Why do we need editors for scientific journals? They are an unnecessary gatekeeper, people can read a paper and decide for themselves. The peer review process is independent of the editors. And the system of gatekeepers is what has helped push the publish or perish aspects of academia.
Research can be done well or poorly. Good research with no outlet is not worth a whole lot more.
Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.)
People in academia know the game with the top impact factor journals, and they understand that there is plenty of great science that occurs outside of those journals.
You can be a scientist without involving yourself with the broken American higher Ed system. Additionally there are journals that do not charge for access.
Sure, but if the kind of science or research you do costs money and you are not independently wealthy, then you will have to have to beg for patronage in the form of grant funding or an endowment. And since it's hard for non-specialists to evaluate the quality of your claims, your record of publications and citations will probably be treated as a proxy for the quality of your ideas.
That may be true, but submitting to a paid journal isn’t necessary, still. Scientists can and do cite and publish independent of the large publications. Arxiv being an example.
Sure, if your work is theoretical or you already have the lab equipment you need. I see your point, but you are being a little unrealistic to ignore that some kinds of research costs money to conduct, in materials, equipment, travel, or rental and storage costs.
In many fields doing science requires a team and equipment, and in all fields doing science requires being able to sustain yourself while spending most of your time on science. All of that requires funding, which almost universally (not limited to American higher Ed system) requires demonstrating that your science is accepted by being published in respected peer-reviewed venues, and if it's only self-published then it's considered not worthy (and there indeed is a big correlation for that) and results in you being denied the means to continue to do science. In essence, science gets validated by being published in selective places which demonstrably filter out most of the chaff (and a lot of science-like products should get filtered out - even in this domain attention is scarcer than content, so almost nobody wants to read things that haven't passed a certain filter) and if something gets published in a less selective venue, the general assumption (again, strongly correlated with reality) is that it wasn't good enough to get published in a better one.
Technically, of course, you can be a scientist without involving yourself with all that, if you're independently wealthy and/or doing it as a hobby in addition to your main job. Science used to be done that way (e.g. by bored educated aristocrats), but I think we have a strong consensus that the world would be worse than the current situation if there would be a de facto limitation to doing science only by those who can self-fund it.
True, but for someone who is already working in academia (i.e. most people producing science), refusing to getting involved with that is equivalent to quitting not just your current job but the whole industry and career, ceasing to do science by moving to a different profession.
Plenty of researchers are opting to publish in open access journals instead. Cell press journals will let you publish open access these days, for example.
Be careful when wishing for absolutes. Editors serve a vital role as the first line of defence against BS publications. They are vital gatekeepers and separate the wheat from the chaff.
The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
I think they have the same flaws as newspaper editors, their own bias can lead to false data and science. If they are required we would still need a mechanism for control.
I haven't form my opinion on the gatekeeping nature of the academic journals, so I won't comment on that.
But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
Editors are essential for jockeying the peer reviewers. It does happen sometimes where you get a malicious peer reviewer. Maybe they don't understand the science, maybe the conclusions disagree with ones from their own work, maybe you are scooping their current work without realizing it, or maybe they just have an axe to grind with your principle investigator. I've seen it happen and it can be ugly, but the editor serves as a backstop here. They can look at what both of you are saying as the adult in the room, and usually they assign a new reviewer. Editors are also the whip for lazy reviewers, since they set the deadlines.
- Academics resign en masse from journal boards for whom they perform unpaid labor and form their own lightweight nonprofit groups.
- The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal".
- The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional.
Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible.
The publishers are not paying scientists for their labor. That's the problem. They are gatekeeping middle-leeches, impeding humanity's progress by paywalling science.
5. Scientific inquiry is about discovering facts about our world, universe, and selves. It’s a different category from creative endeavors like art, literature, film, etc.
if you were concerned about incomes of scientists, then you would support copyright or patents on scientific discoveries. You would support ability to patent the law of gravity.
If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
How do you reconcile the belief in the present system with the right of scientists (and other researchers) to sell their productive labor? The majority of academics are not meaningfully compensated for research and writing up research, instead relying on teaching for income.
A lot of the papers on SciHub are uploaded by the authors, because they aren't doing the research for the paltry royalties they receive.
