A finer point often missed on HN is how different publishing is across fields. In physics i have always been able post preprints to the web/arXiv and leave them up indefinitely. Their scientific content is identical to the journal formatted version and they show up in search often before the paid version. This is true even for the historically worst offenders (i.e. Elsevier)
Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.
I had dinner with the arXiv creator once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ginsparg). What I understood is is that before the arXiv, all "good" universities would each mail each other copies of preprints, and so researchers there would have access to the newest research developments. Eventually, they'd get published, but that takes a while, so anybody not in this circle would be far behind and have a hard time being relevant in his field (theoretical particle physics).
So the arXiv was a more modern, scalable, democratic replacement of what was already popular within the culture of the field.
I'm a medical physicist. I have articles on arxiv, and articles in clinical journals like Circulation (which have a huge impact factor, are required to get the techniques "out there" and demonstrate their value, but basically necessitate putting all the detail and maths in the SI, if not in a separate paper).
Your statement is very, _very_ true. Physics and maths are ahead of the curve, and in astronomy in particular they hammer papers out at a rate of knots where the arxiv is what matters. Biology, biomedicine, and chemistry are totally different. Everyone uses Word (which I hate) and everyone's formatting looks like shit as a result. The concept that you could have "camera ready copy" is alien. Moreover than that, stuff like a data supplement increasingly needs to be hosted by someone else the further down that train you go. You or I would be happy slapping something up on a static University-run website or linking to it; that gets harder the less technical you get. Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world.
Heck, there are multiple groups "competing" in my field on diseases like prostate cancer, which sometimes makes the "losing" group unable to publish their results in a "good enough" journal, and it's not easy to coordinate or organise -- the funding bodies encourage competition. Physicists tend to take the attitude that "there is only one universe to study" and collaborate sensibly; sure, Fermilab and CERN are nominally in competition, say (or ATLAS and the CMS, say) but their competition is more about validation and they explicitly pool resources and ideas such that this is the case. I did my masters' in particle physics and am acknowledged in a textbook chapter I wrote with my then-professor -- take it from me, it's friendly. (I ultimately moved to biology because I felt I was too stupid to progress far in particle, and the medical problems were -- to me -- far easier to solve, or at least make progress on. Doing maths and building things in a hospital is much more of a "USP" than doing maths and building things in a particle physics lab, though I do still love it a lot).
The net result is that publication practices are cultural more than anything, and frankly in my experience only really the mathematicians and physicists have enough freedom and balls to do their own thing. I wish the other fields would follow suit, but there are a lot of vested interests trying to prevent that.
I would add that even within physics there are massive differences, which also shows up in how grants are written. While the fundamental physics areas (like particle and astronomy) do publish a lot on arxiv etc. In the more applied areas it can often be quite different (which also applies to the use of word unfortunately). The metrics you use for your grant applications are also very different, the more applied areas often have to show impact through patents, spin offs etc., while this is less so in the fundamental sciences.
The use of arxiv etc is slowly making its way into the more applied areas, so things are moving to become more open. On the other hand in quantum we are currently seeing the opposite trend, so much research is now within startups who are absolute flush with money, but typically don't have a path to commercialisation. So they do research, but only very little of that research gets published anywhere, so the scientific process is becoming much less open.
> Moreover, the culture is far less collaborative (in my experience) with a lot more competition. The thing I loved about particle physics was that everyone helps. Mathematicians give talks thanking others honestly for their contributions, and name-dropping people who helped in odd ways. That's very alien to the "We ran this clinical trial" talk I hear a lot of in my world.
That’s probably because physicists and mathematicians have less to lose by openly talking about their results and methods, while in bio research, there is a lot of proprietary secrets about lab techniques and hard-earned experiment data, which many researchers see as competitive advantage they justly reap in exchange for the labor they put into obtaining it.
I am a particle physicist and would like to say that Fermilab (where I'm working on one of the experiments there) and CERN don't compete. One of the best examples is the construction of DUNE which is a new experiment which will be the largest neutrino experiment so far is done between CERN and fermilab closely. The prototype is even there. Fermilab main focus is different a little bit from CERN. Also Fermilab is part of every CERN collaboration (except maybe small experiments here or there). Usually in particle physic we tend to confirm results with different experiments and sometimes different techniques and because of the nature of statistics and probabilities involved, this always encouraged collaboration and people trying to help each other. I understand that this is completely different from the competition in other fields.
Exactly -- and that's the point I was trying to make about competition. Fermilab arguably is CERN's biggest "competitor" and it's entirely complementary – e.g. look at the work done with LEP and Tevatron. In contrast, I've had other academics politely ask me not to present my work at a particular conference because so-and-so might be there and that might mean that they'd see it and their paper on x+∂x might come out before our paper on x-∂x, and that would make it harder to get into a particular journal, etc --- and I didn't. It's pretty stupid really. I wish we'd pool resources sensibly, and divide the big ideas ahead of time.
I think there is a lot to learn from what you said, but I just want to remind everyone else reading your comment that it is anecdotal.
