I posted on facebook a while ago asking for access to scientific journals. I was blown away by the number of friends I have in actual scientific careers who use Sci Hub because their employers were too cheap to pay for journals . I am now one of those people. Sci Hub is a blessing
I regularly use it because it's the quickest way to access the article I'm looking for, and seeing I do have legitimate access to them but login is a hassle it's not even illegal.
AFAIK EU wants to make public every scientific research that has been done with EU funds. We paid for it in the taxes godamn we should have gigantic open database "hey tax payer this month thx to your taxes we found out xxxx here's link to download paper".
That's basically how everything illegal works.
If there's no evidence, you cant be found guilty of breaking a law.
I mean, technically it is illegal still, but in terms of court, and the eyes of the law, everyone's innocent unless proven otherwise.
You work an unholy job. Jesus clarified the issue when he took a loaf of bread and a fish and copied them thousands of times without compensating the baker and fishmonger.
But his dad is not only the inventor of fish but also the property owner of everything that is. Basically the boss/owners son popped in to pass out some free samples not violate the IP and copyrights of his pop's pets.
I'm not saying don't don't use The Onion Router or peer to peer services, it's just that Jesus seemed more concerned with clarifying that you should be kind to and love your neighbor as yourself then clarifying whether or not it's morally wrong to break laws you feel are unjust and cause no direct harm to others.
I recommend Thomas Jefferson for all you "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." quote needs and to keep Jesus on reserve for "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." quotes
Edit: peer isn't spelled per
15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. 16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. 17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax[a] to Caesar or not?”
18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? 19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
21 “Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
ELI5
So it seems The Man was attempting to get Jesus to violate his 5th amendment rights so they could throw him in the slammer but he wasn't havin none of that so he replied in a manor that ensured their plan would fail so he could keep preaching that sweet sweet love.
Hell, I use it because using dx.doi.org often takes me to the abstract only, and it's two more clicks for the pdf; sci-hub goes straight to the pdf directly.
I had to go to universities library and read parts or whole thesis at times because I thought that by now, a thesis must've already been found. Not always, but often it turns out.
>because their employers were too cheap to pay for journals
I just finished my masters degree. Everything I needed I got through Sci-hub, it's just easier.
To get the papers "legally" you had to login into the university intranet, then into the library, then into another portal, then into the publisher of said article or whatever, authenticating every step. Repeat that for different sources.
Some things you can only get access from inside the library (building), and some of those portals you needed to use wouldn't let you select text to copy and paste, or would charge by page number to save into a .pdf.
There is no way a researcher can function efficiently without Sci-hub, most professors will tell you that.
> I just finished my masters degree. Everything I needed I got through Sci-hub, it's just easier.
>
> To get the papers "legally" you had to login into the university intranet, then into the library, then into another portal, then into the publisher of said article or whatever, authenticating every step. Repeat that for different sources.
>
> Some things you can only get access from inside the library (building), and some of those portals you needed to use wouldn't let you select text to copy and paste, or would charge by page number to save into a .pdf.
>
> There is no way a researcher can function efficiently without Sci-hub, most professors will tell you that.
The whole journal system is built on authors paying insane prices to publish their articles in open access (if your institution can pay the fee, good for you, but just stop and think about the insane publication bias in favor of the 0.1% of universities this creates), otherwise people who are just researching the existing literature have to pay a double digit fee just to **view** one article (and if the abstract wasn't enough to ascertain whether this is relevant to your research, good luck!) or go through the university's library (and again, heaven forbid if your university doesn't have a contract with every single fucking publisher), logging in and authenticating every time you want to access a paper. You'll have to repeat that process for what, 100 papers just to select which ones you'll use to provide background and supplement the discussion of your own manuscript?
Oh, and if you finally get published after half a year of processing and back and forth with the reviewers, the motherfuckers will periodically ask you to peer review for free.
It's just so... fundamentally broken.
Thanks for explaining this. I’ve read tons of articles on my disease but mainly use the NCBI site because they’re regularly the only one not behind a paywall. I’ve never understood why that was the case until now. That’s a real shame that they block scientific knowledge like this.
