As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference.

I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.

That's very true. The costs are enormous, and also keeps the research closed off to many non-Western universities. Based on rankings such as [1], the research performance is heavily skewed to the US and UK. To gain a greater global perspective, research needs to push outside of these bounds.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scienti...

Be aware that those rankings are heavily biased.

e.g. they don't count 95% of German research at all.

Yeah if you go to a less than stellar university your data sources and paper sources are not that great.

I went to a poorly ranked undergrad and had most of the standard stuff.

I went to a top 10 for my post grad and we had so much stuff, market research reports that normally only consulting companies can afford, top data sources, virtually every journal subscription imaginable, top level subscriptions to online textbook resources.

Imagine a school which pays for a license so you can download PDF's of the textbooks for free.

Made a huge difference, the fact we all had access to this stuff meant the courses could teach literally from the research papers so we learned cutting edge stuff.

My exams were made up of content from research papers written between 2015-2018. Practically brand new developments.

Compared with the poor university which taught from the standard texts.

I'm a PhD student and my university has a pretty decent subscription. But while downloading a paper from a uni IP is very straightforward, from outside campus one has to jump through so many hoops that sci hub is the most comfortable option.

Not only in poorer countries, but for everyone, including Me, doing research before Sci-Hub !

Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?

Given peer review is unpaid and so is authorship, I am curious as to why you think this is a provocative question?

I would imagine that reviewing papers for free is usually considered part of 'service' to the field and the imagined tradeoff here has far more to do with whether the journal is influential or not, and almost nothing to do with pay or access policies.

Paid journals had a point 20 years ago, but not anymore. Most studies are funded by the tax-payers or collaboration with the industries. The authors are not paid. The reviewers are not paid either. Finally the publisher comes along and claims royalty. It doesn't make sense.

Just a reminder that authors have to pay around $800-1000 to publish an article. Then readers have to pay to read the article.

And you have to submit your work edited and almost ready to print, it's not like they are doing heavy work there either. I remember one time I submitted an image as SVG but they wanted EPS and asked me to do the conversion. Yes, that oneliner with "convert" was enough.

The payment is in cv credentials. It is a great payment, by thr way.

I'm not sure if I get your question right. Pretty much everyone in the academy will be reviewing some papers (there are reasons why it's nearly unavoidable, long story), and they're doing that for free.

Are you asking if they will be reviewing papers exclusively for open access journals and avoiding non-open access ones? Or something else?

Peer review is unpaid, no matter if the journal has open access or not

I'll answer this as a practicing academic: I do, regularly, and with the same willingness and rigor I review papers for other journals.

One thing that's never been clear to me: what benefit do you get from reviewing articles for paid journals? Phrased another way, what stands in the way of a movement where reviewers "go on strike" against anything that isn't open access?

Lets consider the top three paid journals I review for. This is certainly not all of them of course, but the volume of review work is the highest with them:

* The American Journal of Epidemiology * Epidemiology * Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology

Those are the journals of the Society for Epidemiological Research, the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America's journals. I am a member of all of those societies. I would, to be frank, rather like to be on the editorial board of those societies - and certainly wish to be on good terms with their editorial staff. And revenue from those journals does help support the mission of the society.

That's the benefit. "Going on Strike" would harm all that, and in my field, the vast majority of papers will be open access within a year anyway (due to NIH/CDC funding).

There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanation so as to be understandable to a wider audience. I for one am not afraid to see a little classic SV disruption hitting Academia.

Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed.

While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience.

I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers).

Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.

Agreed. Academia is gradually doing a better job of explaining research to the public, but this is (rightfully) separate from explaining it to other experts in the field. A good example is the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, who among other actions write publicly accessible summaries [1] and infographics [2] of most of their big detections.

Some groups have a (never large enough) budget to fund flyers, posters, videos, websites, etc. for public outreach and visits to public events. It's also usually possible to ask for this kind of fund when applying for research grants - like adding an extra 3% on top of what you ask for in order to publicise the work.

[1] https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php

[2] http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html

When I review an article, I do it for free. If it's short, I do it fast. If it's long and complicated, I notify whoever is requesting it that I need that-many-weeks for that. If they agree, great; if not, they will have no problems finding another reviewer.

They will be reviewing them for free or, at best, for peanuts.

(Usually, if peanuts are involved, they're literally peanuts)

This was crowdsourcing before it had a name.

What makes you think they plan to become an academic?

I was a researcher at a reasonably big UK University until about 6 months ago, and I used SciHub fairly regularly.

