I don't believe you can publish on Sci-Hub, but you can join the open access movement by publishing your work on sites such as Arxiv where anyone can read your work.

If every scientist published their work on open access platforms, Sci-Hub wouldn't need to exist in the first place.

Why do people not do that? As far as I know, publishing in Arxiv is as simple as uploading the PDF, so I'm wondering why scientists don't do that themselves by default.

Does anyone know?

Some journals rules prohibit submitting to arxiv. Researchers still want to submit their research to these journals because they are prestigious. One of the main goals of researchers is prestige (for their work to be widely read, for getting grants, for attracting grad students and post doc laborers, etc.).

Are there any efforts to work against journals doing that?

TFA links to http://thecostofknowledge.com/

which is an attempt to organize researchers to boycott Elsevier due to its practices. Elsevier is one of the journal publishers that has (or had) issues with preprints like arvix. I do think efforts like this are gaining traction, such as the agreement between the UC system and Elsevier mentioned at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/california-universit...

to not publish, review for them or be part of their editorial board anymore. really easy. and there are always other venues.

Speaking as a biologist working in Australia:

1) Older collaborators with more power are being 'scared' of getting scooped when they post preprints. They're slowly coming around as the argument makes no real sense, preprint = published to the younger generation.

2) Funding bodies, i.e. the people who pay our bills and have all the power. The Australian Research Council, the biggest non-medical funding body here, does not allow mentions of preprints in grant applications. They give no reason for that rule.

3) Again, money. You want your research to go into the journal with the highest impact factor since that mostly decides whether you get to keep your job, get that new position, or get that grant. Some journals still don't allow preprints. You also get no feedback when a top journal rejects your paper, could the rejection be because others have seen your preprint, published papers built on top of the preprint, and now your paper submitted to the journal is not so novel any more? You have no way of telling.

4) Fear. Sometimes, after your paper has undergone peer review it's a little bit better. A few select people see the embarrassing errors in your paper and help you fix them before the paper is widely accessible. If you post a preprint the world sees your glaring errors.

When you say journals don't allow preprint, do you mean they don't let you publish if you've published on Arxiv? Can you not post the preprint and submit to a journal for peer review? Isn't that the best of both worlds?

If there are changes to your paper due to peer review, can you post the changes to Arxiv too later?

Yes, some journals will desk-reject your submission if it's on arxiv/biorxiv.

If you not post the preprint and submit, you're defeating the purpose of preprints, isn't it? We're back to square one!

Normally yeah, people submit an updated preprint based on peer reviewers' comments. Biorxiv has a nice 'see the newest version of this paper' button for that.

In medicine/public health/etc. there are two reasons:

1) medRxiv was relatively new, and while the COVID-19 pandemic was its moment, there are a lot of concerns about pre-peer review stuff, and the public, press, etc. not treating it with appropriate caution.

2) Some journals heavily penalize or won't consider preprints, and some of these journals are quite good. This has gotten a little pushback recently as well.

FWIW, I once backed off publishing on Arxiv because their requirements for the exact format of my PDF were too restrictive. At the time I didn't feel stronly about it one way or the other, and if I was in the same situation maybe I'd persevere. But it would have taken an enormous amount of time to reformat my large and complicated PDF. I've heard the same complaint from others.

You need to upload the original tex and somehow it always took some tweaking to get it to compile relative to my local setup. But yes, it’s a low barrier.

> most prestigious

The existing "prestigious" journals are prestigious because of the peer-reviewing process. How do we solve this problem with Sci-hub? I mean, you can publish your research anywhere (like your homepage) already if you choose to.

It’s not really the peer review process that makes them prestigious. The peer review process employed by world-class journals doesn’t guarantee good science (see: all sorts of high profile retractions). And it’s not really a complicated system - it’s easy to clone, as the procedures are all public and the important players are all volunteers.

But cloning the top journals’ peer review process wouldn’t make you a top journal. Many mid and low tier publications use the same peer review process as the high tier ones.

It’s more of a bit of a tautology: the most prestigious journals are the most prestigious because they’re seen as the most prestigious - which means they get all the best submissions, the best people volunteer to be organizers, speakers, reviewers, and people pay attention to their proceedings increasing their citation numbers.

This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.

> This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.

I think that this is also means that it will be slow moving and very fragile to a new system that could incentivize people to undertake all the listed actions above that don't go thru/reliant upon the traditional process.

Not saying that we are there yet, nor do I think willingly choosing to submit to any particular jurisdiction in hopes of a favorable outcome will have much effect in the long run (I think systems really change when old systems that served similar functions in some capacity are made obsolete), but as long as tech becomes cheaper, more people become knowledge able about the system as a whole and the incentives involved, more ways of pursuing research will emerge that will be more resilient than hoping for nation state judiciary approval.

That's why I think there's a chance for sci-hub to disrupt this. It's already doing great marketing-wise and attracting a lot of great researchers. If some of those researchers donate their research and their time to peer review - in protest against the current monopoly - it could be disrupted.

Point taken.

I think ultimately the problem of academia publication isn't the openness of access (which obviously is good if we can have), but the whole system as you mentioned.

You can just publish to a relevant journal, and make the PDF available easily to Sci-Hub. As in, put the PDF on your homepage along with the DOI so that Sci-Hub can easily pick up.

This would be wonderfully altruistic, but it would be career suicide as well.

This is simply not true. The world has changed a lot the last 10 years. In many scientific fields, you are actually expected to publish your "preprint" in the open and also your source code.

In what fields are you expected to publish your source code? In the fields I’ve interacted with it was always an “above and beyond” thing that nobody would raise an eye at you not doing.

i was thinking about image processing or machine learning, but i'm sure this is the case in other fields as well. Reproducible research is a "hot topic" in many places, and for good reasons.

ecology, more and more biology, chemistry...

That's not at all the same as the proposal I was replying to.

They seemed to be saying that people should only publish in Sci-Hub, making it a prestigious publication (that would appear in press releases, one assumes) instead of just a mirror.