Scientists don’t get paid when people buy their journal articles - that money is kept in it‘s entirety by the publishers. What Sci Hub (https://sci.hubg.org) does is make research that has for the most part already been paid for by tax payers available to the public. I recommend reading about Plan S if you are interested in how this is being solves on the legislative side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
> If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
As many others in the thread have said - the profits from the paper paywalls go to the publishers, reviewing is done by volunteers.
As an aside, it's funny how often defenders of intellectual slavery are so dug in to their beliefs while being completely unaware of the mechanisms of what they're defending. I suppose such ignorance is a necessary precondition to support such injustice.
Universities expect you to have publications in peer-reviewed journals. In many fields there aren't alternatives to for-profit journals, and in fields which do have alternatives, many academics don't know the alternatives exist.
I think a common misunderstanding, often held on HN/Reddit, is that the academia themselves also hate journal publishing industry as much.
I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access.
Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad.
Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic.
TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
>And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish
I've not noticed this in biology. Most journals charge a couple thousand to publish. The only exception I can think of are the plos journals. And they also never ever pay you to review.
The way I understand it, journals are essentially grading agencies. Good journals try to only publish good papers, the best journal are the best at this. So, to show that your papers are good, you show that they have been published in good journals.
eLife needs a honorable mention here. They are doing pretty good job in open publishing and publish quality research. Now they are taking it up a notch higher and will publish all articles accepted for reviews. Its upto the OP to respond to reviews the way they want. Paper will be published along with all reviews and responses. Reader can figure out the rest.
Better yet: knowledge that was paid for by tax payers should be available to tax payers.
The journal business model is astounding: they charge a lot to publish, a lot to read what they publish, they do not pay reviewers, editors, or authors, and then get to claim ownership of what was published.
It's not enough for legislation to be "you must have some bs pseudo-open-access document", it should be "no employee of a publicly funded institution shall undertake unpaid labour for a journal, the journal must pay a minimum of 50% of proceeds to the author/institution, etc".
I think the interesting thing is that, apart from those private companies, institutions such as IEEE and ISO also have rediculous paywall, even for standards that should be public... Perhaps the gov have less influence over private companies, but can't they do something with IEEE and ISO?
IEEE publications only have something to publish and only have reviewers because public institutions are allowed to publish to them, and allow to do free labour (paper review is unpaid).
Right? It is so mind blowing my one-sided. Like hilariously. Usually there is some mitigating factor or some nugget of value provided that someone can make some convoluted argument is worth the price.
But with journals, there's nothing. It's 100% path dependence and coordination problems. No one would ever create this arrangement from scratch today.
"AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption”
Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
"Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly."
I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way.
Ugh, there are no "political ideas" here. Why does western culture always insist on viewing everything through political or ideological lens? You realise that you are literally the only ones who does that? No one else is that bothered with proper virtue signalling at the expense of objectivity.
> apologetics for evil
You're reasoning in childish categories. It's not what is going on here.
> I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub IS her own website, deal with it.
> I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
Why do "people's responses" even matter here? Objective reality exists in the synergy of cause-effect relations. I don't know that your "knowledge of Stalin Russia" (which in itself is a factual error, it's "Stalin's USSR") is, but denying the historical fact that he had a personality cult (which just by definition imples enough love) is just as dishonest as denying that Hitler was loved and supported in Europe and in the US for a long time, not in the least for his antagonism towards the above-mentioned USSR. The fact that they were genocidal mass-murdurers does not eject them from history and context directly into the vacuum. Even if it upsets some people who love to pinpoint all the blame to "a single evil person", despite that history would have just as well produced someone similar given the circumstance if the above-mentioned evil person didn't exist. It's just an assessment of a historical process, nothing more.
Killing huge numbers of middle class families and drawing wealth inwards to Moscow was bad overall, but the small number of remaining positions were occupied by different people. It worked the same way in China, because somebody has to design the bridges no matter how many of the previous bridge designers you get rid of.
Surprisingly, China has lifted some 800 million people from poverty so it does happen. I'm not a communist and wouldn't prefer a communist country but I've gotta give credit where it's due.
That only happened after it embraced the free market and capitalism though. Communist China was, as you say, quite poor for decades.