I have experience with both research in physics and chemistry in multidisciplinary teams, and my experience is the exact opposite to yours in terms of competition and the willingness to help others. Heck, the last time I released some results on arXiv a group that is notoriously unfriendly suddenly reached out and was all friendly. It turns out that after discussing with us about our results they released a half-finished draft on something similar that they have been working on, and presumably tried to stay ahead/dilute the significance of our results by getting it published in a peer-reviewed journal first. Also, during the time we were doing our work, nobody responded when we were asking if we could access data or algorithms. I don't blame anyone and we're definitely not entitled to anyone's help, but that's just a counter example and obviously depends on how well you know the field, everyone else in the field, reputation, etc.
I personally enjoyed using LaTeX for writing manuscripts for physics-oriented topics, but I don't mind Word for chemistry manuscripts. In fact, I would argue that writing chemistry manuscripts in LaTeX sucks for most chemists (maybe except for theoretical and some physical chemists) simply because editing chemical structures, reactions, equipment setup and process diagrams is easy with an embedded chemical editor object in a Word document.
I'm not familiar with how they work internally at publishers when getting manuscripts ready for publishing, but most journals require you to use a Word template with ready-to-use style rules and adhere to certain easy-to-follow formatting rules for everything else. Remembering my early days of using LaTeX (when I was already familiar with using Word for manuscripts), I could say the same about how cumbersome it is to do certain things in LaTeX without even talking about chemical structures. Particularly when it comes to journals that charge subscription fees, I'm not sure why you seem to suggest that it's on the authors to get the manuscript "camera ready". If nothing else, I have seen just as many crap-looking papers formatted with LaTeX than those with Word, and the same can be said about good-looking papers. So... I guess it just depends on the authors themselves and/or the editors.
For much the same reasons as what I have said about competition, I think your last comment is just as biased against your own experience than everything else in my opinion.
I agree; I get the impression that physics and math still do things in The Old Way of science; if we still communicated that way, modern physicists would be writing letters to each other critiquing work and offering advice. Somehow the life sciences became stuck in the “publish or perish” mentality.
Just out of curiosity, you mention everyone uses Word in the life sciences—what is used in physics? LaTeX? I also have to use Word, and hate it.
Perhaps unfairly, it's hard to take physics papers not written in LaTeX seriously. At least within particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology... I don't really read papers from other fields.
Note that, arXiv makes you post LaTeX sources if it detects that it's a LaTeX document, and not everyone remembers to redact perhaps not meant to be public comments :).
Not the OP, but in my experience, when you are doing math, physics or CS and don't use LaTeX, you'll be looked at sideways. There is virtually no alternative when it comes to typesetting advanced maths.
Yep. "The authors don't use TeX" is also sign #1 on Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304
> This simple test (suggested by Dave Bacon) already catches at least 60% of wrong mathematical breakthroughs. David Deutsch and Lov Grover are among the only known false positives.
I have friends who used MS Word to write their thesis in CS undergrad.
Surprisingly it is possible to write math in a LaTeX-like fashion and they show up quite well. I have had more trouble aligning things with Word than with LaTeX so I kinda looked at them sideways.
The math support in MS Office is sufficient for some tasks and it's actually very usable then. But I find it woefully underpowered when it comes to typesetting advanced stuff. I come up against its limit quite regularly (I need to make my slides in Powerpoint for $REASONS). Also, annoyingly, it slows down significantly when there are lots of nested blocks (e.g. subscripts, superscripts, which I need often).
Most of my biology collaborators have switched in the past 5 years to putting all their new submissions on biorxiv. It seems like medrxiv is now getting popular since COVID started too. But, as in math and physics, I guess a big problem is articles that predate this change are still paywalled in many cases.
I would guess money plays a part. The commercial prospects for discovering a new fundamental particle and discovering a cure for prostate cancer are quite different.
The Web itself got started at CERN, not in a zoology or animal testing lab. It takes a lot of time for successful innovations to diffuse throughout a broad, worldwide subculture. Just do the math.
I would wager the nature of work. It might be because maths and CS involve more work that doesn't require fancy equipment, there is lesser involvement of financial risk as compared to fields like biology or chemistry, where equipment is so expensive.
You just said it. Scientific fields are not differentiated arbitrarily; they drift apart as their experimental needs diverge. Chemistry and particle physics used to be one field, back before the cost of particle accelerators diverged from the cost of chemistry labs.
Return on investment pays a role. The higher the profit margin, the more competitive and "locked down" the field is. But things like national prestige and space race type international politics comes into play. Very rarely is lots of money spent on pure science - there's almost always a catch.
> In physics i have always been able to post [to] arXiv
I'm fairly sure Sci-Hub (and book scanners like CZUR's) made DOI useful, even (and perhaps especially) for working and teaching physicists at large research universities with excellent librarians.
Sometimes in the moment one wants to read something sufficiently old or inconveniently rare cited in an arxiv preprint or in one of its easy-to-click references. Or if one is Reviewer Number 3 or that person's victim.
What do you think of fields like medicine or biology where preprints can become a source of misinformation. For example a lot of conspiracy around unproven treatments for covid, vaccine efficacy, and vaccine safety directly source preprints that never make it to publication.
Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to time.
A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees do get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it's libraries that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If the number of requests times the price per request is lower than the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay within budget.
Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe, so we can see our work.
Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read.
Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would seem great, except that they did not increase grants to compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money that cannot go to support graduate students.
As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died long before the web got started.
Governments shouldn’t be paying significant amounts of tax payer money in page fees or open access fees. There should be a small cap on what will be paid, a requirement work is open access and deposited in public databases, and that’s it. It’s outrageous that tax payers are spending $5000 so someone can publish in a Nature type journal, and a waste compared to the additional postdoc and researcher salaries all these page charges could instead go to pay for. Unfortunately, the incentives in academia are such that as long as grants will provide such funds researchers will publish in these journals, so I think this can really only be fixed by funding bodies reducing the money they provide for publications. At the end of the day, I don’t think any journal should be getting more than ~$200-$300 for publishing an article. They simply don’t add much value at this point beyond the prestige of their name.
>Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode.
I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work.
The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ...
This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.
Yeah, progress is being made. It's an open secret that traditional journal publishers add no value in the 21st century. Zero, zilch. Their time is up, and they know it... In some fields more than others so far, but it will come for the rest eventually.
As far as I'm concerned a paper hasn't been stolen unless it's been accessed without the authors' permission.
Why would anyone not do this? Do people enjoy enriching copyright monopolists by paying hundreds of dollars for 24h access to one paper that may or may not have dubious methodology? That's fucking stupid and these paid journals can't go bankrupt soon enough.
If you talk with non-scientists, you'll realize that most people are happy to pay the fees as they don't really understand how things work in the background. While they think they are supporting science by paying the fees, the reality is that everyone is paying the publisher and the publisher takes all the fees to themselves.
But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
> But when you mention this to non-scientists, they'll gasp in non-belief.
They gasp in pure joy.
Back in school I had a professor who paid out of his own pocket for access to one particular journal in order to bring scientific articles to class. Our library didn't have access to this journal. I was disgusted by how these journals were exploiting him. I looked for a way to fix that and discovered Sci-Hub for the first time. He was overjoyed when I showed him that. Our classes became better, richer. He could finally bring whatever material he felt was important.
The damage these copyright monopolists cause cannot be quantified.
There's also the usability. When I told my classmates about Sci-Hub, they were also very happy because they no longer had to go through our library in order to access scientific articles. They can just download whatever they want. This is how things should be.
Just curious, who are these non-scientists who will pay for scientific papers? Journalists?
I can't imagine people whose work do not depend on these papers pay the exorbitant fees. And those who need scientific papers for work are generally the ones we call scientists.
People with a disease and searching for informations about it. You can't imagine how many patients I've heard payed for those articles. And $30-$60 is a lot for just ten pages...
I agree with you. I think the monopolists would respond that this is research that should be done by the doctor, not the patient. Patients doing their own research can be dangerous.
Yes and if my wife didn't bring articles and did her own research to her doctors she would likely be dead by now... Patients bringing info to doctors is extremely common. It also mean that doctors have to deal with a lot of BS unfortunately.
I’m an amateur electrical engineer and I’ve taken time to read research papers about robotics and electronics. I learn all kinds of stuff.
I think there’s a problem in the world (at least in engineering) where research is being done two or more times because of lack of information dissemination. Once by the university researcher, once by the corporate researcher, and many times by the layman who is moving through conclusions on his own work.
> "who are these non-scientists who will pay for scientific papers? Journalists?"
Patent researchers. I was one. Except I never paid a fee just to look at a paper, purely because I don't know if it's any good until I read it, and there are HUNDREDS of papers I have to skim. You can always find it or something very similar for free.
Once we know it's an important paper, then our outside law firm would pay the fee, and it would disappear in their monthly bill.
My employer pays for papers we need on a per-paper basis, and recently got subscription for one of the publishers as that was cheaper. They simply want to avoid lawsuits.
I'm sure that outside of workplace, every employee uses sci-hub.
I work as a scientist, and I never download pirated papers. Why? Mostly because I don't have to - almost all relevant papers are accessible to me straight up, either because the authors / publishers have made the paper available for free themselves or because I have access to the publication through my university's library.
But I am in Computer Science - I know that the situation is not at all the same in other disciplines.
I think if you want to be cited, it is kind of silly to publish at a venue where your paper is not immediately accessible - there's usually enough other papers to cite, so it's in your own interest to be available.
That said, regarding the original question ("why would anyone not do this"), I know from previous discussions here on HN that I'm part of a small minority, but I wouldn't do it because I find it unethical. There's lots of things that I wouldn't mind having / owning but I cannot afford them. Just because they might be available through non-official channels for free does not mean that using that option is the right thing to do.
In this line of thought, I also think it is irrelevant whether putting publicly funded research results behind a paywall is ethical on the publisher's side: two unethical acts don't make an ethical one.
Why do you think that? I cannot imagine anyone losing one second of sleep over it.
