Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science

The first pirate website in the world to open mass and public access to tens of millions research papers
Blocked by Twitter, blocked by operators, and courted countless times...

Sci-Hub, the world's largest free academic paper download site, is ten years old on September 5th!

To celebrate his 10th birthday, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan said on Twitter that more than 2.33 million new articles would be posted on Sci-Hub, and that nearly 88 million free research papers had been published in Sci-Hub's database so far.

It is worth mentioning that most of the articles are from the Dutch publisher Elsevier and the international publisher Springer, of which 398,548 are on medicine, 184,598 on engineering, 171,929 on chemistry, and 7 on dentistry.

Even more exciting is that the restrictions on Sci-Hub have also been lifted to allow the latest research papers to be uploaded.

Netizens were also thrilled, with one message saying alexandra Elbakyan "does more for science than most scientists do".
How much publishers hate, how much researchers love

Although the tenth anniversary of SCI hub has brought us so much good news, we all know that SCI hub is still in "deep water".

In 2011, beleaguered by the high cost of obtaining papers, elbakyan, a Kazakh programmer, decided to establish a "shadow library". So in September, SCI hub was officially launched.

Since SCI hub users can use the papers and articles originally stored in the paid database without subscription or payment, and provide the document file search service in the original publishing house website, they are very popular after they go online.

Even in 2017, Daniel himmelstein, a student from the University of Pennsylvania, conducted research on SCI hub. He said that the papers on SCI hub can basically meet most of the paper needs.

But the opposite is the attack of academic publishers on SCI hub.

For many years, SCI hub has been fighting with publishers. In 2015, a judge ruled that SCI hub infringed US Copyright and issued an injunction against operators. In 2017, another U.S. Court ruled that the publisher Elsevier would receive $15 million in compensation for copyright infringement. In 2019, the U.S. Department of justice investigated SCI hub because they suspected that the website was connected with Russian intelligence agencies.

In December 2020, academic publishing giants Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society (ACS) jointly sued SCI hub in India. This time, SCI hub was completely blocked and could not publish new papers.

Some time ago, SCI hub had to start looking for donations from netizens.

Faced with this situation, 19 Indian scientists directly submitted an application to the court, listing the reasons why SCI hub is popular and why publishers hate it, and emphasizing the importance of open access.

Therefore, this year, the Indian high court ordered to postpone the trial of the case, and there were no results after 15 trials. In this way, the original ban on shutdown has expired. Just like this, SCI hub is "alive" again.

It is precisely because SCI hub is popular. Every time SCI hub is threatened, users will unite to back up the data. In May this year, SCI hub users backed up a total of 77tb of data.

It threatens the publishing oligarchy, but it still solves the symptoms rather than the root causes

In China, since SCI hub's birthday, relevant topics have still received a lot of attention.

Zhihu netizen @ Ruxue denounced the publishers' behavior:

Publishers have no contribution to knowledge itself, but they cut leeks on both sides of the paper authors and readers and do business without cost and profit. On the one hand, the author of the paper needs to pay the layout fee. Different journals charge different fees. A few hundred dollars for a less paper and thousands of dollars for a more paper. Some journals that circle money will be more expensive. On the other hand, except for some open-source journals, if readers want to access papers, they need their own units (such as university libraries) to pay for a paper database, or buy a single paper by themselves. The price of a paper ranges from a few dollars to dozens of dollars. What's more, publishers have formed a monopoly. At present, more than half of the research results in the world are published by five groups: reed Elsevier, Wiley Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and American Chemical Society or sage publishing according to different standards. With the help of the monopoly position of academic journals, the cost of purchasing academic journal database is very expensive (tens of millions), and the price increases by more than 10% every year, even 20% and 30% in some years. As a result, many universities and research institutions are overwhelmed, and taxpayers' money is taken away by these publishers.