Capitalism can take many forms and is often tempered with more socialist policies. No country – including the United States" is "pure capitalist". China has its own spin on capitalism, but that doesn't make it not-capitalism.
I mostly agree with you on this, although I do think in the case of modern China to be intellectually honest one has to be careful to not attribute all the good things to capitalism and all the bad things to communism.
Communist governance of assimilated subjects is about the opposite of democratic governance over diverse states' free citizens.
Communist economies are about the opposite of free enterprise.
Capitalism is its own purely economic animal, perhaps directly opposed to a communist economy, but not the opposite of a communist government.
Really capitalism is not conceptully supposed to be a form of government to begin with, but it can snuggle up to any government from democracy to communism to monarchy and anything in between.
And there you go.
As an "ism" capitalism has been with us since prehistoric times, any actual governance it accomplishes is effectively done by the different types of political systems it has operated with, that have come and gone over the millennia.
Sometimes the strength of the capital is greater than the resources or political will of the government in power at the time, sometimes not. Debt can distort this balance.
I completely agree with their mission statement, and I wish there was a way to help accelerate what they are doing, how could we make multiple copies of this site so that it can never get stamped out? One problem I constantly have is that the domain gets blocked, and so I have to switch to a new domain to access the site. If we can make this resistant to any type of censorship, that would be amazing and I feel like would be an amazing way to contribute. Is there a closing software specifically made for this. It’s not really possible to clone the site without the authors help and she has stated she purposely doesn’t share the code so that the software can’t get hacked.
I agree in principal but not in practice. There’s no effective solution to the free rider problem, thus the need to sell your knowledge and labor derived from said knowledge.
It's not like other types of authorship. The researchers who write these papers do not get paid for people obtaining and reading their research. Nor do their peers who review their publications for the journals, they do this as unpaid labor.
The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.
Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something.
As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.
> Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all
Yes, "publish or perish" technically provides two options. ;-)
But it would be nice to see Elsevier and its ilk replaced with true open access journals (without open access fees), and for everything to be available on arxiv.org or similar sites.
In the quest to preserve human conciousness, I consider this a sister project with Musk's move to Mars and as I tweeted before one of biggest contributions to humanity worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Since there's no planet B and also no planet A sooner than later, we should put ourselves in the position to be able to move to a terraformed Mars or in temporary Dyson spheres as soon as possible.
These types of projects ("Shoulders of giants" all the way down) make me hopeful for the future of humanity.
Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan!
Calling Musk to prove he's a real philanthropist and buy out the entire scientific publishing industry!
Alexandra Elbakyan is a great woman fighting against a corrupt racket obstructing science and access to medical information. She's only an outlaw because the law is evil.
the hilarious thing is how much phd students and other work-a-day members of academia literally could not get their jobs done without sci-hub, the whole system would just grind to a halt without sci-hub.
Yeah, sci-hub is great, but I'm pretty sure academic research would be fine without it... on account of having been a biology PhD student both before and after the advent of sci-hub.
"Science" has institutions to pay for the journal subscriptions. As a random human person my life has changed drastically since the late 2020 India legal case. I used to read a dozen papers a week via sci-hub and now I read maybe a 2-3 and none from the last couple years.
So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.
Is that true? I thought phd students typically had access to these via the (expensive) agreements universities have. I thought sci-hub was for everyone else?
Lots of researchers outside the first world may actually fall into the everyone else category. Not all institutions are flush with money to sign the extortionate licensing deals. Gp comment is definitely a stretch though.
As someone part of a university, I don’t even bother trying to sign in with my organization, since the probability I have “legal” access to a drm-free pdf of a resource by signing in is lower than if I just try it on sci hub.
Sci hub is significantly easier to use than any legitimate university library.
Also, university researchers have been sharing their institutes' access to papers for ever. No university subscribes to all journals. 15 years ago it was quick email to your undergrad mate asking if their uni subscribes to a particular journal. I was at a top-10 ranked US eng school and this was the case. 25 years ago it was a call and a fax. Before then a photocopier.
Most university libraries have a proxy bookmarklet. Go to site with paywall > hit bookmarklet > login > no paywall. zotero will even detect this bookmarklet and run it automatically after you've used it the first time for a given site. It even works for stuff like using your university library's access to newspapers like nyt. At this point if you are going to r1 you have access to everything under the sun.
