I think you have an misconception about how sci-hub works. Most of the content you can access trough sci-hub is not hosted by sci-hub, what happens when you request a fresh new paper is that your request is eventually served by a computer in the network of one of the universities with subscription to the journal which published that paper, using donated or stolen credentials of some high profile scientists if needed. Sci-hub already uses IPFS to cache some papers, it can not move to IPFS network because it is not a library of content like LibGen (which is often confused to) but an actual hub which decides how to serve your request in real time.
(It used to cache them on LibGen, and I think it does still store them there, but I seem to recall it now uses its own servers as well.)
This research papers are anyways funded indirectly and authors of this paper are not really dependent on income from these papers, but the resulting data, experiments and experience they gained while working on it. Reading these papers is only a very small step to know something, but a necessary one.
It doesn't pro-actively replicate content, so it isn't like bit torrent where everyone is uploading.
Instead, it provides resilience, where the actual location of sci-hub could move around, but requesters could still get access to the content. The rest of the network acts to help with routing, but won't be serving data they haven't accessed themselves.
I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense.
It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.
My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.
The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access.
The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs.
I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).
Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they choose to publish in these for-profit journals.
Do you know why?
When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ.
Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.
Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all.
Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't.
There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.
They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom.
Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against.
Have some perspective.
Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm
I presume you must be getting something out of the arrangement, else why on earth do you continue?
We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]
Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]
However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.
Where exactly, what people and institutions?
They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).
It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.
Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.
My comment was in response to the parent who said 'knowledge should be free'
Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free.
Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt.
Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.
Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free.
If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free.
If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out.
edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."
In the context of freedom of information the opposite of free information is not funded information- it's censored, withheld, horded, etc.
You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.
Food is finite. When you buy material goods, you subtract from the seller's supply of goods and add to your own. It's impossible to create new goods out of nothing. Since there isn't enough for everyone, an economy naturally arises.
Information is infinite. Copying and transmitting data is not only trivial, it is natural. That's why people came up with ways to create artificial scarcity. The only cost associated with human knowledge and art is that of creating it. After it's created, information costs $0.
All data, all files on a computer, they're essentially just really big numbers that humanity happened to discover. Once the number is known, modern computers make it possible to copy and transmit it for almost $0. Paywalls? Only one person needs to pay in order to get copy and distribute it to everyone else.
Nobody is saying creators shouldn't be compensated. We're saying they need a new business model. It's the 21st century. You no longer need huge printing presses in order to make copies of something at scale. It's as easy as copy paste.
Published material is not infinite, nor is an author's time.
Information is infinite if you definite it to mean all information, but that is not the context here. The context here is published work.
Sci-Hub proves otherwise.
> nor is an author's time.
True.
It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town. Likewise it's my right to use information to liberate withheld information just as it would be my right to provide well digging tools to your parched neighbors.
The only difference is that I'm thinking of what is best for everyone and you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
Information is like the food in my example, not the "only water supply" in yours. Leibniz and Newton independently developed calculus, for example.
> you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
It's not selfish to be compensated for your work. Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.
As far as I'm aware, authors get very little of the compensation for the work they're doing.
> Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.
Not if the established procedure for publishing is a journal.
As for journals, I understand the distaste academics have for these. This thread was about whether all published information should be free, not just journals.
Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services".
The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer.
What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website.
In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines.
You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now)
If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.
Yes, I understand the hatred for academic publishers b/c they don't fund the research.
The comment above said 'knowledge should be free' and that is what I was responding to.
Sounds fair?
The vast majority of academic research is funded at least in part by tax payers either directly (grants, public universities or universities receiving public funds, etc) or indirectly (subsidies).
Even if research was "made possible by a grant from (private entity)", if it happened in a university, it most likely used university funds (from using rent-free space and equipment researchers can use, to staff and administration researchers rely on, etc)
I agree, I don't know why you think I don't. I said I understand why people don't like academic journals.
It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.
The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.
No, it really isn't. It sounds like you're saying you want someone else to pay for it. That's not free.
> When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.
Funded work is not free.
Funded information can be liberated.
Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free.
Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible".
The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible".
> Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.
Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished.
Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it no longer applies. It's obviously incompatible with free computing as we know it today. In order for copyright to be enforceable, computers that run unauthorized software must be made illegal. Otherwise, people will always be able to copy whatever data they want and there's little anyone can do about it.
Part of the social contract behind copyright is giving the public free access to the works of humanity after the protection expires. It's clear now that the copyright industry has no intention of ever letting these protections ever expire. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when the copyright holders refuse to keep up their end of the deal.
Communism implies an economy. When it comes to data, there is nothing to economize. It's abundant, there's more than enough for everyone.
The only reason the internet isn't a post-scarcity society is we still have laws like copyright holding us back.
> Oops, now nobody is working and there is no stuff!
Pretty weird seeing this argument on Hacker News of all places. Lots of developers work for no financial reward, myself included. Scratching one's own itch is a hacker tradition and it disproves the notion that nobody would create anything if it wasn't for copyright.
I think you are unaware of how stupid that sounds, maybe go and read what communism is/was or stop commenting when you have no idea and you learn things from Star Trek.
FYI people were/are working in communism and things are not free (so 100% comment you had there)
Having the freedom to access information and information be8mg easily accessible are two different things. Those are the two things the above commenter was advocating for.
Should accessing information be free of cost? Of course, yes, as much as possible it should. That's why we have libraries.
Should creating information be free of cost? Of course not, that's just nonsense and the fact that you thought anyone would suggest that is rather telling.
It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.
Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and anonymous.
Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.