In this case, they can't even argue we're depriving creators of revenue they're owed. The only point of journals is peer review. Experts in the field that filter out the bad articles and publish the good ones. Peer review is the only thing that separates these glorified journals from a random website. Those experts don't see any of this money due to concerns over conflicts of interest. These reviewers could get together and create a blog and it would be better than these journals.
The way I see it, these journals have literally no reason to exist. It's unethical to pay them even a single cent for access to anything. The ethical and moral thing to do is to hasten their demise. It is our duty to society.
It does not matter what could be, we're talking about what is. And that is that someone is offering you access to this paper under some conditions (to which the authors and peer reviewers agreed). You can decide for yourself whether you'd like to accept these conditions or not.
But if the answer is "no", I cannot see how that justifies you getting a copy without paying. Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it." Obviously, there are differences between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
We're not morally obligated to accept the status quo just because things always worked this way. Just because some entrenched monopolists that provide negative value to society managed to find a comfortable rent seeking position, we're morally obligated to pay tribute? Hell no. It boggles my mind that anyone could look at this and accept it.
> Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it."
Don't compare physical things to artificially scarce data. They are not the same. Physical things can't be copied infinitely and distributed worldwide at negligible costs.
With data, there is no economy. Economies arise when things are scarce. Data isn't. There is nothing to economize.
> Obviously, there are differences between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
These differences are not negligible. Quite the opposite, they are key. The fact is once created data is worth nothing. It's infinitely abundant. Scientists and peer reviewers are the truly scarce resources here and they don't depend on journals to exist.
These monopolists try to make scientific articles artificially scarce but unlike the entertainment industry they don't actually provide any value whatsoever. They're just a brand name.
Your first paragraph is a nice example for a strawman argument: where have I claimed that we have to "pay tribute" or that I'm in favor of the status quo?
About copying vs. physical things - that's one of the aspects I had in mind when I wrote that I'm aware of the differences between that example and the scihub situation, but that I also think that they are not at the heart of the issue. Hence I don't subscribe to your argument against that.
Nor do I to your last sentence. Where's the scarcity?
> Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it."
If you were starving, and society was so misallocated in its resources that Snickers bars were in profound abundance, and political activism wasn't getting you anywhere, I would say you actually have every right, morally speaking, to take that Snickers bar.
But the other commenter is right. Comparing physical objects to duplicating intangible information is extremely misleading. If you take that Snickers bar, someone else can't eat it. That doesn't apply to duplication.
I anticipated that argument, it's what I meant when I wrote that I think there are difference but they are neglibile: whereever a Snickers bar is sold, there's usually more than one and taking one of them rarely impacts someone else who wants one (because there are usually plenty of others).
Exactly! When you download a copy of an article, there's an infinite number of copies available, and taking one of those copies almost never impacts someone else who wants one.
Many Sci-Hub users believe it is ethical to download copies of journal articles there, because they find the consequences of not paying for the article to be more beneficial to society than the consequences of paying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism
In their view, closed access journal publishers are stifling academic discourse with extortionate fees (especially considering that they do not financially compensate the authors and reviewers), which means it would be most ethical to limit the closed access journal publishers' revenue in order to reduce their power and importance, and disrupt their business model to pave the way for open access journals. Not paying publishers for copies of articles is how Sci-Hub users help achieve this.
> But if the answer is "no", I cannot see how that justifies you getting a copy without paying. Where else in life is that a valid option? "I'd love to have a snickers bar, but I don't want to pay a dollar for it, so I guess I just take it." Obviously, there are differences between that example and sci-hub but for the core of the issue, these differences are negligible in my opinion.
I think the differences are definitely not negligible. There are similarities on the surface, yes, but one can distinguish between the two cases by asking "would it be OK if everyone did this?"
Basically Kant's categorical imperative:
> Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law
In the case of stealing snickers, we can imagine that if everyone did so, then making or selling snickers would no longer be a profitable business, so in the end snickers would no longer be produced, and we would all be worse for it :(
On the other hand, if everyone were to pirate scientific papers, no economic harm would come to the scientists doing the research for those papers. Only the journals would risk going out of business if they don't adapt, and that would be (or could be; i'm not entirely sure) a good outcome, as it would incentivize a more open approach to science distribution and access :)
So, one can conclude that, despite the surface similarities, stealing snickers is morally wrong, while pirating scientific papers is not.
Interestingly, though, no-one who answered to my point has yet commented on the similarities. To me, no-one has yet made a convincing argument to justify why offering for free what others have the right to monetize should be considered okay.
> why offering for free what others have the right to monetize should be considered okay.
Because having the possibility to monetize something doesn't make it inherently right to do so. People have monetized things that we would now consider abhorrent to do, like human lives in the form of slaves, wives as property, and countless examples of human rights violations.
Heck, even today in many places of the world people monetize access to education or health care for example, prohibiting some people from accessing things that are considered basic human rights. That they have a "right" to monetize it doesn't make it okay to do so.
I guess the underlying questions here is: should we consider access to scientific publications a right that anyone should be able to exercise? I personally think that yes, freedom of information is a laudable goal, and is definitely worth the inconvenience of losing some antiquated journals.
If you don't agree, what do you think would be the issue with having universal access to scientific papers?