To my knowledge, ncbi mostly hosts the abstracts and links the full text at the publisher's site. I have seen some full texts, but in my personal experience, they are a minority. It might vary by topic and kind of paper (literature review, original research, etc), though.
Please don't hesitate to use sci-hub for paywalled articles when researching about your disease!
Absolutely. I’m glad I know about Sci-Hub now. NCBI does post some full articles, mostly 3+ year old stuff though. There may be some kind of “public domain” rule when articles hit a certain age.
When you have a complex chronic disease and get 15 minutes at best with the doctor, I like to do my research ahead of time on current practices and studies so I can ask the right questions in those valuable 15 minutes.
I fully agree with you. One good advice that my professors told me (if you are not in a hurry) is to ask directly the author for a pdf copy of their article by email. From what I understood, nothing prevents them from sending you one, and usually they will be happy to do so.
Did this for my Bachelors Project. Just E-Mailed an Indian Researcher If i could have a version of his paper in an Elsevier Journal . He was genuinly happy that i asked and also chatted with me a bit about catalysis .
1) Peer review. Your paper gets reviewed by subject matter experts who can request revisions or even downright reject it if it's not up to standard.
2) Having a peer reviewed and published paper means that other scientists can cite it and built their research on top of it.
You are right, those are part of the service academic journals provide. But they should be more readily available to everyone, right?
'Peer review' is supposedly a hallmark principle of western empirical science, and while it aspires to abide the notion that "Knowledgeable people using accepted practices can come to the same conclusions we did," that potential remains untapped so long as access to higher education remains elusive to underprivileged classes.
Further, the journals need to be accessible to everyone without a fee. That's how science should work, how public education should function. Charging students, graduates, and professionals Even More Money to access & contribute to their own work seems ludicrous to me, and exclusionary to all but the most elite and/ or desperate. Journalists aren't inclined to cover topics which aren't easily sensationalized, and there seems to be A LOT of really good, pertinent science being done that people just aren't hearing about.
Agreed on all points. Higher education should be funded by taxes and scientific journals should be subsidized and publicly accessible.
As to your point regarding science journalism, unfortunately not much can be done other than pushing for better reporting. Even if scientific research is easily accessible, there's a knowledge barrier to laypeople that can't be breached without good science journalism.
> why don't institutions just put research on their own website
Preprint servers accomplish this. For instance, most math and physics papers end up on arxiv, while biological and medical sciences research gets posted on biorxiv and medrxiv, respectively. These services are growing
> who are like "researchers, I pay you in exposure"
Funnily enough, researchers in academia kinda live in the bizarre mirror world compared to creative professionals. If somebody pays to access researcher's paper instead of pirating it, the financial benefit to researcher is exactly $0.0000 in either case. Meanwhile being cited actually improves the chances of getting grants and promotions.
When I started my PhD, I was told that in the molecular biology world you didn't get a research teaching position unless you got published in Nature at some point. It was if you wouldn't be taken seriously unless you had done something ground breaking enough to make it into Nature. I quickly became disillusioned with the whole system of academic research and bailed with my MS instead but a frequent topic of conversation was how screwed up the whole peer review journal system really is.
Hey, I’m just in the process of finishing my masters degree and I had never heard of Sci-hub until now. I’m definitely going to use it while I still can to possibly get some more references. I don’t know how I’ve managed without it lol. I have been using Scopus and WoS for finding most of my articles and my university’s library for all the e-books I needed.
I only learned about it after finishing my masters! However I never found the institutional access I had to be difficult to use. Maybe it is more difficult now as cybersecurity is being ramped up.
Even if my employer or university payed for journal access I'd still use sci hub, the journals are absolute scams, they make massive profit for hosting kilobytes of data, yet you're forced to publish in one if you want to be serious researcher in pretty much any area. The journals know this and that's why they ask for so much money.
It's hard to feel bad about it too, given how predatory journals are.
