Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers
lpress writes: Sci-Hub is a Russian site that seeks to remove barriers to science by providing access to pirated copies of scientific papers. It was established in 2011 by Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who could not afford papers she needed for her research and it now claims to have links to 48 million pirated and open papers. I tried it out and found some papers and not others, but it provides an alternative for researchers who cannot afford access to paid journals. After visiting this site, one cannot help thinking of the case of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature.
http://www.sic-hub.io/ is where the article currently points to.
http://www.sic-hub.io/ is the website.
At least the summary is realistic about this incident, and refers to it as a suicide.
I'm always astounded when this matter comes up at a place like Hacker News, and they twist it into "the state" or "the prosecutor" somehow being responsible for what Swartz voluntarily to himself, completely on his own. It's like his fanatics are trying to convert a suicide into some weird "murder" where the alleged "murderer" was not involved in any way. The delusion these people suffer from is just absurd.
this is the correct one http://www.sci-hub.io/
yeah a typo
It's really just looting, right? Looters often find ways to justify what they do too, talking about greedy capitalists and store owners.
The problem with your straw-man is that MOST of the research referenced is often done on the public dime, then hidden away behind pay walls instead of given to the general public, who as stated, paid for it.
Now wait for someone to argue that open access to scientific papers does not advance the progress of science.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Aaron Swartz killed Aaron Swartz.
This is the kind of person/entity that has the balls to do what is right regardless of the penalty. A true hero. Maybe a stereotype has died today.
Omg ru Aaron Swartz?
with books etc:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
He didn't "commit suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature."
After a prior similar episode which earned him a visit from the FBI in which they told him they'd caught him doing something illegal, declined to prosecute him but warned him not to do it again......he trespassed repeatedly onto the MIT campus, into buildings, into network closets, where he installed unauthorized computers. He then worked to intentionally bypass the network registration system, and then further to avoid MIT's network engineering group as they tried to figure out where his equipment was installed.
His data-dumping efforts were so aggressive that they interfered with JSTOR services for thousands of researchers around the world; his 'free the research' stunt actually interfered with their ability to work. Despite bringing JSTOR's servers to its knees, he installed a second laptop because the first wasn't pulling data fast enough. JSTOR attempted to block his system, but he kept changing IP addresses to subvert the ban, and finally, JSTOR had no choice but to block the entire MIT network.
JSTOR is not some evil "take guvvmint-paid-for research and hide it behind a paywall." JSTOR is a service which archives journals and then provides storage and searching across them all, to institutions which could never afford the journal subscriptions themselves. They're not-for-profit. The fees they charge go directly to paying for the capital and operating expenses necessary for storing, cataloging, and making available for download, millions of papers - and the inherent overhead in doing so.
To what goal, I might add? He would have ended up with a directory of PDFs. Now what? They have to get indexed, a web UI needs to be made, someone has to pay for all that server hardware and bandwidth and electricity and the people to maintain it all. Maybe we could set up a non-profit organization to make that all happen?
Oh....wait...that's...JSTOR.
Does anyone now realize that his stunt was just that? A publicity stunt? A fucking tarball of PDFs doesn't help academic researchers. The whole point behind JSTOR was to collect research, store it, and make it available both at affordable rates and in an accessible way.
This was like going to the village cooperative farm chicken coop (where people pay a small fee to house, feed, and care for their chickens), blowing up the only bridge to the farm to stop the police from getting to you (but also keeping all the townspeople from getting to the eggs they need for food), throwing open the doors to let the chickens out, and then being proud of yourself for "freeing the chickens so everyone can have a chicken."
Let us be absolutely clear: there is extensive proof of all of his crimes, and nobody has argued he did not commit them. The argument from some has been that somehow these crimes were legitimate or honorable.
He was offered plea deals, and even if it had gone to trial - as a white-collar, white male criminal - he never would have received the maximum sentencing. People saying "he would have gone to jail for 40 years" clearly do not spend any time reading the news, because prosecutors almost always ask for maximum sentencing, and rarely do they get it, EVEN FOR MURDERERS. It's highly likely he would have been given little more than parole.
Lastly: Swartz had a history of mental illness and suicidal thoughts - some of it public and irrefutable. He did not commit suicide because he was prosecuted. He committed suicide because he had a history of suicidal thoughts.
Please help metamoderate.
I bet you also feel entitled to prevent others from reading books.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
No, the people that made him do that are responsible.
Without sci-hub and the likes, there would be no journal paper access in many countries including mine.
