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SCI-HUB: the Pirate Bay of science
Ghoul:
ovo zaslužuje svoj topik.
Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge
Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.
FIONA MACDONALD
12 FEB 2016
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.
For those of you who aren't already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it's sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn't afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it's since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.
"Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,"Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. "Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal."
If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that's because it kinda is. But in this story, it's not just the poor who don't have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.
Don't get us wrong, journal publishers have also done a whole lot of good - they've encouraged better research thanks to peer review, and before the Internet, they were crucial to the dissemination of knowledge.
But in recent years, more and more people are beginning to question whether they're still helping the progress of science. In fact, in some cases, the 'publish or perish' mentality is creating more problems than solutions, with a growing number of predatory publishers now charging researchers to have their work published - often without any proper peer review process or even editing.
"They feel pressured to do this," Elbakyan wrote in an open letter to the New York judge last year. "If a researcher wants to be recognised, make a career - he or she needs to have publications in such journals."
That's where Sci-Hub comes into the picture. The site works in two stages. First of all when you search for a paper, Sci-Hub tries to immediately download it from fellow pirate database LibGen. If that doesn't work, Sci-Hub is able to bypass journal paywalls thanks to a range of access keys that have been donated by anonymous academics (thank you, science spies).
This means that Sci-Hub can instantly access any paper published by the big guys, including JSTOR, Springer, Sage, and Elsevier, and deliver it to you for free within seconds. The site then automatically sends a copy of that paper to LibGen, to help share the love.
It's an ingenious system, as Simon Oxenham explains for Big Think:
"In one fell swoop, a network has been created that likely has a greater level of access to science than any individual university, or even government for that matter, anywhere in the world. Sci-Hub represents the sum of countless different universities' institutional access - literally a world of knowledge."
That's all well and good for us users, but understandably, the big publishers are pissed off. Last year, a New York court delivered an injunction against Sci-Hub, making its domain unavailable (something Elbakyan dodged by switching to a new location), and the site is also being sued by Elsevier for "irreparable harm" - a case that experts are predicting will win Elsevier around $750 to $150,000 for each pirated article. Even at the lowest estimations, that would quickly add up to millions in damages.
But Elbakyan is not only standing her ground, she's come out swinging, claiming that it's Elsevier that have the illegal business model.
"I think Elsevier’s business model is itself illegal," she told Torrent Freak,referring to article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which states that"everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits".
She also explains that the academic publishing situation is different to the music or film industry, where pirating is ripping off creators. "All papers on their website are written by researchers, and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That is very different from the music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold," she said.
Elbakyan hopes that the lawsuit will set a precedent, and make it very clear to the scientific world either way who owns their ideas.
"If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge," she said. "We have to win over Elsevier and other publishers and show that what these commercial companies are doing is fundamentally wrong."
To be fair, Elbakyan is somewhat protected by the fact that she's in Russia and doesn't have any US assets, so even if Elsevier wins their lawsuit, it's going to be pretty hard for them to get the money.
Still, it's a bold move, and we're pretty interested to see how this fight turns out - because if there's one thing the world needs more of, it's scientific knowledge. In the meantime, Sci-Hub is still up and accessible for anyone who wants to use it, and Elbakyan has no plans to change that anytime soon.
http://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-has-illegally-uploaded-millions-of-journal-articles-in-an-attempt-to-open-up-science
lilit:
gul progledao! :lol:
Ghoul:
--- Quote from: lilit on 12-02-2016, 21:54:02 ---gul progledao! :lol:
--- End quote ---
i odma podelio s drugima.
a ne ko neki!
nego, vidi ovo:
Journal accepts paper titled “Get me off your f*cking mailing list”
The entire article is just those seven words over and over again. Reviewer says it's "excellent" science.
A paper titled “Get me off your f*cking mailing list” has been accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology.
But, as Joseph Stromberg reports for Vox, there’s more going on here than just a hilariously missing-in-action peer-review system - it highlights the bigger problem of predatory journals, which try to get young academics pay to have their work published, and shows just how shonky they are.
Despite how fancy the journal sounds, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology is actually an open-access publication that spams thousands of scientists every day with the offer of publishing their work - for a price, of course.
Back in 2005, US computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this 10-page paper as a joke response they could send to annoying and unwanted conference invitations.
As well as the seven-word headline being repeated over and over again, the paper also contained some very helpful flow charts and graphs, such as the one below:
Screen Shot 2014-11-21 at 9.53.24 AM.0
The PDF went pretty viral in academic circles, and then recently an Australian scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it off to the pain-in-the-ass International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in the hope that the editors would open it, read it and take him off their f*cking list.
Instead, Scholarly Open Access reports that they took it as a real submission and said they'd publish it for $150. Apparently the journal even sent the paper to an anonymous reviewer who said it was “excellent”.
As Stromberg writes for Vox:
“This incident is pretty hilarious. But it's a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate. They're very different from respected, rigorous journals like Science and Nature that publish much of the research you read about in the news. Most troublingly, the predatory journals don't conduct peer-review - the process where other scientists in the field evaluate a paper before it's published.”
Not only that, but in this instance the journal didn’t even seem to care that the scientist who submitted it wasn’t actually the one who wrote the article.
This isn’t the first time these predatory journals have been caught out, Stromberg reports, but unfortunately it shows that the problem doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Read Stromberg’s excellent full story on the paper and predatory journals over at Vox.
And next time we get spammed by unwanted emails, we know what we'll be sending back.
http://www.sciencealert.com/journal-accepts-paper-titled-get-me-off-your-f-cking-mailing-list?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=Website&utm_campaign=InArticleReadMore
Meho Krljic:
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
Rasher:
--- Quote from: Ghoul on 14-02-2016, 02:32:53 ---
i odma podelio s drugima.
a ne ko neki!
--- End quote ---
Ghoula pišem u zahvalnicu u doktoratu. :-|
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