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Sci-Hub Faces Millions Of Dollars In Damages, Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Domain (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by msmash on from the some-people-want-to-watch-the-world-burn dept.

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.

15 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, me, too by itsownreward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yeah, me, too by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 2

      And it's just as bad for the non-science journals too. IEEE charges a flat fee around $18 for a reprint, even if the article long ago fell into the public domain. All the journals do this, and when they go bankrupt, which they will, they'll sell it ad-infinitim down the line. All of our science and engineering history behind a paywall, yay.

    2. Re:Yeah, me, too by Rei · · Score: 2

      I don't think anyone should be surprised that so many in the US access it. So, the top users are from "Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States"? I think XKCD had something to say about that...

      --
      "I know you have questions." "That would be why I just asked them."
    3. Re:Yeah, me, too by ChromeAeonium · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well I am an academic at a public institution, and I sometimes have the same problems when I hit something my institution does not have a subscription for, or does not have access to a certain year (some journals we don't have before or after a particular year). Yeah, I can get ultimately get it if I want, but it's bullshit that I have to jump through hoops, or am expected to shell out money to do my work, just to get papers my tax dollars already paid for. All I want is what is mine. The people paid for this research, they should get access to it. Full stop, end of story, no exceptions, not next year, not when (if) the copyright expires, NOW. Copyright infringement is downloading something you did not pay for. This is not copyright infringement because you have in fact already payed for it. This is getting what you are owed, what you and I have already paid for through our taxes. Leeches like Elsevier and their ilk are the thieves who are stealing from us, not the other way around. Good on anyone who makes publically funded research rightfully available to the public.

  2. Elsevier had their chance. by nimbius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Elsevier had their chance. by pr0fessor · · Score: 2

      directly opposing open-research mandates by funding legislation in american congress

      You would think that the opinion of an foreign company that wants to make billions off of research funded by american tax payers wouldn't really carry any weight.

  3. Questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Questions by wickerprints · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  4. Spending $20-$40 to get useless information by Steve1952 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Spending $20-$40 to get useless information by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  5. Copyright infringement vs. Extortion by cashman73 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Copyright infringement vs. Extortion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  6. Who is Elsevier by supernova87a · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:To plagiarize Dr Malcom ... by messymerry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    --
    Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
  8. Re:Benevolent Billionaires by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Fuck, Bill Gates will never do something like that. He uses his foundation (the largest charity on earth by like an order of magnitude) to enforce intellectual property regimes by refusing to fund any charity that buys medicines manufactured in-country without a patent license even when it is completely legal by that country's own laws. If you want Gates Foundation money, you gotta waste^H^H^H^H^H^H spend it on vastly over-priced drugs.