While at university, you just take having free access to journals for granted. When you leave academia the withdrawal hits you. A lot of journals will make an article free if the author pays extra. (For those unfamiliar with how journals work, you submit your work, they get other scientists to review it for them for free, and then they charge you to publish it if the reviewers are all happy enough). The result of this practice is that you don't automatically know if an article will be possible to view or not. You can't just say, "Oh that's in Journal X, there's no point in looking it up because it won't be free". You have to check and be randomly denied!

The effect of this is that you can no longer freely follow the rabbit hole of an interesting chain of references, nor will you read articles outside your bailiwick for fun because they popped up on a blog somewhere. Even if you carefully restrict the journals you're interested in reading, subscriptions will total several thousand per year. Single articles will be priced at $40-50, which is just nuts when you're reading for curiosity. Even if it pertains to your job, it's a chore to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to make your company pay for it. The end result is that, once you leave university, you're cut off from legally obtaining access to a lot of interesting stuff. How does restricting knowledge in this manner serve science or industry?

In physics, arxiv is pretty freakin' awesome... for recent stuff. If you're following a reference chain, you go off the reservation pretty darned quick. I admit, I've been guilty of using some slightly more labor intensive means of obtaining articles without paying for them, but it's a pain. I honestly hope somebody succeeds in making all of history's scientific publications freely and easily available online in a very permanent way. Hell, that research was practically all funded with public money anyways! Why should private companies like Elsevier be collecting money for research Schrödinger conducted on the public dime before anyone alive was born?

Sci-Hub is new to me, but it looks promising. This is something the world needs.

It's not a complete solution, but you can walk in to many public university libraries without needing to have a university affiliation and use their computers to read/print articles and/or go find the print copy of many journals.

At the UCSF libraries here in San Francisco you can walk in off the street and browse the stacks and use the photocopiers without showing any ID. You can also use a workstation for one 2h session/day for free to access online journals and databases. You can also pay $100/yr for borrowing privileges (up to 5 items at a time).

https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/computing/policies_pub...

https://www.library.ucsf.edu/services/borrowing/privileges

The situation may differ greatly among fields? For CS, ACM digital library is $99/yr which is pretty reasonable (I've been paying it for years and willing to chip in that range even ACM allows the author to put up the submitted version on his/her own site for free). I do occasionally hit paywalls of other publishes, and wish they make non-member per-article fee cheaper---like $5 or $10 instead of $35; they might set the per-article price that high to encourage institutions to sign up the package?

I'm not a researcher though, so my pursuit of papers are mostly purely interest-driven and can be given up easily. If you need to survey large number of papers I'd imagine the fee quickly accumulates.

No question scientific publishers are effectively a racket. The problem is that as a researcher you're stuck. If you want tenure, you need a publication in a big journal. There are a few that are open access in some domains, notably biology, but even there Plos Biology et. al. doesn't quite have the cachet of Nature/Science/Cell.

In other fields, it can be even harder to find a good open access solution. In chemistry for example, I can't think of one. You can pay to have ACS or other publishers make something open access, but that's more money out a researcher's pocket that's not going toward better science.

Sure, publishing has costs, but nowhere near what gets charged. Also, much of the labor of reviewing papers is also provided to publishers free of charge, scientists review each other's work for no fee before acceptance in a journal that will charge dearly for it.

We as tax payers pay for this work, the people we pay to do it are caught in a catch-22 situation where they can either hand over their work to someone who will charge an arm and a leg, or be pushed out of science.

The researchers deserve some of the blame as well. In physics, at least, and certainly in some other fields, there is a strong tradition of posting preprints to the arXiv or other similar free archives. The journals, including all the top journals, accommodate this---they have no choice.

You mention chemistry. I don't know anything about chemistry journals, but given the precedent set by other fields, I feel that chemists don't have a good excuse for locking their research up behind paywalls.

Some chemistry journals do not allow you to publish if you place a copy on a preprint server like arxiv. The key to this battle will be funding agencies.

Well... you could still make the copy available after the article was published.

If you don't mind breaking your contract with the publisher.

What can they do against it?

Sue you for damages.

You mean, all $0 of them?

Stop being obstinate. You know exactly what the parent means, and that publishers can sue authors who distribute the works for which they (the publishers) own copyright.

Paywalls are a nuisance. Failures of peer review, lack of reproducibility, and political bias are some of the real problems.

Scientists and the institutions that support them must work towards solving these problems. Nobody is going to do that for them. A good first step would be to start acknowledging that the practice of science is as political as any other important human endeavour, and not some impartial objective selfless oracle. Step two could be finding solutions based on this new admission.

I don't want to defend Elsevier, but this article was just egregiously one-sided. Surely an article like this should examine whether this model is sustainable, or what it would really mean if these for-profit publishers disappeared. (Some of them, for instance, employ full-time editors to sift through papers and pick the best ones. How does this sifting happen in the brave new world of universal free access?)

Also they quote "Robin Hood" thus:

"Elsevier, in contrast, operates by racket: If you do not send money, you will not read any papers."

Ummm, that's how most businesses work. If you want a sandwich, you have to pay for it first... Not all businesses are rackets.

"Robin Hood" continues...

"On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why can Elsevier not work like this, I wonder?"

Ummm, because they're a for-profit company, and their officers have a obligation to try to maximize profit for their share-holders?

Again, I don't want to defend Elsevier, but I think a better article would have acknowledged that there's more than one side to this issue.

