Any research funded by any public money (in whole or in part, or done for free on devices funded by public money) should be public. Not scihub pirate-public, but available for download directly, for free on the university/institution webpage, and through national libraries.
My PhD research was funded by public money. The work was nothing special (that's putting it mildly), and it was a couple of decades ago, but thanks to it I ended up as a co-author on two peer-reviewed papers. It seems beyond crazy that there appears to be no legitimate way for me to share my work with others.
The quote from Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer that "Sci-Hub will then use [stolen credentials] to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers" shows some fairly serious misunderstandings of how scientific research is funded, carried out, written up, shared, and published ... and which multinationals get rich from selling access to the very last bit.
The (accepted and legal) "norm" these days is to post an author pre-print in an institutional open-access repository - check out "green open access" (versus gold open access).
It's not ideal though, but search engines like Google Scholar are good at finding the open-access versions of paywalled academic works and linking to the PDF of them.
Yes - for my doctorate, I wrote several papers, and as a condition of my (public & private) funding they had to be made available publicly.
What I found was that the actual _content_ is served by the university - free for all etc, but any typsetting, editing and formatting became the publisher's property. Yeah sounds daft, but, well, you can get all my papers either directly from the university (via a centralised UK catalogue that Google has managed to link quite nicely) or pay £20+ a shot to Elsevier for the same thing. (Maybe it's different? Looks better? A nicer font? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty sure the results and stuff are identical, would be quite funny if they weren't)
Might seem pedantic but it's important to be precise: presumably you mean freely available? Publishing makes something publicly available by definition.
This is the "norm" in STEM fields, but not so much in the humanities yet, and I would suspect that some for-profit journals would reject publication of your article if they knew you were already providing a pre-print and so wouldn’t really be respecting the post-publication embargo.
Not wishing to sound facetious, but where would I get the PDFs, other than from - say - SciHub?
I have the original bound journal for one of them, but you can bet your bottom dollar it would be illegal for me to start making photocopies of my work and handing them out...
A good point actually - from a legal perspective this is tricky. Generally the publisher claims copyright over the arrangement that is "published". Photocopying the printed version would therefore be problematic.
With digital formats, the general approach is to export a PDF from LaTeX (or whatever is used to write the paper) as an author pre-print copy (i.e. not in the final form used by the journal), and publish that one. From a technical legal perspective you would likely need to look at what agreement you signed with the publisher at the time (if any), since that may restrict distribution of the text.
This raises a good point though for works that were pre-open access, and the risk of them "rotting" behind paywalls out of being in a state of legal limbo. Newer science will be more accessible due to open access rules, but older science may end up effectively "lost" to those without access to these paywalled repositories.
There's no real incentive for those publishers to open things up, as they rely on institutions paying large subscriptions to preserve access to the legacy archived content, and that keeps their many thousands of staff employed.
Actually, this depends on the terms defined by each particular journal or conference to which the work is submitted. While things have gotten better in recent years, traditionally even distribution on personal websites is technically not allowed, just selectively enforced, again depending on the venue and even the exposure of the particular work or lab group.
When enforcement is more strict, researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.
Unfortunately, in many fields open access or even just personal hosting and is still uncommon, and the vast majority of papers remain behind paywalls.
Also depends on your jurisdiction. In the Netherlands, researchers are allowed to make their own works available to anyone six months after publication, regardless of their publisher's terms: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/you-share-we...
Of course, it's not perfect since it still requires work on the part of the author, but all they have to do is give it to a university library and they'll make sure it's available as soon as it's allowed.
The poster [1] refers to "the published version", so yes, the PDF of the published article. But Dutch researchers who are interested can probably best just get in touch with their library, who I'm sure will be able to tell them exactly what they need.
Publishers are not all the same on this. Nature explicitly allows - not just ignores, but allows - authors to distribute copies themselves. You can factor in the publisher's policy when you choose where to send your paper.
I was referring to the traditional practice of authors distributing papers to anyone who asks, which is now turned up to 11 by arXiv. This is explicitly allowed by Nature. This is different to Open Access, in which Nature will serve my paper to others themselves, at upfront cost.
Nature Portfolio journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms. Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016); preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Portfolio journals. Manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a study under consideration at a Nature Portfolio journal."
