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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.
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.
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.
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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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.