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Who's Downloading Pirated Scientifc Papers? Everyone (sciencemag.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the mom-and-pop-one-stop-shop dept.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: In increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning to Sci-Hub, the controversial website that hosts 50 million pirated papers and counting. Now, with server log data from Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan, Science addresses some basic questions: Who are Sci-Hub's users, where are they, and what are they reading? The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming the world's de facto open-access research library. Among the revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead -- for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents, with Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States the leading requestors.

39 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isn't the idea that you can pirate scientific papers sort of anti-knowledge?

    1. Re:Isn't the idea by VernonNemitz · · Score: 2

      I wonder how much of the user data was skewed by the Slashdot Effect, or some equivalent thereof.

    2. Re:Isn't the idea by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Isn't the idea that you can pirate scientific papers sort of anti-knowledge?

      No, what's anti-knowledge is the idea that research papers can be locked up behind paywalls. As a scientist, the intellectual property you worked years to create is your research itself. The paper is just a formal description of it, and that paper should be free to the world so that your peers can review it and, by building on your work, appreciate and honor your efforts.

    3. Re:Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that's what they meant, that it's anti-knowledge to consider this 'piracy'. As a publishing academic, I agree, scientific papers are created to be shared so that they can be assessed, critiqued and improved by others, and to be available for contributing to the public good.

    4. Re: Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Scientists do not make money from publishing papers. They get no money from people accessing it. Currently getting published in high-impact journals affect one's career, but as citations matter individual scientists stand to gain from this "piracy".

    5. Re:Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Please, somebody downvote this moron.

      "Why would someone invest time and money in doing the research?"
      Because the results of Research are in themselves valuable. The Papers are but one result. Patents are another, and shared collaboration is a third- no need to keep on reinventing the the Tinker Toys. No Scientist has _ever_ "Done it all by themselves", they stand on the shoulders of Giants.
      The next part is something you are absolutely incapable of understanding- Fun. The Joy of discovering something New, no matter how initially trivial. And part of that fun is telling others, whether it is about a new forbidden Bandgap in doped 13C Graphene, or a different recipe for Crepes Suzette. (Try Blood Oranges, with a smidgeon of Pomegranate juice in the reduction.)

      "You are better off letting someone else do it. Scientific papers are not created to be shared, they are created to make money."
      No. Most Scientists really dislike writing Papers; they, (Or their Institutions...), certainly _don't_ get paid for it. In most cases, they _pay_to have a Paper formatted, they _pay_ to have it published, and then they _pay_ for access to the Journals. The Publishers are those who control the means and profit of publication.
      The only People who make money are the _Publishers_, you twat.
      Note that all of my papers are available for the cost of copying from the UC Preprint Service, or available online for free with an account, because UC is large and powerful enough to actually tell the Publishers to screw off.

    6. Re:Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      but if all scientific papers should be released for "public good" Why would someone invest time and money in doing the research?

      You argument would make sense if the researcher paid for the expenses of the research him/herself.

      Typically the research is funded by taxes or by different foundations like the cancer research foundations that in turn have been funded by donations.
      Anyone accepting handouts to do research while still locking the paper away is eating the cake and having it too.

      Now this is typically a flaw with these handouts. They should come with a clause that states that any result of the research is public property.
      Good scientists won't turn away that deal, they are using that money today because it is a safe income while the published paper is not.
      It's just that there is no downside to double dipping today.

      Scientists that get their money from private companies is another matter, that money wouldn't be there if the company couldn't lock away the knowledge later. I don't see a problem with those results not becoming publicly available. (As long as the company is told to GTFO when public research recreates the study and the company tries to shut down the publishing with bullshit copyright claims.)

    7. Re:Isn't the idea by jouassou · · Score: 2

      The publication process has to be paid for by either the readers (traditional publishing) or the scientists (open-access publishing). In the first case, the scientists don't make any money off the paper, as all the money the readers pay goes to the journal. In the second case, the readers won't have to pay anything, but the scientist may have to pay up to $3000 to get their work published. In both cases, the paper is reviewed by referees that also work for free. So the only people that make money off the system are actually the journals.

    8. Re:Isn't the idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >>but if all scientific papers should be released for "public good"
      >Why would someone invest time and money in doing the research? You are better off letting someone else do it.