Why do you believe these rent seekers have a right to monetize the work of other people?
I can at least understand where the entertainment industry is coming from. I don't agree with them, I think their business model is backwards. However I understand the fact it costs a ton of money to produce films, series.
These journals on the other hand are simply indefensible. They don't do research. They don't do peer review. They don't do much of anything except exploit their brand name. So it doesn't matter what the law says. We refuse to recognize it as legitimate. It doesn't matter what rights they have. We'll take them away.
This is the "you were born a slave, and maybe slavery is unethical, but for you thats the way it is, therefore it's unethical for you not to do anything but serve the master".
I find it unethical to pay these journals. You are enabling a system that doesn't reward the creator only the middleman. When the author gives you a copy you have to wonder who are you supporting?
My point is that it is always your choice, but to me, the ethical choice is not between paying for the journal or getting the paper off scihub. It is between paying the journal or not getting access to the paper.
I used to have access to papers via my university, but I never used that access. The UX of scihub is infinitely better. Anything else just added unnecessary friction to my research process.
How so? Did you have to go through your uni library website to search the paper? I usually find the paper through Google Scholar, log in to the website using my uni account and download the PDF from there directly.
I love SciHub. I used it a lot when I was in a small college that did not have that type of access, but after I moved, I never used it again.
That must be quite the convoluted interface at your university then - at my university, access is given automatically based on my being part of the university network. It is absolutely transparent, I only notice when I'm at home and forgot the turn on the VPN to be part of the university network.
Yes. It’s faster. I’m a scientist who authors papers and needs to read an enormous number of them. My ability to easily search and access dozens of papers per day is what makes my job possible. The purpose of the scientific publishing industry is to support that activity and the general dissemination of knowledge. The fact that a random website in Eastern Europe is able to simplify that task is a good thing, and reflects negatively on the existing publishing industry. (As the author of some of those papers publishers are charging to access, I can assure you that the scientists involved don’t mind that people are bypassing journals and their terrible web UX in order to read and cite scientific work.) The fact that my University already pays for all these journals and it’s still more efficient to access them via Sci-Hub only makes the publishing industry look worse, since it means they’re not accomplishing their core purpose, the one that’s supposed to justify their continued existence in this world.
> In this line of thought, I also think it is irrelevant whether putting publicly funded research results behind a paywall is ethical on the publisher's side: two unethical acts don't make an ethical one.
I think taking public money, and using it specifically to enrich a private company, and not providing value back to the public who paid for both sides of the transaction is actually unethical. Moreso, I think there is regulatory capture going on, and manipulation of our political leaders through strategic donations [1]
If, by opposing an unjust system, you are doing something that may be in name "illegal or contrary" to the law, but morally that is sterling, then you are in the right.
By your same argument, you could claim that doing any member of the Underground Railroad that helped blacks escape from an unjust, oppressive system was also doing something unethical. Despite the legal definitions of property at the time. Do you see where this argument heads?
It is unethical to paywall knowledge, especially when the ones doing the paywalling have done absolutely nothing to actually help in the discovery of that knowledge.
FWIW, I am an academic computer scientist too, have published in top-tier venues, and fully support pirating papers.
The idea of depending on your government to protect you from exploits is insane. Anyone in the world can upload a shady PDF to a website hosted in any country and suffer zero consequences.
Who said anything about "depending on the government" or uploading PDFs? This subthread is about downloading from Elsevier directly vs. downloading from SciHub.
> This subthread is about downloading from Elsevier directly vs. downloading from SciHub.
The reply was to a comment about downloading from Belarus "where the government apparently tolerates the operation" "of PDF exploits" according to the commenter.
I don't see why it would be a controversial bill in Congress to simply exempt scientific publications (broadly construed) from all copyright law. Springer and Elsevier (the latter not even an American company) would be losers, but I doubt they spend more than a couple $mil on lobbying per year between the two of them. The benefit to humanity seems pretty clear.
This seems entirely within the scope of Congress's power under the Copyright Clause, and need not be tied up with other more controversial aspects of intellectual property law. There was a time when one could have made a case that permitting copyrights on scientific publications would "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (e.g. because only journal publishers were in a position to efficiently provide copy editing, nice formatting, and distribution). None of that has been relevant for decades, so it seems to me that one could even make a case that the status quo violates the Copyright Clause, since enforcing journal copyrights pretty clearly diminishes rather than promotes the progress of science.
There are two reasons this would be controversial, and neither of them are practical.
1) Other industries that are highly dependent on copyright (film, television, music) would viewers this as an existential threat. If Congress is willing to adjust copyright like this, we are also threatened.
2) Currently all politics is highly partisan. Support of an idea from one side invites counter from the other. I think it’s also worth noting that there is seemingly a strong element within one party that pushes hard against institutional science, making it even more difficult to distribute essential research.
Can anyone tell me where I can download a copy? /s
More seriously though, my first attempt to request an article for a journal resulted in an article similar to this being delivered. The subject matter was different, but it was better described as an editorial than research. Even though editorials have nearly zero value for academic research, the page fees were identical to research papers. The lack of clarity about what was being delivered was frustrating. The necessity research the articles themselves, prior to purchasing one, simply adds to the cost (e.g. through labour).