You're generally right, but your wording is off. There weren't "people" involved. There was one person: Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz is the one and only person who made himself commit suicide.
Who really reads any of these papers? They are dry as hell and of no use to anyone unless you need to cite sources for your own paper. Yeah it's nice they are out there but come on these site probably get more google spider hits than real users.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Exactly. Conservatives constantly make people do things then blame the people for doing exactly what they did. They're illogical and hateful. They oppress people so hard, so hard then crush them with their thugs in blue when they eventually try to fight back like happened in Ferguson. The conservatives created that situation, and they got want they wanted out of it. Death, just as they got death out of this situation.
And what about the republicans that hated him and decided to drive him to desperation?
I guess you blame the Jews for the Holocaust since most went to their deaths without fighting back.
But their kind never takes responsibility for what they do.
Too bad Edward Snowden and Julian Assange don't have the balls to follow his fine example.
Swartz was facing prosecution for his methods, not for his aims. He entered a wiring closet and impeded the ability of others in the library to do their work (while simultaneously creating a safety hazard in the hallway). Had he been intelligent about it and just used the connection in his office instead it would have taken marginally longer time but he wouldn't have been in anywhere near as much - if any - trouble.
He was either a fool, looking to bring attention to himself, or both.
For the rest of us, there is interlibrary loan - or going to the nearest public university library and using their resources responsibly.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Like with rap. Rapture by Blondie was the rap song but those morons blame inner city disadvantaged youth for it.
heh you imbecile, get lost.
Seems odd - we may agree that publications are very expensive (extremely might be better) to purchase, but pirating copyrighted material isn't something that should be condoned. And it definitely won't get the publishers to change their models as quickly as demanding further open access jourmals.
Self-styled intellectual aristocrat thinks, "ABLOOBLOO INFORMATION WANTS 2 BE FREE FITE DA SYSTEM FUCK DA MAN!" is somehow a valid legal defense; finds out otherwise; becomes an hero Slashdot deserves.
Film at eleven.
So you don't think the people responsible for it are responsible for it?
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
These shenigans of paywalls are bullshit.
It is ironic that for a system that is built on being "open" (Scientific) that the modern trend is for research to be "closed."
. /sarcasm Oh noes! We can't let anyone get the original data so that you can _replicate_ and _verify_ the results for yourself.
This is anti-Science by definition.
-- /Why does /. fuck up formatting when a new paragraph starts with "/" such as this one?
I wonder what my Jewish Republican friends would have to say about that.
AAAAAAAND IT'S DOWN
If there is a Nobel Prize for Promoting Information Freedom, she should be in the running.
If there isn't, it's long overdue.
This is the kind of person/entity that has the balls to do what is right regardless of the penalty. A true hero.
The woman and the site are Russian. So tell me what she has put at risk.
So why doesn't the public already own these papers? Why is copying and distributing these papers considered illegal?
The internet has been around for decades and publishing a pdf is damn easy. So why do these authors publish their papers through expensive journals instead of just uploading to slideshare.net or scribd?
A lot is also of mixed financial means. In other words public and private. And last the public is more than welcome to peer review topics they know nothing about. Sort of a Slash-peer type of site. Complete with +5:Insightful even though I don't understand a word said.
Reputation. A publication in a highly respected journal is worth a great deal in terms of scientific career and grant funding. So if you can, you publish in a big journal so that you can get funding to continue your research and career.
> So why do these authors publish their papers through expensive journals instead of just uploading to slideshare.net or scribd?
Flag as Inappropriate
Because it affects their career track. Keeping your job, or getting promoted depends not just on publishing, but publishing in "high-impact" journals. Impact is the number of other papers that reference the ones in a given journal. The theory is that important and useful papers get referenced a lot. Prestigious journals like Science and Nature get to pick and choose what they publish, because everyone wants to get in them. Therefore they tend to maintain their "high impact" status. So an given author that gets published a lot in high impact journals is assumed to be doing better work than one that isn't. It's not a true measure of quality, but a statistical one that's easy to calculate, like a GPA. So long as their careers depend on it, they have a strong incentive to keep going to these journals.
That said, many authors make their papers available online *in addition* to publishing in a journal, and I have had good luck just emailing a paper's author and just asking for a copy. There is also a growing rebellion/boycott of the giant publishing houses that charge ridiculous prices for their journals.
"So why do these authors publish their papers through expensive journals instead of just uploading to slideshare.net or scribd?"
Because the primary requirement of their academic jobs is to publish new research in peer-reviewed publications.