Sometimes I used it because we didn't have the right subscription for that publisher to get me the journal I needed, but mainly I used SciHub to access papers I already had the "right" to access. The layers of logins screens, buggy single-sign-on systems, having to be in the right IP address range, not being able to download a PDF, meant that I almost always attempted to get the paper through SciHub first, and only went through the library systems when I couldn't find what I needed on SciHub.

I have had access to pretty much every journal in existence by working at big R1s for some time now. Still I find myself using SciHub on a daily basis when I am not on campus. Much easier to append '.sci-hub.hk' than authenticate (2-factor now), fire up the proxy, etc.

Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.

That’s the same excuse that’s trotted out in every field with a piracy problem—up until someone finds a way to do it and it turns out it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all. That’s how we got iTunes, Spotify, Steam, Netflix, and so on.

It's not really an excuse - it truly is convenient in such a way that you only have to go to one place to get the thing you want.

If I want Man in the High Castle, I have to pay for Amazon. But if I want Ozark, I need to pay for Netflix. If I want to watch Metropolis, or The Raven, or The Maltese Falcon, they're old and not any streaming service, even if the rights are owned by a studio. Where can I find them? Yup, bittorrent.

At least piracy more-or-less forced most music to be centralised onto a single service, i.e. in many cases you can get the same songs on Spotify and Apple music. It's a shame piracy didn't force Hollywood studios to sort their out, and allow you to just go to one or two sites. Just look at what Disney are trying to do.

You are of course right: "it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all" - it's just that studios and publishers squabble. But I'm not holding my breath on Elsevier, MacGrawHill, AddisonWesley, OUP, SUP, etc. to come up with a commerical SciHub.

The selection of movies on Netflix is beyond dismal. If it's not from the last 15 years, your chances of finding it are virtually nil. If it is from the last 15 years, your chances are merely terrible. The demise of video stores has left me with no idea how I'd (legally) watch an old movie short of purchasing the DVD. Strange that widespread access to classic movies only lasted about 20 years -- from the mid '80s to the mid '00s.

That's a false dichotomy that because there was a blockbuster nearby they automatically had every classic movie in stock. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix's total active catalog size is much greater than what was in a blockbuster in 1999

There are a number of alternative streaming services with a better selection. One that comes to mind is Filmstruck, which has the entire Criteron Collection but there was another successful one I can't remember the name of.

If you are into classic movies I'd imagine that you would still subscribe to the Netflix DVD mail service. Millions of other do. I'd say that is widespread access to old movies, just not widespread interest.

If you must stream (if you are up for physical media, last I checked, Netflix was king, and has am incredibly broad catalogue ) try Amazon Prime.

You have to pay a rental fee of like three or four bucks per, just like blockbuster, but they have a much deeper pool of old movies than Netflix Streaming, I think.

The working definition of "excuse" is "a reason I don't agree with".

I think you're agreeing.

That many people stop pirating as soon as something more convenient comes along does not contradict the idea that people used to pirate because it was convenient.

Why is it very hard? Take a look at the most successful platform for games, Steam, to see both things aren't mutually exclusive.

There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.

I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam.

It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned.

Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.

Pre-Steam also coincided with pre-Internet / online gaming. Having half your software assets lurking on company servers now makes protecting your IP considerably easier.

Ok, that's a good point. But video games are rarely created with public funds and in general are not crowdsourced to then be placed behind a paywall. Even Steam has plenty of competition.

If there were a disruption of the world of scientific publishing that would have a parallel in entertainment I would have chosen Spotify over Steam.

I'm only trying to refute the claim that "piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience". That's disproven by the fact that many companies e.g. Steam have had undeniable success on the back of that convenience.

I think that claim was made in the context of scientific papers, where there is no counterpart to Steam or Netflix.

Is BitTorrent more convenient than Netflix?

Torrents are very inconvenient compared to many streaming services.

Therefore, you would expect most people to opt for Netflix. (And by and large I'd expect Netflix to be more popular in mass than tormenting at this point for places where it's available.)

But what if it's not available where you live (That's inconvenient), doesn't have the content you want (That's inconvenient), or you want a file you can play offline that isn't allowed to be downloaded on the Netflix app?

Convenience wins almost every time, but not having the option to do something (be it for lack of $$$ or availability) isn't convenient so that's when more people turn to piracy.

My statement (as can be seen from its GP post) uses convenience to mean ease of use, not in the titles available sense that you (and the two following posts) do.

Far more convenient when you consider that Netflix's catalog of reasonably mainstream as-seen-in-theaters movies has been shrinking for years.

As the end user I don't care "why" their catalog has been shrinking, I only care that something I watched last year and want to watch again is no longer available on that service.

