Stolen papers. Absolutely. Stolen by corporations.
I wrote one of those papers. The fuckers charged me $1000 to publish it as open access, then other journals download it and stick it on their websites and charge $60 to read it. What a joke!
That’s such a fuckin’ racket!
Ignorant person checking in with probably a dumb and oversimplified question, but what prevents you and other science researchers from posting your writing independently? Why must you submit to these corpo controlled publications?
If you don’t get published, you don’t get cited. If you don’t get cited, it appears your work isn’t important.
That said, every researcher I’ve emailed requesting a copy of a paper gladly supplied it, and many put them up on their uni sites.
Yep, before sci hub you could always just email an author and probably get the paper that way, they aren’t the ones profiting.
As someone in science that has used this many times, I can’t emphasize enough how much this has accelerated research in the modern era. I am so grateful for her work.
A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.
Yep, I just found out about it recently because I was doing research on a project. I had heard, but never explored or looked into, sci-hub. I had no idea about it. I don’t know how I missed it all of these years!
Sadly no longer updated but I think libgen and some other services are filling the gaps.
Yeah, I was bummed to find out it’s no longer updated. But there are so many articles that it’s still helpful and great. And she still is holding the flame by keeping it up. I’m checking out libgen right now actually.
Fr. After I graduated I was cut off from access to scientific literature, which is a major blow when trying to keep up in ones field.
You see, the problem, publishers, is that your “business” should not have been a business in the first place.
Still insane to me that one woman literally saves the world of science from all this corruption
And she still doing it. And still pretty much alone in doing it.
Perhaps not saved, but I’d venture the most significant nail in the coffin of the scientific publishing mafia so far, pursued with integrity and honor. The rise of open publishing that followed is very telling, and in my mind directly attributable to Alexandra’s work and it’s popularity, they know they need to adapt or (probably and) die.
Still need to work on the publish or perish mentality, getting negative results published, and getting corporate propaganda out of the mix, to name a few.
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Badass
Following in Aaron Swartz’s footsteps.
Hopefully she doesn’t get treated the way he did.
I get so pissed when I think about Aaron Swartz. He was a bit before his time. I’d love it if here were still around. There would be so much more people rallying behind him these current times.
I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).
They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.
Filling in Aaron Swartz footsteps
Hopefully not all the way…
articles aren’t - and cannot be - stolen; articles are meant to be read.
You can steal potential profits.
Stealing profits that are already made by stealing? Yeah, I have no sympathy for that.
Tax payers already pay for this shit through federal funding of the sciences, just for the publishers to turn around and steal people’s time and money to view and peer review them. Publishers are thieves, so they can go fuck themselves.
I agree, If the research was funded by the government; then the research belongs to the people.
Publishers and corporations is why IP laws are so fucked up beyond recognition.
information isn’t profit
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“Actual woman”? Yikes.
Hmm, guess we’re not allowed to call actual women ‘actual women’ anymore.
What a world.
actual woman
you might want to rephrase that (cis woman, for example)
At first glance I thought, “so that’s what Anna looks like.”
she’s anna. anna archive
I’m gonna look up Anna info next. I don’t know anything about her either.
I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it’s just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren’t familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she’s the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.
And she’s my personal hero. :)
Thanks for sharing!
hero
Agreed
“People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”
Albert Greco, a publishing expert at Fordham University who is working on a book about scholarly publishing, said those making that argument are forgetting everything they learned or should have learned in economics class.
“There are costs,” he said. “Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”
Yes.
“So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”
These assholes don’t even have a better reason for fleecing everyone than base greed, and they don’t try to hide it.
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bitter mystery
No, I think he’s saying that it makes it more miserable and mysterious, but only for poor people, which he is not and therefore the status quo is good.
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former director of the American Institute of Physics
arXiv, which physicists setup nearly as far back as the web, would have a word with this guy. The web was invented at CERN practically so physicists could share research documents.
“It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”
Well, I’m convinced!
Refuses to elaborate
Sues
I could almost sympathize when it came to paper publishing. Because the cost to publish was high, and not a lot of people buying. But now with electronic formats, yeah, they are total assholes in the current sense.
“Does this for profit news agency require money for information? Then surely academic research needs to require money to get the info as well! Nevermind that public funds are involved with a lot of research initially where news orgs don’t have that, we need to make a profit cuz reasons!”
“Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”
Tautology School Degree. Why not?
Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.
The existence of publishers for scientific literature is completely unnecessary in the modern era. They exist only to make profits to continue their existence. They don’t actually provide value anymore when research institutions can just conduct peer review and then let researchers self-publish.
They create negative value (a bottleneck) by limiting who can access research for just… aggregating and hosting articles.
wouldn’t it be funny if I slapped in a few ssds into an old desktop I found on the side of the road and hosted the entirety of human knowledge from it
YOU wOULDN’T
DOWNLOAd A
CIVILISATION
Yeah lmao, that’s the worst possible argument he could give I think
“Have you forgotten your economics class?” And then compared public research to a private newspaper
Like, lmao
economics class
which is absolute ideology anyhow
“Does The Washington Post have a paywall?”
wow, you’re using the everyone else is doing it argument. These are fucking children
This is an insult to children, who are generally willing to share and kind people, unlike these corporate ghouls
Also the Washington Post actually pays its writers.
That can’t sounds like won’t
‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers.
We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.
Instead, he just takes everything from authors and reviewers for free. Is he living in a different country?
No give, only take!!!
Is that the Anna from Anna’s archive?
/s