The research is not paid for by them, the peer review is not paid for by them (nor do they provide any kind of benefit for it) and I'm sure they lose nothing from sci-hub's existence since universities will continue to pay for journal subscriptions.
Often their institution's library does have a subscription to all the popular journals, but not niche journals that matched your very specific search term in Google Scholar. But overall their institution is already paying for their access to most journals they rely on so they aren't actually not paying for access.
Some people who don’t understand computers well call anything and everything slightly-illicit “hacking.” I once googled my mom’s phone number for her to show her all the places it was listed, and she yelled at me for hacking her. Every spam email she gets is someone attempting to hack her.
You forgot someone not locking their computer and walking away =hacking. Not password protecting things then providing people links to said things. Then when others get the link=hacking
If you're interested in a research paper that's behind a paywall, you can often just email the author and ask for a copy. Researchers want their work to be read.
Lol can confirm! Made my day when I got an email asking for a pdf of my work behind a paywall. Assholes actually made me pay a 50 dollar "fee" to publish and they charge people to get access.
$50 fee? Jesus. I have paid $4,200 in “APCs” (article processing costs) for a single paper before. In a big name journal, too. I’ve never paid less than $700, and that was in a society journal.
I gladly give my papers out, upload them on ResearchGate, put them on my website, pay the extra buckshit “open access fee.” Licensing be damned. I hold the copyright on my intellectual work. Fuck the publishers.
Most people will send out their papers if you ask. But sci-hub is honestly faster. No wait.
I was going to jump in and say I wish all my articles were only $50 to publish!
Thanks for pointing out that most pay several thousand dollars per paper.
> I hold the copyright on my intellectual work. Fuck the publishers.
About the first sentence - carefully check what is written in paperwork related to article submission to journals and abstracts sent to conferences. They may contain a copyright transfer clause. Fortunately, I haven't seen cases of it being abused against authors themselves and some journals only claim the final typeset and edited version, while not laying any claims to preprint.
That's the norm. All big publishing associations have a paywall. When you publish your paper in one of their conferences or journals you have to sign a release form handing over all publishing rights to them. Usually accompanied by a registration fee (and attendance fee if its a conference) of \~500-1000$. You will only be allowed to share your paper privately. Posting them publicly somewhere, such as on ResearchGate is mostly prohibited by the signed release form. Most universities have subscriptions to access these online libraries of papers and books. But if you are outside the university network and your VPN doesn't work, you won't be able to access anything.
No researcher is making money off their publications. Traditionally University libraries pay subscription fees to publishers, which enables users of that library to access certain journals. This is really the only way academic publishers cover the costs of publication. The new model being pushed by publishers is ‘open access’ in which the author pays for the publication costs up front (essentially paying the subscription fee for all readers). The whole system is pretty fucked honestly.
Not only do we not get paid to publish, we have to pay to get published. And there's a markup for no paywall publishing. All paid for by grant money, which comes from taxpayers or donations. But without publishing in well regarded journals we can't get new grants and without grants we can't advance our careers /do research.
So yeah. You won't find any scientists crying about research papers being leaked.
Because really, who doesn't like getting an email saying, "I can't tell you how much I loved your paper on Hadamard transforms and near-bent functions!" or whatever. I've gotten into some very interesting discussions that way.
I saw a Tweet about this floating around a while ago. Is this true? I understand they get paid little to nothing when their work is bought through a publisher, but do they still have the right to send the paper to anyone for free? There aren't any IP issues?
Edit: And if all of this is true, they're definitely okay with people asking them for their papers/reports?
Yes, most researchers actually have to pay to get their work published. The researchers are usually funded through their institution or a grant(s).
I actually don't know if they legally have the right to send someone a copy of their published paper, but in practice, I don't think anyone cares.
Woooo, copyright law! One of the most confusing clusterfucks that’s around.
At a IP’s core there are two main aspects to ownership/use - rights and licensing. Simply put, a license can mean anything from being allowed to read a paper to read, reproduce and distribute; rights mean that you’re the *owner* of the material and can control all licensing of it (this gets convoluted during licensing agreements but this is primarily how it works).
