The Internet beat out OSI because of the sort of people who use sci-hub. We can kill Elsevier the same way.
This isn't some wild conspiracy theory. I was there, plus I've been on the internet-history mailing list, where Internet pioneers still walk the Earth (the ones still living). I recently instigated a discussion on GOSIP (1990), which was supposed to finally drive a stake in the heart of TCP.
Nearly everyone in academia and the non-profit sector jumped on TCP early in the 80s and before, and accumulated decades of actual operational experience with it. If you were choosing a protocol for your network, you knew all the devices ran TCP and could talk to each other. Anything new you bought surely would, too.
Interop conferences were held, where vendors showed up and made sure they could play, too.
For OSI, not so much. Which OSI "profile" did they support, for one thing?
All this happened because while the telecoms and governments were swearing that OSI would win in the end, the people actually in the field were making TCP just work.
So if you say that scientists prefer sci-hub and other open access: that's how we win. Let's tackle the issues with it if there are any, patiently, one by one. Eventually it'll be a fait accompli.
Why would anyone complaint while sci-hub is there. I know that it is still illegal and people don't talk or encourage this but it is used and a lot. It maybe just a new fact added to unwritten rules in academia. Because I don't think the current situation with publishing industry gets any support inside the community.
Anecdotally, I know some scientists who prefer Sci-Hub even when their institution has a subscription to the journal. The login procedures (and possibly VPN setups when working from home) are too much work when Sci-Hub is immediate.
I'm sure that publishers will try and fight back, just like with music copying.
I would always prefer to get the PDF in the legit way unless sometimes I encountered journals that my institution do not subscribe to.
Only reason for that: to reduce the burden to scihub servers.
I get that but they are that much (at least not 2021 papers because of Indian court case). Also for many fields (steam) the papers usually show up in preprinted repositories like arxiv, biorxiv...etc
Also there are many places to ask for a paper if you really need it like on reddit ( I don't remember the sub reddit name). people do have groups on Facebook and Twitter to ask and provide pdfs. For really desperate people with rare cases if that all does not work, sending a message to thr author asking for a version never gets no. people like when others are interested in their work.
If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub.
If we're going to allow authors to do that then we could reduce the workload by uploading all the papers to central servers, like some sort of hub, and just letting people download them.
The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright. Also USA exporting ever longer copyright terms.
Limit what counts as an artistic work (or what counts asa derivative, extracting data is not artistically derivative).
Limit period of copyright to 20y like for patents.
While the facts presented in a scientific paper may not be copyrighted, the actual form and content of the paper clearly is, both common-sense and legally. Papers contain prose, artistic representations (figures), potentially photographs, and other stylistic elements that are clearly copyrightable.
Whether works funded by government dollars should be copyrightable is of course a different question.
>Papers contain prose, artistic representations (figures), potentially photographs, and other stylistic elements that are clearly copyrightable. //
In copyright there is already a concept (in UK caselaw at the very least) that things that can only be presented in a limited way are effectively not artistic enough to gain copyright. A scientific paper can have artistic prose and such, but the purpose is to make a factual presentation. I'd be happy to allow people to chose to state that their paper is not a presentation of facts, but such things should not be accepted into scientific corpus and should be excluded when considering if an author has fulfilled a contract to produce a scientific paper, or fulfilled a duty to do scientific research.
Photographs which are slavish reproductions---which a photo of apparatus needs to be in order to be scientifically useful---are not artistic works, for example. You can choose puce headings with lilac lines for your table but if it's in a scientific paper the purpose is informational [if that wasn't your purpose then you shouldn't have done it]. Coloured diagrams, sure, if they're used outside the context of the paper, and were manually manipulated, then allow them to be considered artistic works; but in the context of the paper they're presentations of supposed facts.
I don't doubt you can lawyer your way into arguing your scientific paper is a trademark, or a registered design, but it seems entirely reasonable to simply prevent such things with ab exclusion clause in the legislation like "scientific papers are not subject to IP laws and can be shared freely". Of course you need to say what a paper is (something published as if it were a paper, or submitted to a journal as it were a paper, or made available publicly as if were a paper).
> If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub.
It's normally standard academic journal licensing terms that the author is permitted to distribute the work in pre-print form on a person-to-person basis.
The point is though that the license is private and not available, the author might have right to publish to scihub, or scihub might have the right some other way (eg gov funding forces author to publish openly), one doesn't know either way.
