• I'm Hiding 🇦🇺
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      473 months ago

      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!

      • Luke
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        193 months ago

        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?

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          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.

    • @[email protected]
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      103 months ago

      Yep, before sci hub you could always just email an author and probably get the paper that way, they aren’t the ones profiting.

  • Universal MonkOP
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    3 months ago

    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. :)

  • @[email protected]
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    2363 months ago

    “stolen” is such an exaggerated misrepresentation…news organizations should really do better. When you steal something from someone, the owner loses access to it. She just liberated public research.

    • Arthur Besse
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      143 months ago

      These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉

    • Universal MonkOP
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      43 months ago

      I totally agree that she just liberated it. But since many lawsuits said she was “stealing” from them, and people who don’t know the details at first glance may think that too. So I think the headline is correct in a news sense. And the article is very accurate and favorable of her.

    • @[email protected]
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      713 months ago

      When a regular person makes something available that shouldnt be behind a paywall to begin with it’s stealing. When a billionaire or company uses ai to gather data from paid sources or just straight out plagiarises it’s just maximising profits.

      • @[email protected]
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        373 months ago

        Hey hey hey, hold on just a second. It’s not called “maximizing profits”, we don’t do that! It’s called ✨innovation✨

      • Ulrich
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        43 months ago

        Using public information to create something new is not even a little the same as copying private information and then making it public.

    • shath [comrade/them]
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      113 months ago

      like stealing video games that you technically license if you buy, you’re not stealing anything except access which is fundamentally the only thing they can sell

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Also I have met people who have published some pretty important papers, most of them use scihub on a weekly basis, and none of them care that their papers get “stolen”. And they all have some strong opinions about Elsevier.

    • @[email protected]
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      83 months ago

      This is why I hate the recent trend where people are saying “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

      “Piracy”, or more accurately “copyright infringement” was never stealing. What you’re doing is violating the government-granted monopoly on copying something. That’s so different from stealing.

  • @[email protected]
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    443 months ago

    Still insane to me that one woman literally saves the world of science from all this corruption

    • @[email protected]
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      163 months ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    503 months ago

    Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I’m so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn’t be able to graduate without debt (or “even more debt” for the Americans) otherwise.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        When my wife was getting her masters degree, her professor told her about it too lol. All of her professors pretty much used it. When I myself, tried to tell her about sci-hub and libgen, I was surprised that she was already well acquainted

    • Universal MonkOP
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      13 months ago

      I know a little about what it’s like to have people constantly try to remove me from places. At least in the electronic sense. Lemmy has a hate-erection for me, like no other. lol

      Now that I experience hate and censorship daily, I have so much more sympathy for people like her.

      And she has to deal with it in the real world. I don’t. Very easy for me to laugh it off.

      But that chick has to deal with relocating, lawsuits, hackers, etc. She’s my total hero now. So fucking cool.

      • Universal MonkOP
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        23 months ago

        Your choice of words may trigger some people around here…

        Can you explain what you mean by that?

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          Legends walk among us

          It’s a game that carries a lot of memes, and I see you have already some replies about your comment being “sus”.

          • Universal MonkOP
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            2 months ago

            Ahh ok! Thanks for the explanation.

            I have no idea why my comment is seen as being “sus” or why my choice of words would trigger anyone.

            But meh, Lemmy being Lemmy, I guess.

  • Luke
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    3 months ago

    “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.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      Elbakyan is an immeasurably more virtuous, noble and honorable person than these Dylla and Greco worms.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      “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!”

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
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      173 months ago

      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

    • @[email protected]
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      153 months ago

      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

    • @[email protected]
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      363 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        123 months ago

        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

    • 7bicycles [he/him]
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      43 months ago

      “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?

    • @[email protected]
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      323 months ago

      ‘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?

    • Universal MonkOP
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      3 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      213 months ago

      “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”

      Well, I’m convinced!

  • @[email protected]
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    123 months ago

    You see, the problem, publishers, is that your “business” should not have been a business in the first place.

  • @[email protected]
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    233 months ago

    Following in Aaron Swartz’s footsteps.

    Hopefully she doesn’t get treated the way he did.

    • Universal MonkOP
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      63 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        53 months ago

        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.