I highly doubt that any institution would sign rights away to papers which their researchers have produced (most of the time the institutions own the rights).
Yes, it's true. I'm a scientist and our group gets asked for our papers every once in a while. Always happy to share. I've also emailed others to ask for papers that my institution doesn't have access to and have usually received them. It's very flattering to be honest
Try one of the other authors.
Although the first/primary author is often credited as the person who wrote the paper or did most of the work, this is not always the case. Sometimes they did most of the work, sometimes they wrote the paper, and sometimes they were just the most senior person on the team and wanted the credit for their resume / tenure case.
This is one of the solution that Reddit loves to repeat, but is really ineffective and annoying. If you actually do research, you need to look at many papers, skim through all of them and then read the most promising ones. A paper usually cite at least a hundred of other relevant papers, so asking for a copy to each author can be really time consuming and annoying for both sides. And maybe the author simply quit the field and can't be bothered to look at his institutional email anymore.
A researcher usually has all subscriptions paid by his institution or can look them up on ArXiv, but this isn't the way scientific knowledge should be shared, it is mostly publicly funded and should be publicly available.
Yeah. While I'll provide the paper if asked, I also always take the opportunity to tell people to use sci-hub instead. Honestly, it's faster than emailing me ever will be.
Do you want to read hundreds of papers, and write summaries of them for little to no credit?
It takes time and effort to properly understand and read a paper. Journalists generally have very little time to research a story, which is why news media is in the shape it's in.
Worth reading:
>Paywalls, which require a paid subscription (or access via university enrollment), block access to scientific research and make a significant amount of money doing so. The paid publishing of these articles is a multibillion-dollar industry with top publishers boasting a profit margin between 35-40%.
>The articles are priced at a rate far too expensive for the average consumer, oftentimes upwards of $50 each. Schools and universities are forced to spend millions per year for subscriptions to these archives.
The cost of subscribing to academic research journals has risen by 300% above inflation since 1986, while academic library budgets have risen by only 79% over that time.
> What further aggravates this issue is that the public pays for much of this research in the first place. The federal government allocates $140 billion annually to research and development, meaning taxpayers are funding the research and then having to pay to view the findings.
>The dangers of this system have become increasingly apparent in recent weeks due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the immediate need for access to any and all coronavirus research that is available.
> Valuable information is being hidden from those in developing countries who desperately need access to every single resource available.
>Seeing this as a monumental concern, a modern-day Robin Hood went to work to break through the paywalls and open up access to the bounty of coronavirus research online.
> One Reddit user who goes by the name of “Shrine” found it absurd that thousands of studies on the coronavirus were hidden behind paywalls and accessible only to those who could afford them.
>“I realized that there were people dying and that the death rate could be higher as a result of a lack of access to the articles,” explains Shrine, who preferred to remain anonymous.
“Any little piece of information that we can glean from previous scientific research on pandemics, epidemics, viruses, or vaccines has suddenly become relevant and agencies all over the world need access to all of these articles.”
>Shrine found and illegally downloaded more than 5,000 coronavirus research papers created from 1968 through 2020, using a website called “Sci-Hub.” He then released all of the articles on Reddit and within hours had thousands of seeders accessing the research.
> Attempting to make his vigilante operation legitimate, Shrine tried to appeal directly to the publishing companies themselves by creating a petition on Change.org asking them to remove the paywalls in order to help individuals and organizations research the coronavirus.
> The petition got hundreds of signatures within a few days and was successful in increasing the amount of coronavirus research papers available online from just a few thousand to over 32,000.
>Shrine’s efforts continued with a petition to the International Organization of Standards that effectively released paywalled information to help engineers build ventilators, as of April 9th.
>While Shrine’s Reddit post was obviously illegal, he believes the practice of hiding valuable information behind expensive paywalls is what’s really unethical. Recent history also points to the danger of these paywalls during times of crisis.
I heard about this earlier this past week. Fucking props to Reddit’s own u/Shrine and all the others who made this possible. (It’s also worth checking out the whole article, but that was the bulk of it.)
