
Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry - jasonshen
http://www.jasonshen.com/2016/new-napster-sci-hub-academic-publishing/
======
redsymbol
> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in
> revenue...

How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses?
Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17
times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll,
etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple
has 115,000 employees [1], for example, while Elsevier only has 7,200 [2].

It just seems that if their revenue is really $2.9 billion, then even if we
_weren 't_ in an age of nearly expense-free digital distribution, Elsevier's
profit margin should be far higher than it is.

What do they spend all that money on?

[0]
[http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Apple_(AAPL)/Data/Total_Opera...](http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Apple_\(AAPL\)/Data/Total_Operating_Expenses/2015)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc).

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier)

Edit: My employee-count example is a bad one, since the ratio of employees for
each is about the same as the ratio of operating expenses. But Apple has huge
R&D, manufacturing, and retail expenses. Elsevier's equivalents must be minute
in comparison.

~~~
nisa
> What do they spend all that money on?

Here is the most recent annual of their parent company:

[http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/...](http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf)

I don't have the time nor knowledge to give a summary on this but it's quite
interesting - e.g. page 8 - 50% of their income are subscriptions and 80% of
these are electronic. The other 50% are "transactional" I guess that means
fees.

I can't read investor reports but I guess some answers are in there.

~~~
gleb
Page 94 - Consolidated income statement

~~~
cmarschner
So, roughly, 50% cost of sales (print, inventory, online services), 40%
salaries, 10% depreciation

------
rmchugh
Comparing sci hub to napster is a bit misleading. Elseviers customers are not
individual scientists, they're university libraries who pay huge sums to get
massive bundles of journal licenses. I have an extremely hard time imagining
university libraries cancelling their deals with Elsevier and instead telling
their users to check SciHub. What it might result in is slowed growth as new
customers feel less pressure from their users to purchase licenses as those
users can already access the articles. So, a problem for Elsevier, but very
unlikely to be its death knell or a cause for it to change its business model.

~~~
pervycreeper
If there are nonetheless economic consequences for the publishers, the end
result will be the trimming of some fat.

~~~
wernercd
Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know...
competition.

Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use
Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can
get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office?

Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s)
doesn't...

If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, they need to look at why
they are losing customers... and what they can do to get them back... or if
they can (maybe other countries where their services aren't available).

~~~
csydas
The problem with this is that currently, as best as anyone knows, Sci-hub
works via proxying using legitimate logins. At a University level, usually
there is some server running that acts as a proxy so that students and
instructors on the campus can access (all calls get proxied), or students can
access off campus using their federated student logins, which then creates a
quick web-proxy.

Since it's just a login/access to proxied logins, Sci-hub has a third option
which they will most definitely double-down on: try to "fix" the log in
problem they have.

As important as I do think piracy is for situations just like this, the
problem with trying to understand piracy in a market environment is that
piracy doesn't really follow the same rules as other market elements. While
there may be some economic value to pirates, for the most part, they can
compete on cost and free of the trappings of business deals. They don't have
to worry about making a profit, and as such are not influenced by the
responses from other elements, such as those they're pirating from.

This isn't "oh woe to the publishers"; I do think they've been bending us over
forever. But to expect them to respond to piracy as they would another
business is unrealistic in my mind, especially when they can just regulate and
sue their way to their goals.

What hopefully happens as a result of Sci-hub is that it will change the way
that researchers and their institutions look towards paper publication in the
future, once they realize that there's no longer a need for Elsevier and its
kin. That is change I hope happens. But to expect Elsevier et. al. to do
anything but try to return to their status quo is kind of absurd.

~~~
wernercd
While I agree on some of the major points - the business will try to maintain
status quo especially and reacting to pirates is different than reacting to
businesses - I think that, as someone on the outside without a big care either
way, this can't help be have the same issues as IAA vs Pirates.

At the end of the days, now that the IAA has moved towards models that meet
the needs that were unmet years ago (streaming, large catalogs at high
fidelity, etc) they are able to _gasp_ make money again. They were afraid to
leave the "old media" but once forced (kicking and screaming every step of the
way) they were able to realize new ways that met demands. People pay for music
again.

Not all things are the same between the two (Academic papers and Music/MP3s)
obviously, but the fact is Elsevier can only stick to the "old way" at it's
own peril. Closing "Napster" didn't solve it - in fact it just created a
whack-a-mole game. Attacking Sci-Hub won't solve the problem that Elsavier
obviously isn't meeting market needs in an ever changing technology landscape.

------
semi-extrinsic
The one thing I've not seen mentioned yet in the Sci-Hub discussions is that
the national level academic ISPs seem to have put a very effective domain and
IP address block on SciHub. I've tested this both from UK and Scandinavian
university networks I have access to, and none of the SciHub domains nor the
direct IPs are accessible.

Can anyone in the US or rest of Europe with university access test this?

It's certainly ironic when you need an ssh tunnel from your university to your
home to be able to read academic papers at work.

Edit: I have not tried eduroam, just uni ethernets. All Norwegian universities
have the block both on DNS and on IPs. Imperial College only has the block on
DNS, not on the IP.