I still think if the research is paid or subsidised by tax payers money it should be freely accessible. Maybe EU should do something good and make it part of the rules. All wishful thinking of course
The one thing that makes me wonder how nations would behave here is government-funded information generally is only available for free in the host country. BBC content is only free in Britain. ABC content is only free in Australia. Is e.g. NPR content gratis outside the US? Similarly, should NSF-backed research be freely available to the USA or the world?
(I’m in favour of the world for both science and the BBC-style content, for similar reasons really - it’s generally useful for humanity and it seems spiteful to charge some groups when you produced it with the purpose of giving it away for free in the first place).
I doubt the EU will take the lead on such a thing; the EU has a lot less tolerance for new technologies upending traditional institutions than the US. European universities basically require professors to publish in journals owned by a handful of publishing companies, which has served to cement the power of those publishers (American universities tend to be a little more open minded about new publishing models in my experience). I have heard European researchers complain that people were citing the arxiv version of their papers rather than the "official" version -- it made it harder for them to advance their careers.
We need to come up with a way to disrupt this extortion and put these jokers out of the money.
Note that I deliberately avoid calling the publishing racket a business, because these criminals-in-spirit and their empires produce nothing of value: they are lining their pockets by exploiting other people’s work, while those being exploited have no choice but to play into the publishers’ hand; enabling the publishers’ power brokerage further their encroachment on public information by gifting them the most precious fruits of their labor.
I am very sorry, I mixed it up with another paper.. The publisher where the fee came up was Wiley, for the Computer Graphics Forum. It’s a super duper golden access.
I worked incident response for one of these publishers. The grind was constant and unending and they very rarely made decisions to improve the security of the documentation, meaning we were constantly on high alert to respond…usually on holiday weekends…like Labor Day.
I’m torn, because I see both sides of it…moreso now that I’m not receiving a paycheck to keep it safe.
* Not that long ago people's sole access to papers was through insanely expensive journals, with prices that are absolutely unthinkable for a large portion of the world's population.
* Arxiv sort of changed that and a lot of information is widely accessible, granted you don't live in a country with high amounts of censorship.
* On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
* On a personal note, I don't recall using anything other than Arxiv for the past 8-9 years or so with the exception of one notable example involving a medical paper which was published in another location and it wasn't free. That said I purchased it, even if it set me back around 250 euros iirc. It wasn't work related in any shape or form, it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
Who are you supporting, though? The scientists won't see a single euro of that.
To me, the problem is that the balance is heavily skewed towards the publishers. Scientists provide the articles at no cost (or even have to pay to be published!), reviewers do their work for free, and then you have to pay hundreds of euros for a single copy of a single paper?
While I understand that a paper has some overhead costs, the current fees are inexcusable. Scientists are forced to publish in "high-impact" papers so they can't choose another one, and you can't properly do science without reading papers. This gives the publishers a virtual monopoly - and they seem to be quite happy to squeeze every single euro out of it.
It's just rent-seeking, and I believe it goes against the very nature of science itself.
> it was for personal reasons but I could afford it and it only seemed fair. Generally I like supporting people's hard work
FYI authors of published papers don't see any of this money, it all goes to the journal so there isn't really a case to be made for buying papers to support the researchers. Even the peer-review process is unpaid work.
If you contact the authors they're allowed to send you copies for free and most are happy to do so.
I've never bothered publishing anything, just circumstantially gave a hand several people that have(I don't want my name to pop up in papers for a million and one reasons). I assumed they were since otherwise I saw no logical reason to go for anything other than Arxiv and publish them for free.
Universities, especially in Europe, base hiring and tenure decisions in part on where a researcher's papers are published. A paper published on arxiv has less value to advancing one's career than one published in a journal run by a well-known academic publisher.
This also makes it hard for researchers to organize their own journals, separate from the publishers. Many universities (again, particularly in Europe) use the publishing company as a proxy for the quality of a journal, rather than letting researchers within a field make that determination on their own. Thus researchers are forced to stick with the exploitative publishing companies because universities demand it, despite spending most of their time reading and sharing preprint copies of papers.
People publish in journals (etc) because of the peer review and reputation. People are much more likely to read, trust, cite a paper that’s been through peer review. Also people are more likely to discover the paper by looking in prestigious venues than if it’s just in the arxiv flood. For promotion and tenure, papers aren’t considered unless they’re published and prestigious venues count much more.
> Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it - I bought several books that the authors published for free online, just to support them. Even one I found here on HN.
I don't know how it works in medicine, but, at least in math, I benefit not at all financially if someone buys one of my papers. (Book purchases earn their authors a pittance.)
I would personally way rather someone download one of my papers from the arXiv than that they pay the journal. Journals are parasitic vestiges currently used only for status signalling, and I can't afford not to play that status game as an author, but I don't want you to have to play it as a reader, too. (tempay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28423848) made the same point slightly earlier, and brought up the important point that, also, most authors are willing to send you a copy for free if you don't otherwise have access to it.)