If a university wants the work to count towards the targets it is measured by by government, or if it receives certain types of public funding (which is pretty much most of it), there's an expectation in the UK for it to be open access within agreed timescales. If it's not, then it can't be counted for the key reporting metrics.
The end result is that the vast majority (i.e. almost all) such research (regardless of how funded) is public and accessible on the institution's repository, or otherwise deposited with an open access library, such that it can "count" towards the metrics.
A clever approach if you ask me - find what matters to the individuals concerned (the metrics), and discount work from those metrics unless made freely available within X days, with appropriate audit trail to match.
> The City of London's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat to their personal information and data".
> The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.
Police (and politicians in general) should be careful about the fire they're playing with. There are some valid reasons to be concerned about hacking based out of Russia, but if every time they want to try to cast aspersions on things they don't like by highlighting connections to Russian they run he risk of people just totally discounting that warning in all cases.
Yeah, this reminds me way too much of the infamous Californian prop 65 warning labels.
If people see a "WARNING: This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm" label on every other product they buy, they tend to completely ignore that label. And the reasoning behind it is very simple too, because if almost everything causes cancer, then what is there to do about it and why even worry.
> Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia.
Fantastic!
> Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers.
It's a rumour people working with the traditional academic publishers have been spreading, but I haven't been able to find any proof. All I got when asking for it was "the evidence exists, but there is no gain in publicizing it": https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/12/21/wakeup-call-l...
A) Almost certainly not. No doubt phished/otherwise involuntarily obtained credentials end up in their database, and people that voluntarily contribute their credentials when pressured will lie about their contribution to the authorities. But there's no evidence that sci-hub itself is behind any attacks.
B) Yes, but only due to the potential sensitive nature of the credentials unrelated to the downloading of papers.
I feel like it's more likely someone got caught by their org noticing their credentials being used to dl ridiculous amounts of papers, and fell back on the "wow, that's so weird; I must have been hacked" excuse.
> It always seemed unlikely that Sci-Hub’s archive was entirely contributed by concerned citizens.
Note that Sci-Hub's model wasn't concerned citizens uploading articles, but academics (allegedly, at least) sharing their credentials and Sci-Hub using those to download requested articles if they didn't have it in their own caches yet. With that method, it seems a lot less unlikely to me that a relatively small number of academics could have "contributed" many articles.
The BBC is notorious for its poor reporting of tech matters and yet again they've failed to write a balanced, informed article. Is there even any substance to these allegations of phishing and risk to data?
Maybe we read a different article, but the one i did only represented the facts - City of London police warns students to avoid it due to "direct quotes from City of London police". The article is merely about the statement.
The BBC could have asked Sci-Hub and students for comment to add more sides of the story.
It doesn't matter to me if the Police or the Queen is the one "warning students" about Sci-Hub - if it's unsubstantiated and not backed up with forensic evidence it shouldn't be reported.
This is one of the best examples for why "don't editorialize titles" doesn't always work. People here know SciHub and the title is devoid of useful information (basically "UK police warns about website").
A couple of points: There isn't a single police force that operates across England. For London there are the Metropolitan Police who cover actual London, and the City of London Police who cover the "square mile", the tiny City of London area.
And it's weird that the police are advising people not to use Sci-Hub. In England copyright violation is a civil matter, not a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of business or you're doing so much of it you're distorting trade. It's simply not a police matter.
Isn't it about time that Sci-Hub -or something like it- got legalized?
It seems clear that Sci-Hub is a great boon to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
It wouldn't even be unprecedented to have laws that "encourage" contributions. Think of the old library of Alexandria, or even the modern library of Congress.
This article is giving me a major case of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen.
It's a press release from the UK government, it's not actual reporting. The BBC tend to release these kind of things a couple of days before a policy announcement.
Here's an example:
Mar 14 "Ageing equipment puts Army at risk, MPs warn
British army armoured vehicle. The British army is likely to find itself "outgunned" in any conflict with Russian forces" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56386446
What happens here is that voters see the first article, it sits in their mind a bit and they think "well maybe we should increase military spending, we need a good armed forces" then lo and behold their wish comes true a few days later.
