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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.
Why should I, a researcher, have to pay journals to publish my work, sign over my copyrights to them, and have my work paywalled with ridiculous prices to access my work? Journals rely on free peer review and editing, appointing volunteers to those positions. The only part the journals actually pay for is the actual publishing of papers, whether in print or online. The journals exploit scientists and the peer review process generally lacks transparency and is open to unethical behavior. Why do we tolerate this practice? What is stopping more open access journals from being formed, which adopt peer review practices that are far less susceptible to abuses?
I work in a somewhat obscure field of linguistics and regional studies. Most of the journals that we publish in are run by learned societies or state academies in various countries. They are usually free to publish in and often open access (supported by state funding or dead men's endowments). Peer review is very rigorous.
When Sci-Hub appeared, I decided to do a search of topics related to my field. I was appalled to find discover that nearly all results (from journals belonging to big holdings like Elsevier) were terrible papers that would never pass muster in my fieldâ(TM)s mainstream journals: the discoveries they claim are obvious facts of the field at best, outright fallacies at worst. It's as if the big holdings are running publication mills for people who want to get a publication to their name thanks to weak peer review.
Plus the articles are often written in dreadful English or some other language that the author is non-native in, and language revision is sorely necessary. The big holdings seem to be pretty lax about the amount of editing their editors are supposed to do. I feel sorry for anyone who has ever paid for any of this shit. I'm happy that when I discovered this dark side of my field, it didn't cost me or an institution a cent to download a PDF from Sci-Hub.
The research is not actually in the public domain, though there are great arguments that it ought to be.
When it comes to federally-funded research, universities are granted the intellectual property rights to the research under the Bayh-Dole Act. They must grant the federal government a royalty-free perpetual license to the intellectual property. I don't personally agree with this at all, but those are the rules.
A condition of publishing in just about every journal is to sign over the copyrights to the journal. The authors no longer own the rights to the work. Furthermore, I don't believe the authors actually receive any royalties, either. In other words, the authors pay the journal to take the copyright, print the manuscript, and then profit from it.
Universities are happy with the system because of the F&A costs and intellectual property rights they acquire. Journals make money from the authors and subscribers. Editors and peer reviewers don't get paid for their work. A major factor in tenure and funding decisions is the frequency and prestige of peer-reviewed publications, which locks researchers into submitting their manuscripts to the journals. Of course, the journals are very happy with this, because they're able to exploit just about everyone. And in the process, researchers and the public get screwed.
The system is even more corrupt than that. The peer review process isn't transparent at all. Peer reviewers aren't supposed to be collaborating with the authors on any project, but they can be competitors. A peer reviewer is potentially able to anonymously suppress a paper that might be critical of their work, or that would otherwise be published ahead of their own competing research.
Citations are also incredibly corrupt. When writing proposals for funding, there's pressure to cite every relevant paper because many reviewers base their recommendations in part on how frequently they are cited. In peer reviewed papers, it's somewhat similar. Often it's possible to tell who a reviewer is or at least what institution they work at based on the papers they insist you cite. Citations can be important in the inductive part of the scientific method to justify a hypothesis based on prior observations. It's also important to justify some decisions in the methdology, especially if those decisions might significantly affect the outcome of the experiment. This is abused in that introductions often become lengthy literature reviews that aren't necessary to support the hypothesis. The reason is that the quality of papers and the prestige of the authors is somewhat judged on how frequently the papers are cited.
Basically, the entire process is corrupt, but nothing is being done to disrupt the process. I'd love to see excessive citations curtailed and more transparency brought to the peer review process. I certainly believe manuscript authors should collect royalties. An ancillary benefit would be to reduce the number of authors who are listed, but without making significant contributions to the paper.