> * On the subject of the first point, I'd argue that piracy affects the overall situation very little. People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless. Similar to software, movies and so on.
Why? I can cite any paper I want in my paper, who checks where and how I read it? People don't even check if I read something at all. Are you implying that it's unethical to cite papers without buying them? Because then you fundamentally disagree with the whole thing. Papers are researched by authors and mostly funded by governments or private grants. These journals are just mooching off the whole thing.
> and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
Not at all, but, they will review a lot more of them before deciding which ones to cite if sci-hub is available. BTW arxiv is for physics math and cs, while the closed access problem is mainly affecting life sciences which don't use arxiv, and are only partially using biorxiv / medrxiv. There's still a very archaic culture there, mainly because there's no other easy way to ascertain some scientists' value.
Keep in mind, in math and other hard sciences it is not uncommon to cite 50 year old papers which are still highly relevant today (which is less common in biology). Such papers are often behind publisher paywalls since they predate arXiv. So closed access is very much a problem in these fields too.
indeed. it happens in life sciences too, but it's usually classic historic papers that everybody cites but nobody reads. In fact i have been completely unable to find some of the most cited works of e.g. Ramon y Cajal from the 1900s.
> People who need those papers for whatever reason and need to use them/cite them will be forced to purchase them regardless
What? Will they reject your paper if you don't present a receipt you paid to access it? I published two articles in Physical Review Journals, virtually all papers I cited came from Sci-Hub.
> Generally I like supporting people's hard work even if I can't benefit hugely from it
Scientists won't get a penny of the money you're paying, BTW. It makes no sense to compare it to books.
You did not support anyone's hard work. The researchers who wrote the paper receive none of the money paid to publishing companies, nor do the peer reviewers, and sometimes not even the editors (and in my experience, paid editors from Springer introduce more errors than they fix).
Before the Internet, before TeX and related tools, those fees were needed to cover the cost of printing copies journals and shipping them to libraries. Prior to the 1970s academic publishers were typically run by universities and charged only break-even fees, and few complained because there was no better alternative that could effectively spread academic research around. Then a bunch of commercial publishers began eyeing academic journals (probably because they knew they would never have to pay the authors) and from the 1980s onward academic publishing has been for-profit. Instead of going away when the Internet rendered printed journals obsolete, these companies have instead opted to not print most journals and charge fees for online access.
The cost of journal access does not in any way pay for the research itself, and neither the researchers nor the peer reviewers ever see a dime. It is money which is stolen from science and from the public.
That is like the most clueless comment on that topic ever. You are either trolling or working for one of the publishers ;-)
a) Of course people who need to read the paper professionally will just pirate it (if they don't have access through their institution). After all, citing a paper doesn't imply that you "own" it.
I requested a published paper in statistics from my local public library, and they sent it to me the next business day, I think from the University of Massachusetts library system. So going through a public library may be an alternative to downloading an illicit copy.
Before any reader accepts this article's premise as accurate, I suggest they visit /scimag/recent which is a list of the most recently added (requested) papers. From what I have seen the papers requested/added seem consistently skewed toward certain categories of users, e.g., persons interested in computing/neuroscience/psychology or persons interested in social/political issues. Also, browsing major scientific journals such as Science and Nature through /scimag/journals/[journal-no] reveals large portions of the archives for these publications are missing. It could be that the readership of these journals already has access through university/company sucbscriptions, and that readership has not expanded much into the rest of the population despite being potentially available through Sci-Hub.
Arxiv and allies are good. But many journals still do not allow you to pulish a preprint. So if you send to arxiv or other, they will reject your paper because it is not "new anymore". Seen that recently (chemistry).
It's not pirated if the tax payer paid for it... the copyright is invalid. I know it's just semantics, but let's not give evil corp words to make their parasitic scheme seem legitimate.
The one thing that's obvious to me now from these comments is that the angriest people have the least insight into what publishing is, why it exists, and why the system continues to work the way it does. Nobody ever explains in these comments to these angry people, so HN just becomes a machine that takes in ignorance and churns out outrage.
First off, just because a tax payer paid for research does not mean publishing should be free. That's like saying just because the government pays workers to use pencils, that pencils used by government workers should be free. The company is still doing work, whether it's for a taxpayer or not. It still needs compensation for the cost of doing business.
Secondly, commercial publishers perform a vital role, which is why they still exist. If they didn't serve a necessary role people would have stopped using them. This is obvious, because nobody is holding a gun to anyone's head saying you have to publish your research in X place. But nobody wants to think of why these commercial journals are necessary, because it might be the fault of single other than the publishers, so people intentionally stop thinking to avoid the realization.
The only name of a publisher that anyone here knows is Elsevier, which further demonstrates ignorance. They're not the biggest publisher, they're not the most expensive publisher, and they aren't the only organization that pursues legal challenges when their content is pirated. But since it's the only name anyone on here has ever heard, they treat them like The Great Satan. That image further polarizes and enforces ignorance of publishing.