> The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright
While they are perhaps not artistic creations, I see scientific papers as the creative work of one or more humans. Most computer code is not an artistic creation, but is a creative work nonetheless. My comment here is not artistic…
It's not the authors paper if a publisher produced it. That's why authors share preprints. But, I'd be surprised if that wasn't disallowed by their contracts in the UK (no point disallowing it in USA, Fair Use would allow it I feel).
> Also for many fields (steam) the papers usually show up in preprinted repositories like arxiv, biorxiv...etc
To my knowledge preprint repositories are popular in physics, math, CS, bio, but not much elsewhere. I work in research in mechanical engineering and no one uses arxiv or anything like it (unfortunately).
I had this problem a few months ago, but because Sci-Hub doesn't have supporting information currently. Yes, I understand normally that is free anyways on journals but for whatever reason this journal (owned by Elsevier ofc) did not have its SI available without a subscription and my institution did not have access to this journal. So no, just use sci-hub is not a valid alternative as it stands today and because of its legal jeopardy means we probably shouldn't become reliant on it.
Sci-hub breaks down beyond the individual researcher level. A 5-person non-profit, startup, etc. can't rely on it. Research projects which study scholarship can't use it.
If I were legally responsible for a company's behavior, I would not want to, for instance, use pirated copies of SolidWorks or Office.
It's an minor risk I would imagine, compared to the benefits of reading the articles. But paying for the articles you cite or reference in presentations seems like a good decision for the same reason as you don't want some "pirated version" notification popping up while you give a presentation at a conference. The risk is a lot lower, but it's the same logic.
Considering the cost of that handful of articles versus the budget for a company's coffee supplies it seems like probably the right decision. I don't think I'd go for an actual journal subscription though, that seems like ridiculous overkill unless you're the size of Google.
It's a minor risk, but with astronomical potential liability. Statutory damages for wilful violation can be up to $150,000 per violation. If your employees download 100 articles, that's a cool $15M.
In many cases, these sorts of crackdowns can come long after-the-fact. The statute-of-limitations is short (3 years, I think), but a lot of courts start the clock ticking when the violation is discovered. If your organization pirates for 30 years, and a publisher does an investigation in 2022, and discovers all 30 years of violations, they would likely file in such a venue.
In most cases, the liability comes in when a business is failing, and goes into don't-give-an-f territory. If Elsevier / Google / Amazon / Coke / [insert random successful business] starts suing researchers when they're big, they're liabile to be hated for it, which endangers their brand and their existing business.
If Elsevier goes into bankruptcy and those copyrights get bought up by parasites, or otherwise starts struggling to survive (as inevitably happens with almost any business eventually) those sorts of retroactive lawsuits often come into play. Most businesses I worked with in the nineties went into owned-by-sleazeballs territory at some point in the forty years since.
> Why would anyone complaint while sci-hub is there.
That is a hack, not a solution. As you noted, it is illegal.
Workarounds are good as a fast fix, but sooner at later we need to look at the system and fix what is not working. This not only fixes this problem but it may fix other copyright/publication/papers problems.
The one who is milking this system doesn't want to change the status quote, this is why a hack is needed. We clearly want a better option, but government & politicians don't seem to care.
Abolishing copyright is the only proper fix. We're dealing with monopolists worth trillions of dollars who have thousands of expensive lobbyists at their employ so this hack might very well be the only effective solution. Essentially it's digital guerrilla warfare.
I am not an MIT researcher however my university dropped Elsevier at some point and I think generally the experience and sentiment is similar across universities and fields from the admittedly small sample size I have.
It makes things more annoying on some levels, but between the two sides of university library versus Elsevier the large majority of scientists agree with Elsevier being wrong so the annoyance is generally acceptable. Ideally this entire system changes for the better but we can make it work in the short term. Not to mention that even before this we often ran into journals we didn't have access to, so some of these annoyances would have existed regardless.
Faculty member here, conducting research on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. For me, 99% or more of all research that is worth reading these days is open access and published for free in non-profit, community-run journals and conferences. The only time I stumble upon pay walls is when I venture into older work or neighbouring research areas.
The only notable exception is Google DeepMind, that has a nasty habit of using Springer Nature. I am assuming it is because of the perceived prestige and disregard for the standards we otherwise have set as a community.
On a personal level, I refuse to review for any entity that maintains closed access journals. It is not sufficient that you offer open access, it should be the norm.