Link:

https://www.zhihu.com/question/485140254/answer/2108745790

The profit margin of academic publishing even exceeds that of Internet giants

At present, SCI hub is undoubtedly of great significance because it forms an effective competition with the publishing oligarchs.

However, netizen @ Mengyi sun pointed out that "SCI hub always treats the symptoms rather than the root causes".

After all, most of the literature sources of SCI hub are still works that have been sorted and published by business magazines. Moreover, today's commercial magazines even have a monopoly on academic evaluation (see how many evaluation mechanisms are based on the name of commercial magazines), so I'm afraid they can't completely remove the cancer of commercial chemical publishing. To finally eliminate this cancer, we can only establish a better evaluation platform with public funding - but it will not be achieved overnight.

Link:

https://www.zhihu.com/question/401055323/answer/1295903108

Perhaps this is the reason why foreign scholars often call Alexandra elbakyan, founder of SCI hub "scientific Robin Hood" or "academic rogue".

Knowledge theft? Open knowledge?

In China, the monopoly of databases such as "China HowNet" on papers and other knowledge has also aroused many disputes.

In 2016, Peking University and other universities planned to suspend their cooperation with HowNet for similar reasons. Peking University Library issued a statement saying: "we are still negotiating with fangzhiwang (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd., striving to strive for reasonable conditions and not easily compromise with excessive price increases by merchants."

In the same year, Wuhan University of Technology said on its microblog that "at present, the contract of China Knowledge Network (CNKI) database expires in 2015. Due to the unreasonable increase in renewal price, the negotiation between our university and China Knowledge Network (CNKI) company was unsuccessful".

In 2018, Taiyuan University of Technology issued a notice on its official website to suspend access to "CNKI China HowNet Series Database" in 2019, saying that due to the failure to reach an agreement with Tongfang HowNet Digital Publishing Technology Co., Ltd. on the renewal price and use mode of "CNKI China HowNet Series Database", after research, it was decided that teachers and students of Taiyuan University of technology would suspend access to "CNKI China HowNet Series Database" from January 1, 2019 。

According to the semi annual report of Tongfang shares in 2018, the gross profit margin of Tongfang HowNet reached 58.83%

The website represented by SCI hub promotes the publicity of knowledge by means of open and free download of papers. Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?

There was a more systematic debate on this in 2019. Daniel himmelstein, a postdoctoral in genomics at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that the harm outweighed the good, while Justin Spencer.

Spencer believes that SCI hub and other websites are sending a dangerous signal to the society, that is, "any knowledge should be free" and "building a high-quality peer-reviewed journal platform will not produce a certain cost". At the same time, these institutions also encourage the legitimacy of piracy, which will threaten social culture. "What is more worrying is that there is evidence that some European libraries have begun to use these websites with free access to literature as bargaining chips with institutions.". At the same time, there are signs that these publishers are also promoting some more public welfare projects.

In this regard, Daniel said that academic knowledge itself has certain publicity, and SCI hub can not be simply compared to "knowledge theft". In Daniel's view, "the high cost of obtaining literature" is the theme of the printing age. At that time, due to the logistics cost that can not be ignored, it is necessary to charge for obtaining literature.

However, in the era of digital publishing, the media cost of providing literature is very low, which does not match the high fees of the database. "We should change our view of publishing.". "Why do these institutions have the right to monopolize knowledge? Mainly because authors prefer to publish articles in their more prestigious journals. But this does not constitute a legitimate reason for high fees.".

At the same time, he also pointed out that "open access to knowledge" has irreplaceable benefits in future academic research. With the development of data analysis technology, more and more researchers turn to text and data mining. "In many research fields, including curing complex diseases, we increasingly need to use artificial intelligence to widely search for information in documents. Every document 'locked in the wall' is an obstacle to such research.".

Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science

宝贝市场2023-02-08

夺宝助手2023-02-08

查诚信2023-02-08

车价天天报2023-02-08

考勤助理小程序2023-02-08

汽车报价大全查询2023-02-08