And many others will force you to connect to VPN if you happen to be connected from outside the university network. Which in most cases a requirement of agreements with those publishers.
I published in refereed journals from 1997 until 2006.
I was in academia - the last one, post-academia - and it was (to me) understood that having peer review was at least a gatekeeper for releasing information that might be useful to or otherwise heeded by the public. Maybe.
Are there problems with that? Are the prices exceptionally high, especially for academic libraries (I recall that Tetrahedron Letters was on the order of $25K in 1995 for a subscription at UT-Austin)? Yes.
But I keep coming back to the standards involved with friendly, neutral, or hostile people vetting your work. It's a higher standard to reach than the free market will entertain, but there is a cost. Keep you on your toes.
The staff and editors need to be paid. Reprints - something from my generation, actual hard copies, some of those requiring color and not BW - cost money. It all costs money.
Do the authors get something in return? Yes. We get refereed journal article citations on our CVs, and that's invaluable.
Love the idea, wish there was a meeting in the middle.
The issue is that these days the reprints and the editors and the staff are all obsolete. The valuable part you're pointing at is peer review, which academics do for free. Then the people who have been made redundant by the information age make all the money.
This isn't a both sides issue, it's very clearly one sided because all the actual work is outsourced to free labor.
There's no reason to meet in the middle, these companies need to die off and distribution should be free and open.
There definitely is a happy medium. I think the problem is, the current model is way out, where basically everyone (sometimes including editors, usually reviewers) are unpaid, while the journal is expensive beyond reasonable bounds.
This system only works because most/all academics are underwritten by the taxpayer, and are willing to put up with a pretty high level of exploitation.
I think the logical solution would be just to formalize the fact that taxpayers foot the bill. Make journal access free, earmark funds for editors and staff at universities or research institutions, then just pay that directly out of taxes. It would cost a lot less than the current solution, where the taxpayer pays the wages of the contributors (so the journal doesn't have to), then pays the massively bloated subscription fee, then doesn't even get access in the end.
There are a lot of academic papers I want to read, either to advance my own knowledge or because I am doing a vanity search and want to see where I made some mistakes, or how I can improve things.
I don't mind actually paying for things, but the prices they charge are insane. Especially for something were I there only thing I can see is a small footnote that just happens to make what I am interested in pop to the top of search results.
I doubt many academics oppose sci-hub making the work that they provide to journals for free (or sometimes paying absurd open access fees) available to the general public without paywalls or other annoying restrictions.
118 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadThe scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.
But you can't be a scientist without obtaining grant money. And publishing - particularly in top journals - is the major way to accomplish that.
Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups...
Technically, of course, you can be a scientist without involving yourself with all that, if you're independently wealthy and/or doing it as a hobby in addition to your main job. Science used to be done that way (e.g. by bored educated aristocrats), but I think we have a strong consensus that the world would be worse than the current situation if there would be a de facto limitation to doing science only by those who can self-fund it.
Clearly there are pros and cons to the current system as you’ve pointed out.
The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
We just need a better system for QA in general.
But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
- The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal".
- The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional.
Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible.
[1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442
[2] https://msp.org/
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology
If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
2. In many cases, publicly funded research is gated behind paywalls;
3. In many (most?) cases, peer reviewer are paid nothing or close to it.
4. Most researchers I know either use sci-hub, other so called illegal sources for papers, or ask the authors for a copy.
If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
The scientists have a right to sell their labour, not to own observed facts.
You can pay people to do science on an hourly basis just fine
A lot of the papers on SciHub are uploaded by the authors, because they aren't doing the research for the paltry royalties they receive.
As many others in the thread have said - the profits from the paper paywalls go to the publishers, reviewing is done by volunteers.
As an aside, it's funny how often defenders of intellectual slavery are so dug in to their beliefs while being completely unaware of the mechanisms of what they're defending. I suppose such ignorance is a necessary precondition to support such injustice.
What's stopping scientists from just not publishing in those for-profit journals? I mean, it's their paper.
Journals also often require that you assign copyright to them and restrict your ability to publish in more accessible places.