Lastly, all is not fun and games when it comes to open access. Even if your field and publications are always open, you are likely to be forced to upload your work to approved repositories (which always come with horrendous, slow, and fragile user interfaces). You must remember to do this within a given time window or suffer punishments akin to if you had published your work as closed access, marking the work as ineligibility to count towards funding, etc.
Question: how does one stay competitive if a field mostly focuses on high impact factor journals (eg nature) and one makes trainees publish in lower impact factor journals as a matter of principle.
Won’t one be hurting the careers of students by not publishing in the venue with the broadest audience?
Speaking for NLP in particular, and based on my experience, one doesn't publish in conferences "as a matter of principle". One does it because it's how everyone else in the field works. No one I know in the NLP field cares about Nature - if you want to get the broadest audience, you submit to one of the ACL conferences.
The one problem I'm aware of is those who want to get positions in universities that don't know how the field works, because their selection committees tend to complain that you have no journal papers. If that's your plan then you can submit to journals such as CL. But again, that's not where the broadest audience is.
If you are in a field “driven by” closed journals, you are highly unlikely to make career progress if you stay principled as funding, promotions, and so on will depend on publishing where others perceive the work as being good. Maybe if you are an utter genius that brings about a revolution you would not, but how likely is that?
However, I do not expect that the audience that matters will not have access to your work in some way, even without open access. If your university is a good one, they will have subscriptions. Plus, there will be networks of researchers illegally passing around documents. Rather, closed access hurts researchers at less privileged institutions and the general public, as they are unlikely to gain access.
This is more or less my experience as well. I’m not as involved as I used to be, but the only time I couldn’t get access to something I wanted in ML was Google’s TPUv4 paper. But a quick trip to https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar solved that.
I'm a research engineer in mechanical engineering. I hear about open access from time to time but it's still very fringe. Some journals offer the option of the author paying a fee in exchange for their paper being published as OA, but from my experience not many PIs see the value in this, and prefer to use their grant dollars for other things.
Sci-hub has been a huge help though. Our library subscriptions cover probably 80-90% of what I'm interested in and scihub covers the vast majority of the remaining fraction. For the last 1 or 2 %, I turn to emailing friends/contacts in other universities to ask them if they have a subscription and can get me a copy. Our library also offers the same service (inter library loans for papers) but charges 2$ and has a 1-2 week delay.
My job is building/maintaining a digital repository for university materials, a significant portion of which is thesis and dissertations.
It replaced a closed source vendor product. It's been very successful - however, there's a pretty consistent minority who are very vocal and unhappy about having their materials freely available. Embargo negotiation and publishing policy is a regular argument.
most of the papers I read are open access, especially the newer ones. There are some good journals on Elsevier and Springer and most of IEEE stuff that is behind paywall though. My university gives me access to the majority of them and when not I use SciHub.
Elsevier's business model was valid in the 1990s and 2000s when most people used paper. Unfortunately the world has changed but their business model hasn't.
In no way defending real estate agents, but people have been predicting that the Internet would obsolete their business model since the Clinton administration. It's yet to happen, and arguably they have more of a hold on real estate transactions than they did previously. The web never disrupted their business model, sadly
I learned this week that Elsevier has raised 10x the price of one of their products for the company where I'm currently working. I don't think that's why OP sent it, but I do wonder whether the two are correlated.
Edit: I checked the OP's history and he sends at least one link every hour every day for a total of about 600 links in the last two weeks. So I'm guessing it's just a repost bot.
If you'd like to remember Aaron Swartz, you should remember MIT continued to use CFAA to extort people, right up to the time it was overturned (Van Buren).
The administration's actions showed no admission of fault, guilt, or changed behavior.
This isn't some wild conspiracy theory. I was there, plus I've been on the internet-history mailing list, where Internet pioneers still walk the Earth (the ones still living). I recently instigated a discussion on GOSIP (1990), which was supposed to finally drive a stake in the heart of TCP.
Nearly everyone in academia and the non-profit sector jumped on TCP early in the 80s and before, and accumulated decades of actual operational experience with it. If you were choosing a protocol for your network, you knew all the devices ran TCP and could talk to each other. Anything new you bought surely would, too. Interop conferences were held, where vendors showed up and made sure they could play, too.
For OSI, not so much. Which OSI "profile" did they support, for one thing?
All this happened because while the telecoms and governments were swearing that OSI would win in the end, the people actually in the field were making TCP just work.
So if you say that scientists prefer sci-hub and other open access: that's how we win. Let's tackle the issues with it if there are any, patiently, one by one. Eventually it'll be a fait accompli.