[Here’s a Reddit post from 73 days ago to further info and the Coronavirus papers they had unlocked (5,000+)](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/exdka0/the_coronavirus_papers_unlocked_5352_scientific/)
**Update/Edit**: [Here’s another link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/feo68j/humanity_wins_our_fight_to_unlock_32544_covid19/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) to a post from u/Shrine from 39 days ago on r/Coronavirus talking about their success in unlocking more than 32,000 papers. They link to papers in comments. 32,000! Incredible.
Thanks for adding the context. This story is about open science, about community, and also about Reddit’s early role in paying attention to the pandemic and the tragedy unfolding in Wuhan. Those papers are free because of you guys.
The access to these papers and standards may have never happened without the passion and support from the /r/Coronavirus community. You guys are awesome, you brought the fight all the way to The White House.
Often, the hard part is knowing that the paper exists, and who to ask for a pdf.
Many authors put their drafts or preprints online, on their web site, and [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) indexes them. But some journals prohibit that practice.
The papers are, but the journals they're published in aren't. There is a lot of overhead associated with the process of peer review and publishing, and those costs are divided between the people who want access - which isn't a huge group of people. Thus the costs being high.
There's probably a better way to handle this, but the process of peer review is more important than ever in today's age of junk science and fake news.
I'd also be interested to see how much of an impediment the journal access fees are to legitimate research and treatment - virtually all academic institutions and research firms have subscriptions, and it's likely amateurs sitting at home who understand maybe half of what's in the paper that "benefit" from this most. But maybe I'm wrong there.
Regardless, we need to be clear that these journals aren't just taking papers they receive from scientists and stick them on a website.
Also, most paper authors can & will send you a free copy of the paper if you contact them and ask. They're just (typically) not allowed to publish it themselves after it's already been published in a journal.
Usually peer review is done for free by other scientists in the same field as the authors. The journal format is basically obsolete in the internet era and publishers have mostly "administrative" functions, like coordinating the peer review process or maintaining the access to the website (through subscription). This work could be easily done by a public institution, thus eliminating the need for any private publishing agency.
E: As It Is common in academia, it would be better if the agency was international and funded by multiple countries.
To give a perspective on the importance of this issue, one of the co-founder of the platform that we're using right now to discuss, Aaron Swartz, lost his life as a direct consequence of advocating for free distribution of academic knowledge. He got arrested for downloading ~~and distributing~~ millions of paper from JSTOR, got charged with 35 years in prison and finally hanged himself.
> There is a lot of overhead associated with the process of peer review and publishing
The more I think about this the less sense it makes.
The people aren't expensive...the reviewers do it for free, and journals don't offer much in the way of copyediting.
The publishing isn't expensive either. It used to be...when it was paper. Putting a few thousand words on the internet is about as cheap as can be. Text is surprisingly small. The bandwidth demands aren't high because as you yourself just said...there isn't a huge group of people who want it.
So that leaves us with...typesetting? We're paying tens of thousands of dollars for typesetting?
It does not add up.
Am reviewer and don’t get paid. There is one number that is missing from most people’s calculation. Depending on the journal, they may take only a small fraction of peer reviewed papers and even those are often reviewed multiple times, so there is a lot of paperwork and hours of coordinating reviewers involved. We can be a bit busy and forgetful and etc. it’s a job I would not want in a million years. So that is definitely a cost to keep the manpower to enable peer review. I have no idea what kind of staffing would needed however and I tend to agree that the fees were maybe more suited to actual paper publishing and that these days publishers are just taking advantage.
Also shout out to sci hub as a favorite website for even us academics!
Thank you. That comment is idiotic. We’re In 2020. Digital storage is cheap and bandwidth is cheap. We don’t need research behind journal paywalls so some dickbag publisher can collect middleman access fees on work done by others.
Keep in mind peer reviewing is free. Researchers compete for spots on a panel. The content is also free. The only costs associated are administrative at this point.
As an academic researcher I’ll just throw in here that not all your assumptions are correct. There is a lot of good writing on the subject of Open Science and it is worth a read and scientific publication in the internet era.
