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Sci-Hub Ordered To Pay $15 Million In Piracy Damages (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint (PDF) against Sci-Hub and several related "pirate" sites. It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission. While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier's legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall. The injunction ordered Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn't happen. Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day. Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the U.S. lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week. Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15,000,000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent.
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Only in the land of the free you get fined 15 million for spreading illegal scientific information.
Elsevier is a fraud machine, and they should be begging people to lend them legitimacy by republishing papers they've published. The fact that they are not tells you everything you need to know about corruption in scientific publishing. They've done more than $15M in damage to the scientific process, let alone public health.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
who is having evolution removed from school text books because it is too ''controversial''. He wants ''all classes are to be taught in a more religious context'' — translation: ''I want future generations to make decisions on the basis of whatever fantasies that I want to promote; make them incapable of rational evaluation of evidence.''.
This can only result in a more unstable future world. We should eliminate religion from all politics; however I can't see that happening.
You can't blame them for trying.
The fact is that the journal model has gotten very bad. When reproducibility rates in some fields are below 50%, that whole secret-data-secret-programming-secret-fails peer review thing just doesnt work over the long run.
Journals exist entirely because of the journal model. They must defend it. Its self defense.
I predict that in the future that "publishing" will simply mean opening up your data and your scripts publicly, by adding them to a central repository. "Peer review" will be when someone else reproduces your work and also opens up their data and scripts publicly, and not at any other time. We will no longer trust a "peer reviewer" that doesnt reproduce. After all, the only reason right now to trust the peer review processes is the unfounded belief that people arent trying to fake it. The system was bound to fail.
"His name was James Damore."
Not exactly true. Hitler never won an absolute majority in the Reichstag, true. But Weimer Germany elected its parliament by proportional representation: nobody ever won an absolute majority. Governements were coalitions of parties, generally led by the largest party in parliament. And in 1933, that party was the Nazi party. Actually, the first go-round, nobody would form a coalition with them, and they had to go back for new elections, but the Nazis were the largest party again. This time the mainstream parties gave in, and formed a coalition government. As leader of the largest party in the governing coalition, Hitler had a right to be named Chancellor (prime minister, basically). There was some behind-the-scenes maneuvering to diddle him out of that (some people could see how dangerous he was), but it didn't work. Hindenburg named him chancellor because that was his ceremonial duty, but it really wasn't his choice. In summation, the Nazis did come to power because they were democratically elected to it. Didn't stay that way, of course.
The system was bound to fail.
The system evolved to retard progress. How much faster would scientific development progress if everyone made all their data available to everyone else all the time, and right away? But everyone is forced to be concerned with getting personal credit for everything they do if they want to be able to secure additional funding later, so they hide knowledge away — at least until a later date. And that's to say nothing of the pressure to come up with something worth publishing, whether you really have something or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The future of science and data science needs to be as easy as:
git clone http://whatsamata.edu/medical/...
make
Toss in the read me that you need to have this Siemens medical device attached to USB1 or some other such hardware setup.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's the "publish or die" culture that is pervasive in academia that is the root cause here. The journals are just a highly visible artifact of the underlying problem.
It's not as if academics, including some very prominent ones, haven't been openly criticising the journal model and questioning its effectiveness for years. However, until the funding model catches up, many of those academics have their hands tied.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now that the domain names are blocked, here's the onion address
http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
(Use the Tor browser to access the site)