These were not data sets. They were research papers. He believed information should be free. Especially since the people who wrote those papers get shit in return.
It's a shitty system that they setup. Hopefully with this new site it helps curve it a bit.
What we call "science" is 17-century technology. The system made sense when research was done by a relatively small group of learned individuals who needed the printed journal as a way to collaborate and communicate, but it has since devolved into a racket. It has devolved into two rackets, to be precise:
First, you have the journals who add no value to the process but appropriate huge amounts of taxpayer money. Consider the process of research and publication: the scientist/researcher, who is generally taxpayer-funded, creates some result which he writes up in an article and sends it for publication to a journal. Of course, he cannot just send in a handwritten manuscript; he has to typeset and format it himself via Latex. The article is then sent out by journal's staff to other researchers for multiple rounds of peer review, which these other researchers, in the overwhelming number of cases, do at no cost and at significant investment of time. It can easily happen that a reviewer contributes more to a paper than the third or fourth author, yet doing the reviews is simply seen as a collegial duty. If the paper passes, it is published by the journal at basically zero cost, because journals are rarely printed physically nowadays. All Springer and Elsevier have to do is provide a PDF and maybe some BibTex info online. For the end product other people's work, to which they have contributed nothing, they then charge 20-50$ per article. Of course, nobody pays that; they get their money though subscriptions from libraries and universities. Thus you have the absurd situation that a university has to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to provide access to research that its salaried scientists have themselves done.
Second, you have the university-government complex. University administrators (who tend to be the most incompetent people you can find at a university because nobody with actual scientific ability wants to do the job) use indicators like the h-index and the numbers of papers published in "big-name" journals like Nature to gauge the worth of a prospective employee - "worth" meaning the ability to bring in grant money. It should be noted that the h-index favors authors with a large number of seldom-cited papers over authors with a few oft-cited ones, again contributing to the pressure to publish endless streams of mediocre work.
Publishers make basically free money, while bureaucrats keep the hamsterwheels of scientists spinning and themselves necessary. Why do scientists put up with this shit? Mostly because they're autists who imagine themselves to be above petty economic concerns like the theft of millions at the hands of useless middlemen every year, but primarily because they're enamored with the prestige of the institution of the journal. If you're a scientist, publishing in Nature or Science or The Lancet or the ACM Transactions on something is your life. You're constantly regaled about the august nature of the entire edifice of science, of the journals, of peer review and its alleged ability to eliminate errors and fraud (yeah, fucking right). The overwhelming majority of scientists have an utterly slavish devotion to the system and would not even consider alternatives to it, lest they lose the ability to get a spot on the cover of prestigious Nature.
Now that the racket-part is out of the way, let's go back to the "17th-century" aspect: the article format is hopelessly outdated in the age of the Internet and wikis. Once again, the desire and the necessity of getting sole credit precludes a great deal of possible, fruitful collaboration. Even though people would technically be able to work together and share ideas much more quickly and organically by, say, working out a proof in a wiki together or pooling genetic data into a instantly searchable database, they sit on it and hide it like Galileo way back when. The measure of scientific output is not the theorem, or the model, or the algorithm, but the published article which describes it, and which tries to transplant the outdated medium of the book onto the computer screen, inconveniences like alternating page numbers and non-clickable citation lists included.
And a web-based, cheap/free website providing peer-reviewing feature for papers is impossible? AFAIK, these journals have contributed little to deserve the high prices they demand -- the funding for the research comes from the public and research is performed by PhDs. The journals are just the middlemen between the authors and readers/other researchers.
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
Interesting seeing as FDR was a republican.. so he denied his whole purpose of being president within history??
Tea party republicans yes, are dumb enough to not care that there are gaping holes in their world view.. and yes they claim to be republicans.
'free ticket', 'free food', 'free movies' could not make some poor one become new Einstein but 'free book' does. Imagine every poor kids could have free education, attend the same school as you and perform much more excellent in studying than you (this system exists in .e.g, Scandinavian countries), then the world is much better place.
While some excellent scientists or students from 'third world' are 'pirated' by more wealthy countries, while these home countries paid the cost to train them. Yes, the world is benefited, because of by moving to better places these people could do better for their careers (and the world). You may have no problem with this, don't you?
Otherwise, in 'third world' (foreign) books, documents for studying either very expensive and/or are hard to reach. Not everyone could afford to go abroad to study, not mention rich kids, only the brightest *may* have a chance.
Free eduction, free books,... let people have equal opportunity not something like 'free travel' or 'free hotel' you mentioned.
