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Subscription Journals Are Doomed Because of Sci-Hub's Big Cache of Pirated Papers, Suggests Data Analyst (sciencemag.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous -- and, according to a U.S. court, illegal -- online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub. Their findings, published in a preprint on the PeerJ journal site on July 20, indicate that Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is "even higher" than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub's reach is greater still, with instant access to 85% of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97% of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub's servers -- meaning they can be accessed there for free. In a chat with ScienceInsider, Himmelstein concludes that the results of his study could mark "the beginning of the end" for paywalled research.
I have access to pretty well every journal I need through my university's library. I still use Sci-Hub. One DOI entry and I can have my paper. 5 minutes of bullshit and jumping through menus to get a preview and abstract, then still need to hunt around on the individual page for download link (if it exists - if its offered as a PDF, not some protected web reader nonsense).
I'll stick with the pirate way.
The university libraries will still keep paying the subscription fees, and researchers will keep paying for the privilege of surrendering copyright.
Elsevier's business model isn't going anywhere.
Paywalled research is just a bad idea.
Yes, I understand that the peer review and publication process has to be paid for, but restricting access to the fruits of scientific progress -- and therefore also limiting further progress! -- is the wrong way to do it.
My guess is that we'll transition to an "author pays" model. Researchers employed by institutions will have their fees covered by their employer. Researchers who don't have that option are already disadvantaged under the current model, so the fact that they'll still be disadvantaged isn't so terrible. Plus they'll still be able to publish in free online archives that accept non-reviewed and unedited work. Really good work should find it fairly easy to get someone to fund the peer review and editing required to get it into a journal.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Just out of curiousity I searched for a (not at all famous) paper I published in the 1990s. Found it on Sci-Hub by just entering a few key words in a search engine - conveniently retrievable.
I remembered that at some point in time, a state-funded institution did officially archive my paper. But it took me about half an hour to finally find it, buried behind multiple retrieval forms and links, with no chance to find it had I not looked up its entire, exact title before.
No question, Sci-Hub did the better job of keeping my little contribution to the world's knowledge available to the public.
not picking on journals
If they want it gone, they can simply seize the domain name or add filters. I keep hearing news about "controversial" sites which "somehow" are still up no matter how many news articles are written about them about how illegal they are. If they actually want a site done, it's gone within seconds.
Under what jurisdiction would they seize the domain names? Sci-Hub operates under many domains, including those in .ac (Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, a group of islands in the South Atlantic), .bz (Belize, a Central American country), .cc (the Cocos/Keeling Islands in the Pacific), among others. Of those, .ac has a connection to the UK due to the islands being a UK territory, and .cc's operations are run by VeriSign, a US company.
The site itself is hosted in Russia, who is unlikely to care about US or EU takedown requests.
It's also available over Tor, so good luck.
Seizing the names isn't really feasible.
The dirty secret of the academic publishing world is that it's a enormous scam designed to funnel taxpayers money into the pockets of rich vendors, who have repeatedly failed to do their jobs because they have no competition and act as a monopolistic racket. Let's not even talk about the kickbacks and benefits they give to the people at these public institutions that are supposed to be upholding the public good but are just looking to inflate their budgets and their ego.
The thing researchers love about sci-hub is that you type in the article name, and you get the article. Imagine that! Something the web search industry figured out 15 years ago has yet to make it into the proprietary morass of vendor locked in library IT systems.... because the academic publishing world is hopelessly corrupt and moribund.
There is no opportunity for a free market force to come in and force these leeches on the taxpayers to do their fucking jobs properly - and their job is to index and store information after it has been verified by peer review. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not complicated. It's not rocket science and it's not brain surgery.
Scihub is the best thing that has ever happened to academic publishing. The management and shareholders of Elsevier and the rest of these thieves should be ashamed of themselves. Ripping off the public for decades on end. It's time to stop.
True, but what does having a publisher acting as a grossly overpriced intermediary contribute? It's become abundantly clear that many (most?) don't do any vetting of their volunteer reviewers, much less their paying submitters.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Personally I prefer "Couldn't have happened to a more deserving ____"
Same initial dose of sarcastic irony, plus the lingering savor of literal truth once you realize the actual intent.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Netflix actually do something with their money; they fund original content and pay other producers for access to theirs and collaborate with them.
Scientific publishers don't do any of those things; they work entirely by creating artificial scarcity of a product paid for by others that they don't contribute to; at most they rate it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You couldn't have refuted your own point better in a single sentence. You have the entire chain of cause and effect backwards.
