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Sci-Hub Faces Millions Of Dollars In Damages, Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Domain (torrentfreak.com)
Reader Taco Cowboy writes: Sci-Hub is facing millions of dollars in damages in a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. As a result of the legal battle the site just lost one of its latest domain names. However, the site has no intentions of backing down, and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open. Several 'backup' domain names are still in play, including Sci-Hub.bz and Sci-Hub.cc. In addition to the alternative domain names users can access the site directly through the IP-address 31.184.194.81. Its TOR domain is also still working -- http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/. Authorized or not, there is definitely plenty of interest in Sci-Hub's service. The site currently hosts more than 51 million academic papers and receives millions of visitors per month. Many visits come from countries where access to academic journals is limited, such as Iran, Russia or China. But even in countries where access is more common, many researchers visit the site, an analysis from Science magazine revealed last week. Late last month we learned that plenty of people were downloading academic papers from Sci-Hub. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub had served over 28 million documents, with Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States being the leading requestors.
I'm in the US and I certainly use it. I'm not an academic or associated with an institution, but have an education in physics and computer science. I maintain a keen interest in several academic topics, and sometimes when I find a paper I want to read and can't find it on an author's website or arxiv.org then Sci-Hub is my go-to. It's ludicrous to want to charge someone $20+ to read a paper, especially when, often times, the research was government-funded. I certainly couldn't afford to do it.
I genuinely hope if this keeps up Sci-Hub goes nuclear and just publishes a few torrents of all the papers. It'd be very Swartzian.
Elsevier should serve as a warning to other industries like healthcare and insurance. You can pursue profit in an industry, but once it becomes your sole modus operandi you risk the very real incidence of becoming a riot trigger.
this isnt just a reactionary site contesting some recent policy adopted by Elsevier, its a concerted and dedicated movement against a corporate monster thats spent more than 15 years inventing new ways to privatize the hard work and important research of institutions both public and private. Elsevier contests that its profits are simply industry average and its a thoroughly discredited argument once you realize they are the industry in terms of where most research publication comes from. supporting SOPA and PIPA's fascist information controls and directly opposing open-research mandates by funding legislation in american congress are among the most prominent reasons academics including myself boycot this corporation
Good people go to bed earlier.
Another big problem with the Elsevier model is that often after fully reading an academic paper, you realize that it is not very useful. I estimate that for every 10 academic papers I read, only about one is a worthwhile "keeper". So the true cost to find a useful academic paper, using the Elsevier model, is actually hundreds of dollars.
Sci-Hub is clearly engaging in copyright infringement by the definition of the law as written. But one could make a very good argument that Elsevier is also engaging in Extortion as well, by charging as much as $30-35 per paper to download a PDF. Is there any data out there on how many people actually pay these fees? Most people with access at a Carnegie Research I institution don't need to pay the fees, but there are a lot of smaller academic institutions whose libraries don't have the resources to subscribe to everything. The options are either email the author and ask for them to send you a copy (most of the time, this works), contact a colleague at another institution and ask them to send you a copy (many academics will do this for friends and collaborators), visit Sci-Hub and download it yourself, or pay the extortion fee and obtain it. Three of these options violate copyright laws as written, but the first two options have the advantage of maintaining contact with other researchers in your field and increasing communication, which can help your career. Do we really want to stifle this all in the name of making a few extra bucks for the publishing companies so that their stock can go up a quarter of a point?
To answer your last question, the primary reason why there are not more open access journals, and why the outrageous pricing of journals exists, is because of the issue of reputability.
The system of knowledge dissemination in academia, historically, has largely relied on peer review, but as the corpus of that knowledge has grown explosively, it has become increasingly challenging for individual researchers to quickly identify influential and important discoveries. Consequently, academics relied on journal editors to elevate the status of certain papers through the reputation of their journals. Getting published in Nature or Cell carries far more prestige than some "second-" or "third-tier" journal, and through this mechanism, companies like Elsevier realized they could use this as leverage.
In short, the pressure to publish in reputable and highly visible journals is what created the market opportunity for monopolists to extort huge sums of money from the academics who created this flawed and dysfunctional system. The publishers exploited this flaw, but it is the researchers and the institutions which employ them that largely created the flaw in the first place.
The move to an open-access model is not one that can be done in a short period of time, because it takes time for journals to develop the reputation that is the basis for their value. Elsevier knows this, and in response, they know they can't tighten the screws too much. But they are greedy bastards too. Sci-Hub threatens to topple their house of cards rather than letting them milk the system as long as they can until academics collectively wake up and decide that enough is enough.
Elsevier and other publishing conglomerates are absolutely milking researchers, universities, and governments for access to information that in many cases, these public institutions have paid for already through research subsidies, government grants, taxpayer funds, and more. So don't be too sympathetic to the claim that this is ripping off a company's intellectual property.
In case you have any love for such publishing companies, know that they are really not much better than cable companies. They bundle unpopular journals together that libraries are required to purchase, just to get access to the one journal that they actually want. They add little value aside from binding the paper journals (which is dying) or putting up paywalls to restrict access to information. They bill researchers who submit papers with per-page charges (with surcharges for "color" figures, if you can believe it) for the publication of their works which are submitted for free. And then they recruit academic researchers yet again to be editors for pennies, and then charge subscription fees to authors to access their own and other people's works, who no one got paid for but somehow Elsevier deserves a cut of.
They deserve to die a slow and painful death for all the value they have extracted from the academic community over decades. And scientists should be more vocal about wresting control of journals from them -- and I mean in a way that more effective than the current open-source / borderline-spam journals that exist out there. This is a market failure / monopoly situation that needs to be broken up like the worst examples in history.
Follow the money and it will invariably lead you to a pool of slime... A huge chunk of that knowledge is publicly funded and thus belongs in the public domain anyway. Just another example of privatizing the gains and socializing the losses...
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