The problem with your straw-man is that MOST of the research referenced is often done on the public dime, then hidden away behind pay walls instead of given to the general public, who as stated, paid for it.
That research is given to the general public. If it was funded by the NIH or NSF the manuscript has to posted online for free within 12 months of the original publication date.
Africans fought to escape the slavery and genocide being committed by their own people?!? Really? What kool aid you drinking? Everyone knows who was committing the genocide, enslaving and being fought and who is still committing those acts. Sounds like a lot of cluelessness in your rant. Makes sense that you are supporting the state sponsored actions that drove a great person to feel the only escape was suicide
Well I can not afford to travel the world
That means the airlines must give me free travel, hotels free accommodation and restaurants free food. Oh the same to all those touristy things too, I should not have to pay for entry.
why because you are retarded?
If the liberty loving population would get up and move the war of freedom could be won. I joined the Free State Project's effort to move 20,000 people to a single low population state. The project is proving a success with 20,000 signers and 10% have already moved and it's not even been a month since reaching 20,000! However more people need to move for the effort to have a more substantial impact. That's why I'm moving. I've been planing to move for about a year and have a closing date on my new house for next month that I'm buying.
Awesome things going on in New Hampshire and why you should move (you don't have to get arrested to contribute! just being in NH makes a difference):
0. Fought for equal marriage rights (and the movement isn't republican/democrat, racist, bigoted, etc we have a lot of LGBT folks including myself)
1. There are a lot of GNU/Linux and Free Software Activists involved in the Free State Project
0. Many technical types including supporters of mesh networking, developers, entrepreneurs, etc are in involved in the Free State Project
1. BitCoins BitCoins everywhere (FSP members are big supporters and getting BitCoins "out there")
0. FSP participant James Cleveland got precedent created through trial to ensure recording of police encounters is not a crime
1. Numerous libertarian representatives elected by FSP participants
0. Stop the crackdown on Uber (one person arrested, really political persecution, illegally drove, but trumped up on federal wire tapping charge for recording)
1. 420 rallies to legalize pot (Rich Paul arrested, did not plea, year in prison, only occurred because FBI wanted informant at Activist Center- due to successes)
0. Lowering the drinking age to 18 (actual hearings have occurred thanks to FSP reps)
1. Fought and won DHS's attack on Tor in libraries (protests held outside library which shut down Tor node, then restarted after protests by FSP participants)
0. “Free the Nipple” Trial created good precedent applicable to overthrowing other bad local laws (FSP lawyer & participants assisted defence)
1. Jury nullification out reach (successfully ensured defence lawyers have the right to inform juries of right judge bad law, not just judge guilt)
0. Lots of agorism going on for political reasons (ie under the table cash transactions- the government doesn't have the right to steal your money)
1. Fighting wasteful spending (a great example right now is the governments take of so much from the public in tax dollars that most can't afford to cover there own children's education expenses, and are forced to send them to school on tax dollars, but we could fix that by limiting government spending to the destitute)
0. Many many many more projects and successes that wouldn't be feasible anywhere else!!!
You don't sound like you know much about African history. No, I am not the person you replied to.
Yes, Africans were captured by other Africans before being dragged to ports and sold into further slavery.
If taxpayer money is paying for academic research, the researchers should release to the public, not just put their work behind paywalls that have nothing to do with funding the work, then charge exorbitant rates into perpetuity. Aaron Schwartz was right, but not for the reason he thought. You see, the public has already paid for that work, and are the true owners.
That's a mischaracterizarion of JSTOR. If they were truly trying to make work available to libraries and the like, then they would be far, far cheaper. I don't understand why people continue to just give them their work.
The publishers simply do NOT own the data they are publishing, nor are their agreements with the researchers valid. They own their servers and the bandwidth they've paid for, but that's it. They are stealing from the public on everything else.
While there is some merit to that argument, the reality is that not all of the stuff released was paid for by the government. I do not really hold much of an opinion on the subject other than this: Accept the consequences of your actions. If you are unwilling to accept the consequences, do not perform the action.
Accountability and responsibility are important things to me. It's one of the reasons that I try to avoid posting as an AC. I said it. I own it. I may be wrong. I will learn. I am accountable for my actions. Actions have consequences. If you are unwilling to accept the repercussions for your beliefs then they are not beliefs, they're suggestions.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And people don't "just give them their work"; JSTOR managed to work out deals with ornery publishers to digitize and make old editions available.