      You seem to be of the impression that

      (1) someone else *can* do it
      (2) the only result of the research is the paper

      The first gets more true as more people are scientifically literate, but wasn't true at all 10 years ago. Depending on the niche, still that way.
      The second is worrying. The paper is a *report*. The main use of the research is the improvement in knowledge and understanding of nature by myself and my colleagues. I write the paper so it's archived, so others (strangers) can give me criticism and because I built it on top of other people's papers, so I like to give back.

      > Scientific papers are not created to be shared, they are created to make money.

      WTF? No, they aren't. I'm a scientist, take it from me, we don't create these to make money (and we don't get any money for publishing a paper). Reputation yes, peer review, ability to get criticism etc, yes. Money? No.

      (The state pays me a salary)

      > Burnie Sanders would disagree, since he is a socialist and socialists live in a dream world.

      Many countries are social democratic republics and work just fine. Those dream worlds?

    9. Re:Isn't the idea by Coisiche · · Score: 4, Informative

      I don't see a problem with those results not becoming publicly available.

      Suppressed is another word for that. And it has caused a few problems in the pharmaceutical field.

    10. Re:Isn't the idea by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "It has economic and scientific value to professional scientists although no value for laypersons."
      Who are these laypersons? Is there a certified scientist label that you can get? I have a bachelor in science as one of my degrees is that good enough?
      Do I need to stay in academia to be one of those scientists where such papers have values?
      Or can I be a person interested in a topic and would like to dig further to expand my own knowledge? Or am I forced to the depth of Wikipedia because I am not a real Scientist?

      Science should be more acceptable and it doesn't need to be dumbed down. Normal Scientific journalism confusing a hypothesis and a theory all the time, jumping to conclusions or oversimplifying statements. If a topic is interesting enough, it would be nice for me to dig past all the media hype and look at the real findings.

      But because I am not a real Scientist (Having to turn in my Science Card when i got a MBA) I should have to just be dumb to science and just trust those real guys at their words, without me having any understanding.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    11. Re:Isn't the idea by JoeMerchant · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Scientific journals developed as ivory towers of knowledge. In the beginning, the fees they charged were somewhat justified by costs of publication and distribution, but even then it was mostly about the editorial work and peer review. If an article made it into a prestigious journal, it was assumed to have a high chance of being valid and of some importance.

      As costs of publication and distribution dropped to zero, the journals maintained their paywalls as some kind of "exclusive club" status - all their readers (who mattered to them) had access through institutional subscriptions, the subscription fees propped up the journals' (probably bloated) offices, staff, travel habits, etc. After all, there's still the editorial process to maintain, peer review to orchestrate, etc.

      It took hundreds of years for the journals to get to where they were in the late 1900s, it's not surprising that it is taking a few decades for them to come around to deal with the implications of instant free information sharing. It's just ironic that they were founded on principles of "free" exchange of information, but when the costs of exchanging information fell away it exposed how much tax they were placing on this exchange.

    12. Re:Isn't the idea by CRCulver · · Score: 2

      The publication process has to be paid for by either the readers (traditional publishing) or the scientists (open-access publishing).

      Open access is not always paid for by the scientists. I recently published a paper in a peer-reviewed open access journal and didn't have to provide anything more than the manuscript. The journal in question is issued by a country's academy of sciences, and all costs are evidently covered by the state and some rich men's endowments.

  2. You do the world a favor.... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For every scientific paper you pirate and share. It's bullshit to keep that stuff behind paywalls.
    I also applaud everyone that finds a way to pirate college textbooks and share them.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:You do the world a favor.... by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Informative

      Do you give your work/time away for free?

      The person who did the work/put in the time isn't going to see anything from the money that goes to a scientific journal or textbook publisher. As someone who's written a textbook, I can tell you that very few authors are paid based upon the sales of that textbook.

      And scientific journals? The authors/researchers were paid before the paper was even submitted to the journal.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    2. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, but as a tax payer, I paid for most of those papers. I expect to see the results for any public-funded work.

    3. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Potor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I actually write books. In my case, I earn much more from rank promotion than I do from royalties. When people pirate my books, I lose VERY little.

    4. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 5, Informative

      Do you give your work/time away for free? (I am assuming you work)

      When you publish in an Elsevier journal, you sign away any IP in the paper, and get no royalty from them. Worse still is that everyone who sees your paper has to do so through an institution that has to pay an expensive subscription for access.

