Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed

Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by philipkglass on Thursday July 27, 2017 @03:04PM (#14868349)

A lot of papers get ingested into sci-hub while they're still in the preprint/early-access stage. Sci-hub doesn't appear to reingest papers after the final version is published. It's one of my very few gripes about the system. A more quality-focused system would probably handle this edge case.

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by poppingtonic on Thursday July 27, 2017 @03:35PM (#14868643)

This seems more like a versioning issue. Can't papers that pass review get a new DOI? I'm thinking something like semver for scientific papers or scientific data, more generally. DOIs even look like semver versions, so why not add more space for the different stages of publishing?

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by philipkglass on Thursday July 27, 2017 @04:01PM (#14868896)

I'm talking about papers like this:

http://sci-hub.cc/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b06335

It's already passed peer review, but the final version will be tidied up with additional editing and will have e.g. the line-by-line numbering stripped out. I see sci-hub versions of papers from months ago, or older, that never update to the final edition. The content doesn't differ much but the final version may have better-placed figures, corrected typos, and other minor improvements.

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by aw3c2 on Thursday July 27, 2017 @05:06PM (#14869533)

If different versions of a paper have different DOI then the DOI is broken and should be replaced by something better.

I consider it a heresy that some sites (fuck ResearchGate, Academia.edu) consider it fine to alter the PDFs. Document integrity should be the holy grail. Files should be final and never get touched. If they are, they are different.

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by matthewmacleod on Thursday July 27, 2017 @06:56PM (#14870446)

Wait, aren't those two statements opposed to each other?

Different versions of a paper should have different DOIs. A DOI is fundamentally quite abstract, and there is no reason that an object-appropriate versioning scheme can't be laid on top. Figshare, for example, uses a versioning system where there is a single DOI referring to the overall artefact (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037) and a versioned-by-suffix DOI referring to a specific version (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037.v16). That works really well IMO.

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by poppingtonic on Friday July 28, 2017 @08:35AM (#14873742)

ArXiv itself does this. See the 'cite as' section of this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.08475, which has the note

arXiv:1707.08475 [stat.ML] (or arXiv:1707.08475v1 [stat.ML] for this version)

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by aw3c2 on Friday July 28, 2017 @11:58AM (#14875199)

Oops, yes of course. That's what I meant. Typo. :)

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Re:Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription... by rvern on Friday July 28, 2017 @12:31AM (#14871983)

The publisher is using DOIs incorrectly.

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