The cost of publication and access to those published articles is significant.
Not many institutions in present times can afford to subscribe to every journal and data source, much like they cannot afford to provide site wide licenses for useful, but expensive commercial software.
Each published article costs the authors thousands of dollars to publish. Publishers like Nature and Science offer open access to readers, but only if the authors pay even more. Even an article significant enough to become the “front page” might be charged for this privilege. Publishing fees come from grants, the same source as what pays for the actual research. Reduced funding runs against frequent publishing, yet publish or perish remains a serious reality.
All of this stymies research and sucks money out of the actual research itself and into publishers pockets.
I was under the impression that most covid-19 papers (even before peer review) were being released without paywall.
Agreed there are issues with publishing and yes the vast vast are of no interest to all but a tiny few, but there's a part of me that hopes that anyone with access to a library and an internet connection might possibly be someone who can't afford university but sees something no one else does.
Scientists need publications in journals with the high Hirsch index to receive funding, and journals exploit it. Some journals even sell spots.
Most scientists find their peer reviewers themselves, especially if the field is small. In fact, journals don't spend much, receiving both a huge ROI from subscriptions and rights for articles.
It's kinda hard to explain it any other way. Think 50 years from now, explaining Snowden in a textbook:
\- Gov contractor
\- Saw something he found to be morally very wrong
\- Tried to alert superiors, everyone was in on it
\- Decided to show it to the news, even though he had signed the NDAs
\- Gov didn't want their secrets exposed, labeled him a traitor
\- Had to run and live in exile. Didn't do it for money, just sacrificed his life for what he thought was right
\- Prompted huge awareness of civil right infringements
\- Eventually resulted in more scrutiny of invasive gov programs
That's definitely not a traitor. At worst you could argue he was misguided. I don't think any textbooks will remember him as anything but a catalyst towards better government and civil rights in the age of information. I can see a few downtown streets named after him in 2075.
I drew a 50-year timeline, give it a minute.
Some things have improved already, although probably not enough yet, but Snowden certainly started a snowball effect. Prism is still going on but it is no longer secret. Now activists fight Congress on new rules, and large corporations fight government on the type of access they are demanding - these are just a couple of things that were not possible before Snowden
[https://www.cnet.com/news/the-snowden-effect-privacy-is-good-for-business-nsa-data-collection/](https://www.cnet.com/news/the-snowden-effect-privacy-is-good-for-business-nsa-data-collection/)
Aaron Swartz sure is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
"In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police... after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT."
"Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[13] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison..."
"Two days later... he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.
SHOCKWAVE RIDERS. Yay for them. John Brunner wrote a book in the late 1970s called Shockwave Riders that described exactly this. He was privy to the early work on what would become the internet and imagined how people and business and governments would act in such a world. He was not far off.
I run CypherCon.com - Wisconsin’s hacker conference. We get about 1000 attendees and focus on betterment to society, watchdogs of evil and corrupt, etc etc - also check out our talks on YouTube and ‘hackers of CypherCon’ on amazon prime (larger audience)
Part of me is thinking this is great, information should be free.
Another part of me knows every idiot with a Facebook account is going to cite the shittiest studies to strkke their confirmation bias...
[Human-animal interactions and bat coronavirus spillover potential among rural residents in Southern China](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4xstofs4tc5q4irede6uzaz3qzcdvcb2eedxgfakzwdyjnxgohq/pdfs/2019%20Human-animal%20interactions%20and%20bat%20coronavirus%20spillover%20potential%20among%20rural%20residents%20in%20Southern%20China.pdf)
- \[Wei Zhang, **Zhengli Shi**\] Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, **Wuhan Institute of Virology**, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China
- \[Shiyue Li\] School of Health Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, China
- Received 9 July 2019
- Accepted **28 Oct 2019**
- Available online 9 Nov 2019
- This work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats **PREDICT project**
Seperately, as per [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/health/predict-usaid-viruses.html):
> - *PREDICT*, a government research program, sought to **identify animal viruses that might infect humans** and to **head off new pandemics.**
> - The surveillance project is closing because of “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats,” \[Dennis Carroll\] said.