~~~
Loic
DTU (Chemical Engineering) has not blocked the access to [http://sci-
hub.cc](http://sci-hub.cc).

Maybe you can check if you can resolve the domain with an open DNS server like
8.8.8.8 from Google and then access it from your university network.

~~~
Blahah
[http://sci-hub.cc/](http://sci-hub.cc/) works in the UK

~~~
semi-extrinsic
This is from Cambridge? Eduroam or uni ethernet?

~~~
kchoudhu
3 Mobile, UK here -- it's accessible.

It's shocking to me that your university administrator has put a block in
place on a website that isn't obviously malicious.

VPNs are cheap. In this case, I think it's worth it to invest in one.

~~~
justincormack
Virgin media is blocking some addresses but not that one so I presume they are
on the UK blacklist.

------
d33
One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of
their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would
be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror
the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating
names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single
point of failure then. Right now those huge torrents have as few as 4 seeders.

~~~
aw3c2
It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread
already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help.

You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

~~~
petra
It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes
10 papers including the one they're interested.

~~~
aninhumer
Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you
need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have
a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few
other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make
sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.

~~~
jobigoud
Yeah, good idea. Sort the papers by popularity, and when grouping them find
the distribution that minimizes the distance between any paper and the top-
popular ones for atomic block size.

~~~
aninhumer
I don't think you need to do anything that complex. Just find the N most
popular papers and make sure there's one in each block.

Or thinking about, you could put them at block boundaries so people grab two
blocks when they download them, in which case you'd only need half as many
popular ones.

------
guico
The problem with knowledge not being free is that it blocks the very engine of
humanity’s progress: building on top of previous knowledge. That effectively
slows us down and means we will take longer to solve the big issues of our
time.

To me, the only reason why private (some might say evil) corporations like
Elsevier still have a place in the world is because they somehow still have a
monopoly for quality/prestige. That's basically for historical reasons and it
can be solved by creating an open alternative for assuring quality of papers.

We're building just that, a platform for open peer reviews, meant as a layer
over all scientific publications used to surface the valuable content. You can
check it's current (early) state at
[http://peer2paper.org](http://peer2paper.org) and are very very welcome to
get involved in the development.

Feel free to shoot me an email (me @ iamguico -d0t- com) as well, in case you
want to discuss anything related to making the highest quality scientific
knowledge available to everyone.

Cheers!

------
lottin
Academic publishers are parasitic industry. They profit from somebody else's
work without contributing anything of value themselves. If they go away,
everybody wins.

~~~
tmalsburg2
What the big publishers offer is prestige and most academics are addicted to
that prestige. Getting into Science or Nature is like a heroin. No academic-
run open access web journal offers this high. Apart from that, journal
prestige also plays a key role in the distribution of funding, for example in
the UK. Many researchers feel they just cannot afford to publish in more
ethically correct journals because these journals have less prestige which
will make it harder for them to compete for funding. Of course all this
doesn't change the fact that this industry is completely parasitic.

~~~
refurb
Exactly. If these publishers weren't offering anything of value, then why
would authors continue to use them when open source alternatives are
available?

No one is holding a gun to their head saying "you must publish your paper in
Science!"

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Actually there's incredible pressure on academics to publish as much as they
can, in journals with as much prestige as possible.

There may not be actual guns involved, but funding and research opportunities
are very much on the line.

Which raises the question: who are the pirates here?

In what sense is a corporation holding an entire professional community to
ransom while adding no real value _not_ being piratical?

In reality the journal publishing "industry" is just another example of
aggressive for-profit enclosure of what was once considered a public good.

I'm more ambivalent about rights issues around creative works, because I think
everyone wins when unusually talented artists and creators earn enough to work
full time.

But academic publishing seems straightforward extortion of value from
universities and governments - ultimately from tax payers - with no plausible
upside.