    5. Re: You do the world a favor.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, the government paid researchers, then the journals stole the common good, which was paid for, and hid it behind a paywall with prices so high it never gets read. Imagine where we would be without the journals restricting access to the pinnacle of society's years of effort.

    6. Re:You do the world a favor.... by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agree 100%.

      This shenanigans of modern science having a whitepaper behind a paywall with _no ability_ to reproduce the data, let alone look at it to verify the initial analysis was correct is total bullshit and the complete antithesis of what Science is all about.

      Science was the first open source philosophy; namely to share questions, data, and results for the benefit of everyone; not sell them off to the highest bidder all in the name of greed / capitalism. This modern behavior is a complete perversion of Science, Knowledge, and Truth.

      --
      Cult, noun; a myopic belief held by a group that their "way" is the only way. Examples include stupid justice whiners, fundamental theists, fundamental atheists, pseduoskeptics such as Randi, etc.

    7. Re:You do the world a favor.... by jenningsthecat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First of all, those in industry are not your "Colleagues". If they are getting paid 3-4x more than a PhD working for a university, then they are almost certainly worth that 3-4x increase in pay. It is called "real-world" experience for a reason. They produce more for the company they work for or they disappear unlike some professor or assistant who doesn't have experience developing real products. Don't get me wrong, we need university research, but it really doesn't pay the bills for anyone, it only sucks resources from the tax base.

      I'd mod you Troll but I already posted, so Ill take the bait instead. You say that "real products" and "real world experience" are worth money, then go on to say that the university research upon which those products are often based, (and which you admit we need), "sucks resources". If you don't see the contradiction there then your opinion isn't worth much. If you DO see the contradiction, then why did you post it? Oh yeah, I temporarily forgot - you're trolling...

      --
      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    8. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And scientific journals? The authors/researchers were paid before the paper was even submitted to the journal.

      Authors are often not paid to write the paper, they are paid to do the work. They write the paper often on unpaid time because it is of benefit to their career. Also, some of the most interesting papers are on work that was never funded, just stuff done in someone's spare time.

    9. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Sir+Holo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you give your work/time away for free?

      The person who did the work/put in the time isn't going to see anything from the money that goes to a scientific journal or textbook publisher. As someone who's written a textbook, I can tell you that very few authors are paid based upon the sales of that textbook.

      And scientific journals? The authors/researchers were paid before the paper was even submitted to the journal.

      CORRECTION: We scientists (and he taxpayers that usually pay for our work) pay THREE TIMES for it. Plus, we exert effort FOR FREE to the publishers – BY LAW.

          1. Write a proposal for funding –US Federal law prohibits of using research funding for these efforts. It is on our own personal dime.
          2. Win a grant, which pays for you & your students to do the work (on the public dime)
          3. Write a manuscript to share the results with the world – US Federal Law prohibits the use of Federal funds for write-up. It is on our own personal dime.
          4. Submit it to a rapacious for-profit scientific journal – any owned by Elsevier – for review- / referee-ing.
          5. Referees are other scientists in your field, again legally required to perform the service unpaid.
          6. If accepted, Your second $$ outlay comes in the form of "page charges." Yes, you pay them to publish you work – once it's deemed important by the 'FREE' referees for the journals.
          7. The article might be printed, but is more likely to be in the form of a PDF, one that that the authors are these-days required to submit in electronic form, following stringent guidelines. The scientific authors essentially do the page-layout. Again for FREE.
          8. The publishers charge your institution tons of money for subscription to the journals, whether it is in-print, or simply a PDF

      Scientific publication charges are a huge, multi-level scam. At one time, it did cost them money to print and mail paper copies of journals. These days, they have outsourced almost every aspect of the labor required to produce a Scientific Journal Article, but somehow, mysteriously, their prices keep going up far faster than inflation.

      It is no wonder that sites like J-Stor, Research-Gate, Sci-Hub, and others are popping up all over the place.

      Personally, even though I have access to basically any journal known (at my large University), I go to Research-Gate simply because it takes 1/10th of the time to access the article I am seeking. My Uni has already paid for access, so I have a limited license to make a copy, but the big publishers make it an absolute, time-consuming pain in the ass to get a PDF of a given article. (Most of which I trash after glancing-through, as titles and abstracts are frequently inadequate.)