Payment models vary widely depending on the circumstances and organizations (or individuals). Mostly publishers are trying to find sustainable models to pay for the jobs they perform, which includes hosting, indexing, referencing, editing, proofing, and facilitating peer review, as well as publishing the journals as a whole. If you don't want to pay for any of that, liked over said before, the whole research community would need to do those jobs for free. But even in OSS, companies pay OSS developers to work on code. So somebody has to pay for it. If you're so outraged at the profits of publishers, then get off your ass and build the replacement. But people just like to complain, not fix things.
I like where you are going with this. What would that business look like?
Would this be a new journal with a different way of making money or some kind of aggregator service?
Seems like an aggregator service would be the most appealing way to access the data for the end user.
I'd say these entrenched journals are being very cautious with an aggregator because the raw text data would be super valuable to companies, so they are probably going to try their hardest to limit usage of the data for individual access and bulk access. That's not to say an aggregator is not going to happen.
The problem is not access, it's the confusion around what journals are for. Researchers use journals for finding information and publishing information. But research institutions use journals as a hedge to avoid having to figure out what is "reputable research / researchers" and what is not. Those are two completely different use cases, so you need a solution to both.
The simplest solution would be to separate those solutions, so there's one system for vetting information and researchers, and one system for finding or publishing information. Those can be different businesses or community-led efforts.
There's also the aspect that publishing does not have to be inherent to access. One thing is finding who can publish; another is vetting their information; another is editing and layout; the final one is publishing. And then on top of that, is access. All of these are discrete steps which can be done independently of the other, by different organizations.
App stores are one example. There's not one company putting out a million apps. They set standards and do curation, but the apps are completely constructed by an outside party. The app store handles publishing and access, but the publishing aspect is mostly just hosting.
Another example is an Operating System. They don't restrict publishing or access, but they do provide a platform on which to do all the things needed to make or use data. Technically you only pay once for access to the platform, and other parties deal with the rest (which may involve payments).
No we don't. Sci-hub is doing the job fine. Also just like music and tv, the fragmentation of the market would require on the have multiple subscriptions at the same time.
how long before scihub takes the front seat of publishing papers originally so all you have to do is search and its there. if that model works for everyone and everyone is happy, where does dinosaurs like elsevier stand? i think in the history books
Don't know about EU in general.. but my articles published in Springer is open access with the German initiative DEAL. I don't know if that counts as open access as the German government is the one paying for it.
So the taxpayer - i.e., you (and 82 million other people) - is paying... and your salary was probably already paid by the government if you are working at a university?
I can imagine better ways to spend the money than buying open access right from publishers - though the current German government certainly has found even worse ways to waste money...
Elsevier and other capitalist firms that lock up papers are the real pirates in the first place:
"Digital piracy and the digital copying of cultural products for private use is a refusal to pay rent-tribute to knowledge capitalists.
Therefore, piracy is miss-naming of the phenomenon.
The sea pirates take away by force others' properties. The digital “pirates” only use universal commons which have been artificially fenced off. They just remove fences, and by doing so they do not take away knowledge, because, knowledge cannot be taken away. They use something which by its nature belongs to the whole of humanity. The producer of knowledge uses knowledge, as “raw” material, which is part of the general intellect of humanity as a whole and the produced knowledge itself becomes immediately part of this general intellect. Therefore, the fencing of knowledge is, essentially, more similar to the traditional piracy. The knowledge capitalist fences off, with help of the force of law, universal commons that does not exclusively belong to her/him. Therefore, s/he robs commons. To put it bluntly, digital piracy takes back that which has been stolen from the public. Therefore, although illegal, it is morally and ethically justified. The very fact that public ethics and the bourgeois property rights contradict each other on this matter evidences that such rights are superfluous in our era of digital technology.
In this way, the digital piracy and digital counterfeiting is an important economic-social movement of our time. This movement is expressed in various ways including the following.
First millions of individuals around the world, understanding and believing that they are not involved in theft, copy things for individual uses. The historical, cultural and political significance of this practice can hardly be exaggerated. It undermines the moral and ethical legitimacy of the bourgeois intellectual property in the very pours and veins of everyday life. Digital piracy is a major force of the growth of knowledge and culture, on the one hand, and the self-improvement of the individual on the other.
Second, “pirate” activists illegally copy fenced off knowledge and make it available for a global public on the net. A good example was Gigapedia digital library on the net, which was created by activists who scanned books.
These activists are either from poorer countries or classes or our era’s Robin Hoods from privileged countries and classes. Aaron Swartz was one such Robin Hood. The very massive and online and off line protests against SOPA in the USA and ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) in the European Union, and their temporary success, are evidence of the moral legitimacy of digital piracy and digital counterfeiting."
The way they compare this literal non-crime to high seas piracy pisses me off to no end. I hate how entrenched this word is. Can't even talk about this stuff without inadvertently reinforcing the propaganda of the copyright monopolists. They did the same thing with the word theft.
Beautiful. I like the mention of the economic classes at play there. It is convenient for those who can afford all the knowledge they can swallow to find it illegitimate for those who can't afford any quality bites, to get their hands on some.
Last I heard the situation in chemistry was still completely different. The ACS is also known for bullying cash strapped college libraries into exorbitant and unnecessary journal subscriptions.