~~~
kgwgk
> But academic publishing seems straightforward extortion of value from
> universities and governments

It seems universities and governments find value in the service provided by
publishers. If they wanted, they could stop making funding and research
opportunities dependent on how the results are published, right? I don't see
how publishers have much leverage here, let alone a position where they can
exert extorsion.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
No, universities can't do this. They can't compete with publishers directly
because publishers can decide to cut off the supply of journals to libraries.

They also can't set up a competing independent paper service because there's
no way New Journal X can compete with the brand recognition of Nature or Phys
Rev D.

The publishers have a de facto monopoly on the prominent brands. That's why
it's extortion, and not a service. The only service provided by the publishers
is access to the goodwill associated with the brand.

What universities can do - and are starting to do - is to set up alternative
publishing systems that will start to bypass those brands. Arxiv is the most
famous examples, but increasingly communities of academics - not universities
- are creating their own online enclaves, with the optional prospect of live
debate about papers instead of the current somewhat dysfunctional formal peer
review system.

Eventually the goodwill for many disciplines will move to those online
enclaves, and that's when publishers will lose their leverage.

~~~
kgwgk
I guess we agree, then. Publishers have something that customers want and
cannot find elsewhere, and set the prices accordingly. I wouldn't call that
extortion, though. ("The NFL has a de facto monopoly on the prominent teams.
That's why it's extorsion, and not a service. The only service provided by the
NFL is the ability to watch the games of the teams I care about in the stadium
or on tv.")

------
tmalsburg2
I doubt that Sci-Hub is doing serious harm to the big publishers. Elseview
doesn't lose any money when someone downloads an articles from SciHub. They
actually save money that they would otherwise spend for bandwidth. The key
here is that hardly anyone is buying individual articles. What happens instead
is that universities subscribe for journals and this is not going to change
because a university can hardly tell their their staff and students: "Hey
everyone, we canceled our Elsevier subscriptions. Please use SciHub from now
on." This is also the reason why the comparison to the music industry and
Napster does not really work. In sum, I doubt that Sci-Hub is such a big deal
and much less a game changer. There have always been ways to find pirated PDFs
of research articles. Sci-Hub just made it a little bit more convenient.

~~~
detaro
More people getting their papers from SciHub means less people using their
universities subscriptions, and even less people complaining when the
university wants to cancel the subscription to save money.

~~~
tmalsburg2
If a university cancels the subscriptions for a journal and the publishers
find a way to show that people from that university's network access articles
from that journal on Sci-Hub, I'm pretty sure the publishers would be in a
great position to sue. Even if the publishers eventually lose, the university
would look incredibly bad in the media. Not sure they would risk that.

~~~
stale2002
Sue who? The university? The university doesn't have any control over what
their students or professors do in their own home.

------
andrewfromx
even Lars Ulrich regrets the side he took in 1999 "I wish that I was
more...you know, I felt kind of ambushed by the whole thing because I didn't
really know enough about what we were getting ourselves into when we jumped.
[...] We didn't know enough about the kind of grassroots thing, and what had
been going on the last couple of months in the country as this whole new
phenomenon was going on. We were just so stuck in our controlling ways of
wanting to control everything that had to do with Metallica. So we were caught
off guard and we had a little bit of a rougher landing on that one than on
other times than when we just blindly leaped. But you know, I'm still proud of
the fact that we did leap...and I took a lot of hits and it was difficult."

~~~
noonespecial
"I'm not sorry for what I did, I just wish it hadn't, you know, made me look
so much like a weird, out-of-touch old man yelling at kids to get off my
lawn."

------
gallerytungsten
It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the
built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

If academics got organized to the point of establishing new journals, with
legit peer review, they could make all of the information free. Which it wants
to be, right?

Obviously, there is the problem of establishing the credibility of these new
"free journals," which is a serious obstacle for the reputation-based "publish
or perish" pecking order of academia.

But once such a movement is established, it could eventually crush the paid
journals and their rent-seeking profits. The captive journals would also
eventually emancipate themselves and come around to this free information
model.

Since such free journal articles would also be available on sites like Sci-
Hub, the transition to (almost) totally free academic publishing could be
unstoppable.