    10. Re:You do the world a favor.... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Do you give your work/time away for free? (I am assuming you work)

      Hi, published scientist here. And the answer is:

      YES!

      All my papers are available on my website for free.

      Where it could actually make a difference and where it applies, the source code is available on me website (and github) for free.

      Next question please!

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    11. Re:You do the world a favor.... by butzwonker · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Of course I give away my papers for free. I'm a scientist. I get zero money for my publications, my review work, my editorial work and anything else related to publications. I've even edited typeset several books for free. All of this for commercial publishing companies who make an insane amount of money with it. The only thing that publishing companies like Springer do is to send the final version to India for the final typesetting in LaTeX and put out the printed versions about one and a half years later. That system is possible because as a scientist I'm paid by the government.

      The problem is that I'm not allowed to put the original, quotable paper on my web pages, only earlier drafts. The papers you need for quoting are behind expensive paywalls, and every time someone accesses one of those articles to do his work, somewhere some tax payers are paying for a very expensive subscription. Or, they can pay $39 for a single article themselves - their choice (hahaha). For the publishers, this is like an endless source of money with minimum amount of work. That's why Springer, DeGruyter and small number of other publishers have sucked up and monopolized nearly all of the previously independent journals. It doesn't matter which journal I choose, I always end up with one of the three or four companies - like with record labels.

      See the problem now?

    12. Re:You do the world a favor.... by lrichardson · · Score: 2
      "Scientific publication charges are a huge, multi-level scam"

      Even with access, you don't get a copy of the papers on your system: you get the right to access a copy on *their* system. Which means, if, for example, your University goes "OMFG, we can't afford this journal anymore!", after several years of insane price increases, and fails to renew their subscription .... *poof*, you have nada, no stored papers, nothing.

    13. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I say WAHHH to them.

      Because you have NO RIGHT to sell your book on Algebra, that has not changed in 100's of years for $150. 95% of the content in your book is plagiarized from other sources.

      90% of all college textbooks are overpriced by 1000% and incredibly few have any real content that was added from version to version. they simply reorder chapters and "practice problems" to force students to buy a new $150 copy every year. So I support fully anyone that steals from the den of thieves that is academic publishing.

      You area hero to the world if you steal from that pit of villany.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    14. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's pretty hard. You need a lot of gravitas to generate momentum for a journal. There are thousands of spam-level journals out there ( ref beall's list of predatory publishers ) who just want papers and don't offer/care about peer review. You would need several field-leading researchers to support it by submitting to it, reviewing for it, and citing from it. And you would have to tend that reputation for quality very carefully.

      I suspect anyone in that position is so well established that they barely notice how crappy journals are.

    15. Re:You do the world a favor.... by Coisiche · · Score: 2

      I was about to say that lots of people give away some of their time for free (organizing social events, amateur sports teams, etc.) but I realized that's because where I live you actually tend have some spare time and you're probably in the USA and so won't have any.

    16. Re:You do the world a favor.... by jenningsthecat · · Score: 2

      Informative and insightful - thanks. You've given me an idea too. I've often thought that Detroit auto engineers should spend one year in four working as mechanics in garages, just to give them incentive to not make some of the truly wrong-headed design decisions they seem so fond of. So how about having university-based PhDs work one year in four, (or five, or six), in their field, outside of the university? They could work for the private sector, a government agency, or a non-profit. Or they could teach, but at high school or community college, under the watchful eye of someone who can prevent them from confusing the students too much. Or probably any of a half-dozen other alternatives I haven't thought of.

      This would put some (more) holes in the blanket of academic insulation, and provide the "real world" connection whose importance was rightly pointed out by GP.

      --
      'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
    17. Re:You do the world a favor.... by xvan · · Score: 2

      What nobody tells you is that scientists have a scoring system based on impact.

      Impact, is some sort of magic formula based on:

      a) the score of you publisher.
      b) the impact of the works that reference your paper

      The score of a journal is based on some magic average impact of the works published on it.
      The score of an institution and of a scientist is based on the total impact of the works produced.

      So, as a scientist, your entire career can be reduced to a number. Many institutions have minimum quotas that must be met to keep a project.