I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access.
Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad.
Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic.
TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
I've not noticed this in biology. Most journals charge a couple thousand to publish. The only exception I can think of are the plos journals. And they also never ever pay you to review.
In engineering, at least as far as I encountered, only some shady journals would charge you.
The journal business model is astounding: they charge a lot to publish, a lot to read what they publish, they do not pay reviewers, editors, or authors, and then get to claim ownership of what was published.
It's not enough for legislation to be "you must have some bs pseudo-open-access document", it should be "no employee of a publicly funded institution shall undertake unpaid labour for a journal, the journal must pay a minimum of 50% of proceeds to the author/institution, etc".
But with journals, there's nothing. It's 100% path dependence and coordination problems. No one would ever create this arrangement from scratch today.
"AE: Although the Soviet Union collapsed, the communist ideology remained strong, so I grew up in an environment where communism was still an inspiring idea. Hence, I always understood Sci-Hub as a communist project. The first version of Sci-Hub even had a small hammer and a sickle on the website, and if you hovered a mouse over it, text would pop up stating, “The communist society…is based upon common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption”
Knowledge today has become the private property of corporations such as the publisher Elsevier. These corporations are making a lot of money, while researchers are poor and exploited. Sci-Hub is against all of this. Knowledge belongs to everyone and all people should have equal access to it. Sci-Hub is fighting for communism in science."
"Why Stalin is God"[1] is the most marked example; e.g. "He [Stalin] created a communist paradise for righteous people, while bad people were sent to GULAG.", or "Someone may disagree by saying: there was a censorship in the Soviet Union, and it was impossible to say anything against Stalin - therefore everyone loved him. However, we must admit: the censorship was done by the people - there must be someone who sends you to prison if you don't love Stalin. Stalin obviously couldn't do this himself, on the contrary, that was done by other people for Stalin, because he was loved very strongly."
I'm not even going to spend time addressing this nonsense; it should be obvious to everyone with knowledge of Stalin Russia what's wrong with this. This article is an apologetic for evil. Sci-Hub is used as apologetics for evil. I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
I know everyone here loves Sci-Hub, and I like the idea of it too. Everyone can make their own decision based on this, but for me, personally, I find it hard to support a site that explicitly defends evil in such a way.
[1]: https://sci-hub.ru/why-stalin-is-god
Ugh, there are no "political ideas" here. Why does western culture always insist on viewing everything through political or ideological lens? You realise that you are literally the only ones who does that? No one else is that bothered with proper virtue signalling at the expense of objectivity.
> apologetics for evil
You're reasoning in childish categories. It's not what is going on here.
> I wouldn't have minded so much if she just uses her own website for this kind of drivel, but she uses Sci-Hub.
Sci-Hub IS her own website, deal with it.
> I'm pretty sure people's responses would be different with s/Stalin/Hitler/. I don't see why it's all that different; both were genocidal mass-murderers.
Why do "people's responses" even matter here? Objective reality exists in the synergy of cause-effect relations. I don't know that your "knowledge of Stalin Russia" (which in itself is a factual error, it's "Stalin's USSR") is, but denying the historical fact that he had a personality cult (which just by definition imples enough love) is just as dishonest as denying that Hitler was loved and supported in Europe and in the US for a long time, not in the least for his antagonism towards the above-mentioned USSR. The fact that they were genocidal mass-murdurers does not eject them from history and context directly into the vacuum. Even if it upsets some people who love to pinpoint all the blame to "a single evil person", despite that history would have just as well produced someone similar given the circumstance if the above-mentioned evil person didn't exist. It's just an assessment of a historical process, nothing more.
Capitalism can take many forms and is often tempered with more socialist policies. No country – including the United States" is "pure capitalist". China has its own spin on capitalism, but that doesn't make it not-capitalism.
The PRC never embraced free markets, transitioning from state capitalism to something closer to fascist-style corporatism.
Communist economies are about the opposite of free enterprise.
Capitalism is its own purely economic animal, perhaps directly opposed to a communist economy, but not the opposite of a communist government.
Really capitalism is not conceptully supposed to be a form of government to begin with, but it can snuggle up to any government from democracy to communism to monarchy and anything in between.