And no, I'm not going to sign up for a dozen different services just on the off chance that one of them will have what I want to see at any given point.

In my experience in the last five years, Netflix's batting average for actually hosting movies I want to see is around 20%. In terms of convenience, if they don't have the movie at all it's kind of like dividing by zero.

No but it is more convenient than lesser known streaming services like popcorn or certain kodi plugins that don't work well.

Depends on what you want to see. If Netflix has it in your country in your language of choice: Netflix wins, else BitTorrent wins.

No but there are piracy streaming apps that are more convenient than netflix.

"Click the picture of Einstein"

Ugh no thanks. Scihub it is.

I've read this many times. It's almost funny

Same exact reasons for me at a big US university.

Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing there).

I think fields outside of physics and math have caught on recently; there's now a bioRXiv, PsyArXiv, and ChemRxiv. That last one, kind of surprisingly, is actually co-owned and run by ACS and RSC, two of the largest chemistry publishing companies (who, iirc, had some weird terms that initially made some people weary about using preprints at all when publishing in their journals). Hopefully more publishers can follow suit and support open access across more fields.

This is my experience in political science as well.

Poli sci is starting to get some really good repositories of data (replication is something we actually care about), but for a long time common practice has been to post your paper on your own site. Nobody is going to stop you.

Ex.

https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research

These are a number of articles in major journals which if you go through Wiley are closed access, but a quick search will bring it up. The only reason that doesn't happen is the author doesn't want to do it, which is detrimental to them because their research isn't promulgated as easily.

This stuff tends to be working itself out outside of SciHub, it's just the most visible route (probably because the approach is so newsworthy, being illegal and taking on big interests).

I wish there was a an arXiv for mechanical engineering, sadly most of the research is funded by industrial companies seeking competitive advantage so papers are less freely shared. Most of my masters thesis research sources came from paid-by-industry research projects.

Well, if you're feeling ambitious, you may be able to get one going with some elbow grease yourself. A lot of the marketing work has already been done now, with the success of the other ones.

And if that's not your cup of tea, that's fine too; I don't mean this as a "put up or shut up". Just putting up an idea you may not have had.

I don't know what field you are talking about, but in physics only about 95% of papers I want to read are published on arXiv, including older ones. I assume most researchers occasionally read something from scihub or subscription services.

Downside to this is if there is a major revision during publication peer review that doesn't get reflected in arxiv. Economics has has SSRN for years, and while not as widely adopted I would presume the issues between the two are similar.

It sounds like the "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries* is made real by less copyright, not more.

And yet, Congress is now trying to extend copyright to 144 years.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/18/us_congress_copyrig...

No, it's not, that Act doesn't extend copyright terms. Those works are already protected until 2067 (144 years, for some of them). The Act changes the type of protection they receive during that term, specifically meaning that streaming services will always have to pay royalties for using those songs, rather than that being decided depending on state law.

It's pure rentism. Whatever little service they provided has completely evaporated in the age of the Internet. Now they're purely feudal lords, extracting their rent from a status quo.

Especially say in Eastern Europe, resources like SciHub are critical for students and researchers.

I don't know how I would have been able to write my first paper without SciHub. My lab didn't have subscriptions, they just decided to stop paying.

From my outsider perspective I mostly agree, I've read a few papers that weren't available for free. But for the opposing perspective, consider that they index curated content and don't curate anything themselves. This is a frequently debated argument. For comparison I'm considering youtube or torrent sites that are swamped with low quality content or outright malware. In effect, the inception of the internet, as far as I know, was motivated precisely by the need to exchange scientific material. But we are still far from a global library, on-line. Coordination does take a significant amount of work. So, if anything, it needs more investment. But whether that needs to be direct financial investment or just a lot of voluntary work from the people for whom the system is kind of working alright at the moment, is not even in the question. Because journals and universities acting as gate keepers setting barriers to entry is seen as elitist and pejorative by the vast majority of the excluded. That involves a lot of indirect criticism of the financial market system. The whole problem involves marketing. Just look at wikipedia, stackexchange or even the stock-exchanges to see what kind of imbalance, for lack of a better word, huge projects incur, virtually invariably.

* the vocal majority, at any rate

I have access to most papers through my university, but every now and then a pubmed or google scholar search leads me to a paper I cannot access easily. For those, instead of waiting for interlibrary loan I can easily just grab the article through SciHub.

Is it right? I don't know. But it makes my life so much easier when looking for something specific.

Paywalls are a totally evil thing. It hinders human progress will providing benefits only to a small amount of parasites.