      If you add that you get almost no score for reproducing others work, and that money on the table depends on that score, the result is a big and corrupt stackOverflow system. Your new journal would have low score, so as a scientist you wouldn't want to burn a good paper on a low score publisher. A low score publisher would also give your work a lower "base score", giving it a lower indexation on relevant searches, reducing exposition. Not all papers can be groundbreaking, so relevancy decays fast with time.

  3. Hostage by Vlijmen+Fileer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "... Downloading Pirated Scientifc [sic] Papers"??
    You mean:
    "Freeing scientific papers that were being held hostage"

  4. Google the culprit? by Obfuscant · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How much of this is because when someone googles the relevant terms it shows them Sci-Hub results and not their local restricted library? I.e., how may people are deliberately pirating papers versus being counted as pirates because that's where Google took them to?

  5. Re:sci-hub uses compromised University accounts by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    " theft of the Universities' resources and theft of the online resource material."

    No, the thief here is the journal that grabbed the researchers' IP not only without compensation, but made them pay to do it. Plantation slaves had a better deal than that. Getting the papers to Sci-hub is the most moral way for the researcher to benefit most from his intellectual property.

  6. Re: Psst. Hey journals. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not part of academia, but I like reading CS papers for my own intellectual stimulation. I regularly go through the latest on arxiv, but some times you want to follow some references to older stuff, and that's when you end up having to reach out to Jacobson because you can't find a copy of his seminal paper, etc.

    You're right, I'm a nobody, but that also means no one is really losing anything when I read these papers. I would never pay for a paper anyhow, it's just not going to happen. I'm also not directly using results in my work (which quite frankly is too mundane for most of the stuff I'm interested in).

    I haven't used scihub, but I wouldn't hesitate to do it.

  7. Re: Psst. Hey journals. by butzwonker · · Score: 2

    I'm living in a small, comparatively poor country in Europe, and I'm a scientist, so let me explain the situation to you.

    Via expensive subscriptions we have access to a constantly and seemingly randomly changing selection of journals at our institute. Sometimes I can just download what I need "for free" (free for me, it still costs the tax payer a lot of money, of course), another time I cannot access it. Anything that falls on the borderline to neighbouring disciplines I cannot access - which happens to be a lot in my field, because my work is very cross-disciplinary. The situation is way worse in even poorer countries, e.g. in developing nations, or in those where politicians in charge simply do not understand the nature of scientific work and cut money in the wrong places.

    In a nutshell, rich universities in rich countries already have many advantages, and without sites like sci-hub many research institutions in the poorer parts of the world could just as well close down.

  8. Re: Psst. Hey journals. by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Your post is jaw-droppingly ignorant.

    Just about every computer scientist is unaffiliated with any institution that pays the extortion for access to these papers, covering a wide range of topics such as artificial intelligence, data compression, image processing, graph theory, statistical analysis, ....

    Your seem to be amazed that I might want to see the 1977 Frei and Chen paper on a complete set of basic functions for both line and edge detection in images. You seem to think that I would be satisfied with the commonly used but inferior Sobel or Prewit operators which dont distinguish between lines and edges and so forth.

    There is a reason that almost nobody uses the Frei and Chen's masks even though its superior.. and it has everything to do with access.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  9. Cake and eat it too? by ausekilis · · Score: 2

    On one hand, as a researcher you want to explore and document new and interesting/amazing things while being able to share those things with the world. On the other, you want to be seen as reputable so you look to publish your paper with a "known good" journal in your field, while avoiding those "crap science printing press" publications that are known for just throwing anything through the printer.

    It seems to me that sharing the knowledge as widely as possible is much like just pushing it through the crap science press, the opposite of getting into an established journal. Is the problem that those established journals are just greedy bastards? Or is the problem that there is no other way to separate the wheat from the chaff?

    1. Re:Cake and eat it too? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 3, Informative

      Peer review is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Like all other parts of the publishing process, peer review can operate even more easily as part of an online site than on paper. But in the time when science was published on paper, some journals accumulated more prestige than others. The only reason these journals still exist is they coast on the prestige acquired in the days of paper. Because journals, even the most prestigious of them never paid the reviewers who defined the very exclusivity of the publication, there is no reason for reviewers not to jump ship to the online world. Researchers and libraries will do it because it saves them a pile of money, while reviewers will be in the same financial position as always. There is no reason whatever to keep churning out those dead-tree buggy whips.