We're just living in an real world Yes Minister episode.
Very short paragraphs in a semi-random order, together with a smattering of out of place headings. I assume they must have some internal style document, because it applies to a good chunk of their stories on diverse topics.
"The occasional quote which is unsourced, and doesn't have an end quotation mark.
disagree. The first sentence is the lede. Next, a primary source backs it up with a specific quote. Then context is given for the decision. Sci-hub's perspective follows.
Then you get several sentences on the police's view, and several on Sci-hub's.
It's mechanically straightforward, like most news.
That's not unwarranted, but you'd have to have at least a cursory sense of what pdfs are capable of to know why. Like arbitrary javascript and file embedded files. I don't get the feeling that the police involved here necessarily do lol
"If you're tricked into revealing your log-in credentials, whether it's through the use of fake emails or malware, we know that Sci-Hub will then use those details to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers," [Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer] said.
That's the first I've heard about this, and it would represent a very different perspective on Sci-Hub to the traditional anti-copyright Robin Hood styling.
That said, even though CoLP is a rather strange police force within system here, it would be surprising for it to make a definitive public statement like that without being reasonably confident that it was correct. Is there any truth to that allegation?
Note that the police statement makes it clear that said credentials are allegedly being used to "steal papers", which to me sounds like Sci-Hub's actually just using said credentials to do, you know, exactly what it's advertised to do: download any and all paywalled research papers it can find, to be shared with the general public.
If SH is actually crawling independently, the police might have at least part of a point here. Academics who gave it unauthorised access using their credentials could then end up on the wrong end of a very nasty legal action if they were subsequently identified, not just about the copyright infringement aspect but potentially criminal charges related to the unauthorised access itself too.
Probably, but that's not the point. Sci-hub contains the official science views, i.e. published and peer-reviewed journal articles. They just don't have the copyright.
This isn't about enforcing scientific orthodoxy. It's about making sure that the journals get their inch of green for accessing that orthodoxy.
Non-official science views are everywhere. These are the gatekeepers of official science views, maintained by copyright. The people who can't get past those gatekeepers are usually desperate to get them into your hands.
Woah, this is a big deal. On a weekly basis I find myself trying to dig deep into research and data on a health abnormality that I'm experiencing and often am greeted by a paywall. It's just not practical for me to pay for access to each article when 95% of them don't end up including the specific information I'm looking for anyways.
I think I remember the Indian government proposing something similar to this current sci-hub initiative.
Obviously I don't know if sci-hub is the right way to go about these things, and I wonder how this would change the incentivization behind research. From my understanding though the main gatekeepers here like elsevier act as more of a financial leech on the system rather than providing any real value; since they aren't the ones funding the research to begin with. Would be interested to hear other's take on this.
Is there any basis in fact to what's alleged in the article? Forking over your university login credentials to scihub seems like a very bad idea indeed. OTOH, presumably they must have amassed almost the entire corpus (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/) by some such means...
I think they do use "donated" credentials in the background, but the article makes it sound like people would be phished into handing over their logins, which is not the case at all.
Probably someone contributed their credentials because they (rightfully IMO) felt the cause was justified.
Later the uni found out, asked questions and the person just lied they were 'tricked'. Uni makes a police report and the police just takes it at face value.
Why would anyone need to hand over their credentials to sci hub if it weren't for this purpose? Neither the BBC nor the police present any evidence of this "phishing" that I can see.
If I still had access to my university creds I'd totally give them to sci hub. They're doing God's work.
I don't know how sci-hub works but there have been private versions of it for decades and that's how they worked, but that always occured in somewhat trusted circles.
There wasn’t really an equivalent of Sci-Hub and LibGen until the last decade or so. I was a member of previous filesharing communities popular among Eastern Europeans unable to afford academic literature, but there wasn’t all that much available in pirated form, because it required time-consuming scanning or making a request to someone who might download it for you. It was only when people like Aaron Schwartz and the Sci-Hub team managed to mass-download articles from JSTOR and other paywalls, that finally academics got access to most of what they were looking for.
There was, privately, as I said. Private web servers that proxied through other people's credentials that gave direct access to the catalogues. You'd use them exactly the same way as Sci-Hub.