And there you go.
As an "ism" capitalism has been with us since prehistoric times, any actual governance it accomplishes is effectively done by the different types of political systems it has operated with, that have come and gone over the millennia.
Sometimes the strength of the capital is greater than the resources or political will of the government in power at the time, sometimes not. Debt can distort this balance.
As we have seen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#cite_note-:12-31
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censo...
The free riders here are the middlemen who take their pound of flesh and hide almost everything behind paywalls and expensive subscriptions.
They not only get free content from the authors, free labor from the reviewers.
They get to charge the readers but also THE FREAKING AUTHORS for their submissions.
Scientists are not obligated to publish in journals at all.
Much the same way you’ll voluntarily do something when someone who holds a position of power over you asks you to do something.
As numerous other people have pointed out, there is no small amount of career advancement riding on the back of being published in a journal. Until the culture of publish-or-perish can be removed from universities and publishers can be removed from their position as rent-seeking parasites, this dynamic will continue.
Fundamentally there’s no difference than say bootstrapping a company or seeking investment.
Yes, "publish or perish" technically provides two options. ;-)
But it would be nice to see Elsevier and its ilk replaced with true open access journals (without open access fees), and for everything to be available on arxiv.org or similar sites.
Since there's no planet B and also no planet A sooner than later, we should put ourselves in the position to be able to move to a terraformed Mars or in temporary Dyson spheres as soon as possible.
These types of projects ("Shoulders of giants" all the way down) make me hopeful for the future of humanity.
Thank you Alexandra Elbakyan!
Calling Musk to prove he's a real philanthropist and buy out the entire scientific publishing industry!
And than Aaron hanged himself and Carl feels good and still sells his books, https://www.amazon.com/stores/Carl-Malamud/author/B000APW8Z0...?
This is a wonderful instructive almost biblical story.
So science marches on but without public access to the full text articles all we have to go on are the usually low quality science journalism press releases.
Science in the rich countries perhaps, anyway. And if you're at a university.
Also, university researchers have been sharing their institutes' access to papers for ever. No university subscribes to all journals. 15 years ago it was quick email to your undergrad mate asking if their uni subscribes to a particular journal. I was at a top-10 ranked US eng school and this was the case. 25 years ago it was a call and a fax. Before then a photocopier.
exactly my entire point.
people inside the tower just do not understand, which is why scihub came from someone outside of it
I was in academia - the last one, post-academia - and it was (to me) understood that having peer review was at least a gatekeeper for releasing information that might be useful to or otherwise heeded by the public. Maybe.
Are there problems with that? Are the prices exceptionally high, especially for academic libraries (I recall that Tetrahedron Letters was on the order of $25K in 1995 for a subscription at UT-Austin)? Yes.
But I keep coming back to the standards involved with friendly, neutral, or hostile people vetting your work. It's a higher standard to reach than the free market will entertain, but there is a cost. Keep you on your toes.
The staff and editors need to be paid. Reprints - something from my generation, actual hard copies, some of those requiring color and not BW - cost money. It all costs money.
Do the authors get something in return? Yes. We get refereed journal article citations on our CVs, and that's invaluable.
Love the idea, wish there was a meeting in the middle.
This isn't a both sides issue, it's very clearly one sided because all the actual work is outsourced to free labor.
There's no reason to meet in the middle, these companies need to die off and distribution should be free and open.
This system only works because most/all academics are underwritten by the taxpayer, and are willing to put up with a pretty high level of exploitation.
I think the logical solution would be just to formalize the fact that taxpayers foot the bill. Make journal access free, earmark funds for editors and staff at universities or research institutions, then just pay that directly out of taxes. It would cost a lot less than the current solution, where the taxpayer pays the wages of the contributors (so the journal doesn't have to), then pays the massively bloated subscription fee, then doesn't even get access in the end.
Without sci-hub I would not be able to get access to a lot of them. A good example being this one https://sci-hub.ru/10.1109/TASE49443.2020.00032 which I could had no other option than pay an exorbitant amount of money to access https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9405312
I don't mind actually paying for things, but the prices they charge are insane. Especially for something were I there only thing I can see is a small footnote that just happens to make what I am interested in pop to the top of search results.
:)))))