradition of sending the paper to a tertiary reprint
service.

------
omginternets
Does anybody know how to find the corresponding torrents for the papers that
sci-hub has fetched? Is there some sort of prefix I can punch into
torrentz.eu?

~~~
return0
i think scihub uses various proxies in multiple universities to fetch the
articles.

~~~
opejn
I think the question was whether we can easily mass-download the papers from
Scihub.

------
chandhasaikiran
Scientists do research paid for by institutions, universities, large charities
and other scientific institutions. They write research papers and they have it
published and those same institutions pay to get that information back. I
can't think of any other area where such a crappy business model prevails.

The scientific community should reclaim their intellectual capital.

------
justifier
as i understand it the argument for pay walling is the costs of peer review?

so how about a service where you publish the paper, but pay for the peer
review that grants your paper an accreditation of significance or legitimacy

this current system of peer review to enter our journal to determine
legitimacy is prone to too many errors: corporate buy outs, poor standards,
peer review is only done once prepublication; and needs a revisit

i'd love an arxiv`like to have for hire peer reviewers with associated
reputation, question the significance of a paper that is peer reviewed? Hire
your favourite reviewer to take a second look

that said, i think all papers should be open for reading regardless of peer
review, the indicator of research should be on review stead access

~~~
fanf2
Peer review is done for free by the reviewers.

~~~
justifier
my understanding is: unpaid work is the model but the current appointment of
that model makes liberal use of the term honorarium(o)

(o)
[https://www.google.com/search?q=honorarium](https://www.google.com/search?q=honorarium)

------
okc
A simple fair circumvent: Any freely published article should not be allowed
to be cited by a non-free one.

This puts the power into the hands of the author, who could decide if they
want this as part of the open license. Rather than the current robinhood type
system.

Does this already exist, anyone seen anything similar?

(edited, typo)

~~~
raverbashing
This is as absurd as prohibiting hyperlinks because the site being pointed to
might have copyright violations

Not to mention completely non-enforceable. You're forbidding people to say
"David et al. [3] did a work in this area"

~~~
okc
Ok, that makes sense. But is it an absurd proposition to say that people who
release non-open articles should not be allowed to directly build on the work
of those who did it for free?

So how about if part of the agreement of accessing an open article was that
any published work citing it would have to be open too. is that absurd in
principle? and is it really non-enforceable?

An offshoot of this would be that anyone who goes on to cite something in a
non-open article, could academically be accused of not reading the article
their citing, and therefor mis-attributing information. This could lessen
there creditability or even be grounds for a specific type of plagiarism.