You see, the only reason services like Netfix and Spotify now exist is because of piracy. I remember when people, even at this very site, were scoffing and ridiculing the idea of a cheap streaming service. '10 bucks to listen to millions of songs? Hah, the record companies will never allow it, look at the prices on Itunes! Look at how much a CD costs! They'll never agree to such pricing, if you want streaming anywhere, listen to the radio!" But they had to.
You see, record companies, much like Elsevier, have had to face the fat that the service they originally provided, access to information in a physical format, is pretty much dead and the service that replaced it, access to information in a digital format, does not and cannot be priced in the same way. Consumers are not idiots. If you tell someone to pay them 18 euros for a physical album and then tell them the exactly same content over a digital medium with a fraction of the costs of the physical medium costs nearly the same they're going to know you're lying.
If it was up to record companies and movie studios we'd all still be paying 5 euros a pop for 24 hour rentals and 4 times that for downloads riddled with massive amounts of DRM making cross-device/platform playback near impossible. But the advent of piracy gave the consumers a choice that was both more affordable and more to the point better in quality. They groaned and the grumbled, but eventually they started giving in when they realize this is an existential threat to their existence.
And just in the same way, I hope, Sci-Hub will usher in the era of 'Sciflix' where you can pick the fields you want to follow and get access to ALL articles from those fields at a price that's affordable even to private citizens.
"But the publishers will never allow it. Look at how much journal access costs now! Look at the prices of individual articles! If you want widespread access just use your campus network or library!"
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
I used to work in a lab doing research at a major research university. I worked there and at another lab for eight semesters and three summers. I was not paid - my PI pleaded poverty as he did with all the undergrads. And yet we could not necessarily get all the papers we needed. But I did contribute to some papers directly and indirectly. It's repugnant that I worked for free but couldn't even directly get access to those papers after I left until I went to a graduate program. (Yes, I could email a friend to get a copy but direct access is the point here and they won't do this every week for me for other papers.)
Later I needed access to some medical papers - which are often even harder to obtain than regular science papers. Again my university did not have access. I had to go across town to another university. But of course I could not logon because they restricted access if you were a student from another institution. In the end I had to hustle and find a computer in their library that was very antiquated located near the printers. It luckily did not have a login requirement. I loaded up about 15 papers onto my flash drive. And it was very scary because the foreign institution was (and still is) so strict about this. I am reminded me of the death of an MIT student. MIT is and was so IP obsessed that it assisted in pushing one of its own to suicide.
Now I am no longer affiliated with a university, But I do pay lots of $$$ in taxes to the federal government. Somehow paying for the research now, having done previous research for free, and later for graduate student slave wages does not privilege me with the right to obtain papers. I asked many people if there was some way I could pay as an individual a modest fee (of about $500 a year) to get access to all the typical journals for noncommercial use and was told no such program existed. I even called multiple libraries about this. I later needed some information for urgent personal reasons from a journal article and forked over around $45 for it.
When I brought up how unfair the system was to other people I was either politely ignored, told to stop complaining, or told that IP was necessary and that without high fees the journals could not survive (which is false). Fast forward a few years and now Sci-hub has provided a way for people like me to obtain papers that I have in one way or another already paid for. And suddenly Nature and Elsevier cry crocodile tears. But because they are rich and powerful, people don't condescend to them and insist they stop complaining. The power of campaign finance contributions is so overwhelming.
The system is broken. IP is out of control - it's even corrupted university faculty who blab on about their own intellectual property and restrict the supply of their lecture notes even when they would not otherwise make money from them. There are many papers demonstrating the over indulgence in IP restrictions. One showed that the optimum copyright should last a mere seven years. Knowledge should be freely available as much as possible when its creation has already been paid for.
And we could incentivize new idea production with a lot less IP. Drug patents are another example of how it is abused - pharmaceutical companies charge what the market will bear. And that means monopoly pricing. Screaming "free market" will not help you. Giving someone a legal monopoly is not laissez fair. If you are going to give someone extra privileges, there have to be protections to prevent abuses. Lots of people urgently may need journal access like people with rare diseases. It's hard for policy makers on the state or municipal level to make good decisions without ready access to journal articles - I see this firsthand as someone who serves in local government.
So until there is a realistic alternative that allows wide distribution of knowledge we are stuck with sci-hub. It's almost impossible to have reasonable discussions because all major news outlets are in love with copyright and IP generally and th