~~~
uxp
> It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the
> built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

Isn't the reputation of those journals somewhat derived from the work that
Elsevier puts into editing the papers that are submitted to them? I don't have
enough knowledge to claim that it's a lot of work, nor that it costs them a
lot to edit and review the submissions, but it's starting to sound like most
of the arguments against Elsevier are completely ignoring the actual work they
do.

"If we could find some way to do the work that makes the Science and Nature
Journals desirable we could really change the world here. We already have the
distribution portion figured out, so it shouldn't be hard!" I've got some
really great ideas for an app, I just need a developer to implement it... etc.

Edit: I feel weird arguing for Elsevier. I personally would love to see all
the paywalls and weird academic gateways that hide these fascinating nuggets
of knowledge go away, but I have to play devil's advocate on this. Elsevier
does do work, and that work is represented in the prestige that journals like
Science exhibit.

~~~
detaro
Most of the review and editing isn't done by employees of the publisher, but
by other scientists in the field. Sure, the main editors do important work
coordinating the process and providing a point of contact, but they get a lot
of value from unpaid work in the community. Which they then charge for access.

\+ the status of a journal or conference is somewhat self-sustaining, since
people want their papers in the best venues they'll submit more/better papers
to the venues known as the good ones, which means those venues have a large
pool of high-quality submissions to select from, which means they a) can boast
high rejection rates and b) have great content, which means they are seen as
high-quality, which ...

------
carbonatedmilk
Really, this couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch. Research staff need to
get published in "A+" journals for tenure, promotion and all that jazz. At the
same time, they know that these journals are exploitative, bankrupting their
University and generally impeding progress in their field. Sci-Hub solves
everyone's problem. Who on earth (except the academic publishers, who we all
agree are pond scum) is against it?

------
bluehazed
Cached, as the original seems to be unable to handle HN traffic.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Y_lcTf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Y_lcTf4UywJ:www.jasonshen.com/2016/new-
napster-sci-hub-academic-publishing/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=ubuntu)

~~~
frenchie4111
Is the CSS messed up in this cache?

~~~
bluehazed
Wasn't before, but it looks like Google has updated their cached version.

------
jostmey
I wonder how many people have book marked sci-hub under its IP address
[http://31.184.194.81/](http://31.184.194.81/) so that every time the domain
name changes the bookmark still works.

~~~
Jerry2
There's no need to bookmark the IP. Sci-hub actually runs a DNS server and you
can simply specify 31.184.194.81 as one of your DNS servers in your computer
network settings. Under OS X you can just add it in Sys Prefs. It's probably
similar under other OSes.

If you do that, sci-hub.org, sci-hub.io, sci-hub.club still work just fine.

~~~
skybrian
That's putting a lot more trust in them than bookmarking the IP address.
(Well, not for https, but for everything else.)

------
the8472
relevant xkcd for the map: [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

------
beardog
If only Aaron Swartz was alive to see this.

------
UniZero
Is anyone aware of a Sci-Hub equivalent for accessing content on websites like
Forbes for free?

~~~
ikeboy
archive.is

~~~
UniZero
Sorry, but that doesn't work. It loops indefinitely on submission.

~~~
ikeboy
Try again.

For Forbes you could use incognito and click twice (find article in Google,
click, close tab, click again) usually works for me.

------
marcus_holmes
Startup theory 101: your customer is the person who pays you. What they buy is
the story about how you're solving their problem.

What the universities are buying is not access to the papers. No-one in this
whole system gives a monkey about papers.

The universities are buying a solution to their filtering problem. Allowing
anyone to produce "proper science" with no filtering mechanism will kill the
universities' business model.

There needs to be a filtering mechanism that stops "crackpot" science from
getting in. The journal system works well for this. If all "proper" science is
in the peer-reviewed journals then everything else can be ignored as
crackpottery.

So the universities sell qualifications that are a prerequisite to being
published in journals. People without qualifications do not get published.
Papers not published in journals are ignored.

Universities pay Elsevier for journals so that they in turn can sell
qualifications to students and farm research grants from governments.

None of this has anything to do with science or access to papers.

If SciHub develops an effective filtering mechanism (like ArXiv has apparently
done) then that's the existential threat to both Elsevier and the Universities
that support it.