In any case, JSTOR for the most part does not publish research financed by the US tax payer, so what justification is there to demand that they make their stuff available free or cheap?
Even for public research grants, the conditions everybody agrees on is that researchers and universities retain many rights; if the government wanted to retain all rights, it would have to pay more.
If they really believed in open documents, surely they would make the whole collection browseable or available in torrents? Instead from what I could see, it is a DOI search.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Besides the career advancement others have mentioned, another main reason is that peer review in mainstream journals performs a significant quality check on both the results and the clarity of communication. The system is not without its failures, and it does not work well every time, but by and large it works and it is better than any known alternative. Notice I have written mainstream journals. There are "peer-reviewed" journals out there that will publish anything. But, in any area of science it is generally known among scientists which journals follow good practices and which are junk.
Putting a manuscript online is easy nowadays. E.g., in many areas of natural sciences arXiv is a de-facto repository for nearly all papers published in the field. Papers often appear there many months before they appear in the journal. Yet it's rarely that a paper ends its life in arXiv. Most are submitted to journals, receive anonymous reviews, are revised (sometimes more than once), copyedited, and finally published. This can often be traced by several revisions of the manuscript in arXiv.
The problem we are dealing here is that running a journal and managing the editorial process (at the minimum, peer review and publication decisions) still costs money. These have to be recouped somehow. Hopefully it shakes down over the coming years and we'll have a better system than subscription-based journals that only universities can really afford.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Bandwidth still costs money, servers still cost money, editing still costs money, and all the miscellaneous other things it takes to run an on-line journal still cost money. You can certainly do things "low cost" and things have gotten *MUCH* cheaper than they used to be. Despite this some journals still charge obscene amounts in order to keep their sweet profit level (e.g., Elsevier). That's the problem that people are pushing against, but running a journal will always take some effort and money.
The people who think it should be "open and free" are forgetting that even with dedicated volunteers there has to be some kind of cost recovery and/or funding from somewhere. Even if you got all the papers set up for nothing, edited and typeset properly, you'd still have to serve the traffic. Some journals manage to be genuinely open and free, but only with some kind of benefactor that covers the costs (e.g., some scientific societies cover the costs via membership fees or other fundraising efforts).
They probably would be the first to agree about this sorry state of affairs. Being "republican" by itself, of course naturally doesn't impoluy that they would be, but the narrowminded clique has swelled to gargantuan proportions within the republicans since these types always want to identify as "conservatives". They are of course aanything but, but you won't find as many of these close minded pinheads in the "opposing" parties. Really if you want to blame anything for the resurgence of Holocost denial, or the reurgence of.. you got it.. Flat earthers.. or climate change denial (a big one) then blame the internet.. a great big wacko delusion enabler...
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
It might have been more accurate to turn it around to say "Most holocost deniers are republicans"
I renember fed AG BY HIS NATURE UNACCOUNTABLE AND PLAYING POLITICS. And after hammering Aaron FOR EVER trying for a plea bargain, threating to indict his lover. So I heard. And what do you do about AGs?
Most research in the US and Western Europe is, in fact, privately financed.
Depends on your definition of research and the historical period. At its height (1960s), the US federal government grants accounted for 67% of science and engineering research, today it is closer to 31%. However, that 31% is critical: it makes possible the vast majority of long term research being done in basic science, government labs, and universities. This long term research is the foundation everybody else relies on: it's the most important research being done.
Further, there are often tax benefits to research, which means government grants are not the sole source of funding. The public also helps fund this research by the structure of patent law: by having consumers pay more for new and improved goods and services, the public is effectively paying for the research that led to the creation of the same. The "31%" thus hugely understates what the public is actually paying for research.
Even for public research grants, the conditions everybody agrees on is that researchers and universities retain many rights; if the government wanted to retain all rights, it would have to pay more.
The government is not paying for the research, it is giving out money. It is under no obligation to let the recipients do whatever they want on receipt of that money.
Further, you are suggesting that contract law should supersede the Bill of Rights, the highest law in the land. The right to access over the long term to public research is a consequence of the right to long term oversight over government, arising under and protected by the 9th Amendment.
In short, the US government does not have the legal authority to give away certain of those "many rights", especially over the long term.
As I understand it, while in the past people often forgot about this issue (the US legal profession has always had a sketchy relationship with the 9th Amendment), that loophole has been closed and now government funded studies must be freely available a year after initial publication.
Too bad Edward Snowden and Julian Assange don't have the balls to follow his fine example.
Why would they want to kill Aron Swarz?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.