If you don't want to defend Elsevier, then don't. The research was paid for with our tax dollars. The public has a right to read it. The academics who write and review the papers are not paid by Elsevier. The only value Elsevier provides is choosing which papers to accept, and organizing physical printing of the articles. A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs... and in some fields, that's what's starting to happen.

> A committee of prestigious academics in a particular field could easily choose a few leading papers to accept each month, and run a web server with some PDFs.

This is a little naive. Running a good journal takes a lot of time and effort (not to mention a little bit of money).

Are you familiar with http://www.nature.com/news/leading-mathematician-launches-ar...

I'm not saying that it can't be done. But I think it is an open question whether we can move to a model where all journals work this way. It inevitably means academics will have to spend time and money on things that they didn't previously have to spend time and money on.

Academics already have to keep up with the literature in their field. It is an important part of being a researcher. You don't want to spend your time on something someone has already done, and you want to cite prior work.

In practice, paper selection is done in a bottom-up fashion already. An individual lab usually decides whether a paper is worth publishing. A minor conference decides which of the papers submitted to it are worth featuring. Bigger conferences look at the results of the minor ones. And so on. There is not a guy at Elsevier whose job it is to read the entire internet. Like the rest of their business, it's parasitic off the publicly funded university research system.

I know how the system works, I'm an academic myself.

If you really think that no-one employed by journals is actually doing any work, I'm not sure what to say. The reality is that editing and publishing are time consuming, and that if this work is not being doing by paid employees of journals, it's going to have to be done by someone else.

Paper selection is not really the issue. That is largely done by (unpaid) reviewers in any case. It's everything else that goes into running a journal that's potentially going to give rise to problems.

Again, I'm not saying that it's impossible for a group of academics to get together and run a journal entirely by themselves. I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals. It's very easy to confuse work that's easy with work that's quick. Yes, it's easy to set up a website with a few PDFs on it, and it's easy to forward papers to reviewers, and it's easy to come up with a LaTeX stylesheet for papers, etc. etc. But maintaining all of that stuff and keeping it running smoothly eats up a lot of time, even though there's nothing fundamentally difficult about it.

> I think it's less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals

Yes, it's less clear because we don't have that kind of system yet to see. We need to try it. Perhaps we'll find we do not need all current traditional journals. Perhaps we'll be fine with online archive for all academic publications and a good search engine.

Well, I'm really defending the rule of law, not Elsevier. I fully support the current trend towards open access journals. But open access journals don't involve systematic copyright infringement.

I wouldn't fault an opinionated blog post for trying to make a persuasive argument. Why should the author pretend to be a pseudo-objective newspaper journalist and mix in Elsevier's talking points? This is seems to be written with the reasonable assumption that the reader is aware of the academic journal publishing reform movement and its opponents.

> If you want a sandwich, you have to pay for it first... Not all businesses are rackets.

A more accurate analogy might be:

You are a small sandwich manufacturer. Supermarkets are the only shops in town. The supermarket won't pay you, the sandwich manufacturer, to stock your goods. In fact, they may charge you for the privilege. Or they may charge their hungry customers. Or both.

Legacy science publishers are one of the best examples of copyright fail - how times have changed such that the current rules are no longer aligned with reasonable goals of current society.

Isn't this effectively what Aaron Swartz got in trouble for?

Except I don't think he actually released any of the documents he was collecting. So what Aaron was doing was far less condemnable. This is just out-right disregard for the copyright law.

And I love it.

He got in trouble for hacking in his own country. Something the author of this project wisely avoids.

Breaking and entering? No.

more or less yes.

Is it possible for anyone who wants to to just mirror the entire database? How big is it anyway?

If each article weighs in at 1mb (probably an overestimate) then 1mil papers weighs about 1Tb, so for their currently reported 47mil papers you are looking worst case at 50Tb. If we assume they have about 50% coverage (which seems reasonable base on this article [0]) then 100Tb total under the 1mb avg. I'm guessing that number is quite high because the true average will be significantly less than 1mb and compression could bring it down even more.

0. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-outpu...

I applaud what sic-hub is doing, but am curious why doesn't Elsevier simply block the IPs that sci-hub is using. I imagine that once a university gets blocked, whoever shared their credentials at that university will get similar treatment to what Aaron Swartz experienced. I for one would never take that kind of risk.

Numerous journals offer access to researchers, campuses, etc., through various systems. These are either individually authenticated, or are offered through campus-wide systems.

My understanding is that Sci-Hub works through "donated" access -- either credentials or inside-the-firewall systems -- through which it can request papers. There are other options for feeding papers into the system as well, and once they're inside, they're then available. Given that most disciplines tend to have a few highly-cited papers, and a standard Zipf / Power curve, starting with the most relevant papers and working down will get you a lot of coverage.

You've still got to keep up with new publications, but that's tractable.

Elsevier would have to deny access to entire academic institutions, or highly-placed researchers. Given they're already in a hot seat, that's a risky proposition.

Expected LibGen. Was not disappointed.

Well, SciHub isn't LibGen, though they're similar in concept. I believe SciHub used to be accessible through LibGen, but the latter has been flattened a bit.

True, but there's a strong connection mentioned in the article.

The website is:

sci-hub.io

searching for scihub returned results for other organisations.

Anyone use it much? How complete is it? I just tried it and got the nature paper about deepmind's go playing program, which was nice.

Although we just had https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192, this article appears to give more information, so we won't treat it as a dupe.