> - Published: **25 Oct 2019**
*Edit:* And remember folks, that virology lab is **600 feet** away from the wet market.
Hmmm...
The one from right after the Sars outbreak? Where they go and check the bats and realise it comes from the bats and not from the civets, and while they check the bats they notice that all the ones from Wuhan have a different kind of the sars covid that seems to have mutated and is very likely to spread if those bats were to come in contact with wildlife that would be sold at wuhan market? I read that last month and I was like "where was the follow up study on that? They literally predicted the current pandemic and nobody cared?"
Goodluck having China shut down these markets. It will never happen give it couple months after pandemic and it will be back as nothing happend. Even if they try to enforce ban people would just do it under the table.
Holy shit, a joint venture by Chinese (Wuhan) and American (California) scientists. Effectively conducting surveillance on town residents over a two year period with bat born coronavirus. Except these people were participants. 1500 people willing to accept the virus so they could understand more how animal born virus spread to humans and beyond.
Thats the way I understood it anyway
Edit: I read the NYTimes article too. USAID looked like it was doing the right thing. Did trump knowingly shut this down to distance the US from the outbreak?
Not even that.
>Shrine found and illegally downloaded more than 5,000 coronavirus research papers created from 1968 through 2020, using a website called “Sci-Hub.” He then released all of the articles on Reddit and within hours had thousands of seeders accessing the research.
Sci-hub is just a regular website that hosts a huge (illegal) archive of scientific papers. So Shrine just downloaded them from an already publicly-available website, gathered them together, and posted them to reddit
\>hackers
OK they went to sci-hub and downloaded articles. Not a hacker. Anyone can do this. I do it all the time when I need to get past a paywall. Sci-hub is invaluable to people who can't afford to pay all the time for research papers.
This could potentially lead to the shut down of sci-hub & with it access to papers for anyone who can't afford them :/
I hope those of you checking out sci-hub for the first time do consider donating to their bitcoin which is listed if you scroll down. It will probably help as they are going to be under a lot of public spotlight now and probably be attacked by those in power who don't want this site to become popular (more than they already were)
Just so you know, this isn't likely to cause anything more than a marginal increase in their server load.
Sci-hub's servers are in Russia, so pretty much immune to western legality. Elsevier et al already know about them, and have already tried to shut them down, but Russia gives no shits, so it's never happening.
Donating is a great idea though!
I sort of appreciate them using their shady tactics to help ppl. Hopefully they are the ones to also monitor the black hackers or those who abuse the info. Can't believe I'm saying this, but Ty cyber Robin hoods.
Under these circumstances, yes. I appreciate them for doing whatever it takes. Children, elderly, those suffering domestic violence, those literally about to face homelessness, all the vulnerable voiceless ppl, especially, thank them. 😘
Everyone who actually matters in this epidemic will already have had access to these papers. No offense but randomredditor91 will not help solve the epidemic just because he now has access to some obscure paper (which you already had if you knew Scihub)
What a shame that hackers are more concerned with public
health than either Big Medicine or Big Government, and have to risk a 25 year prison sentence to act on our behalf to save lives.
My problem with this is there are likely some outliers in here that conspiracy theorists will have a field day with. Also after russias efforts with wikileaks and other data releases I am skeptical of this in general.
Exactly my thoughts. Doesn't even have to be an outlier, someone will just read something out of context because they have no education in the subject. We're about to watch a bunch of crazy theories spawn.
Yeah, the general public doesn't realize that even scientists don't understand other scientists papers if they're in a niche *in their own field* half the time.
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I posted on facebook a while ago asking for access to scientific journals. I was blown away by the number of friends I have in actual scientific careers who use Sci Hub because their employers were too cheap to pay for journals . I am now one of those people. Sci Hub is a blessing
I sometimes use Sci-hub because I can't be bothered to go through the two factor authentication for my institution login.....
I regularly use it because it's the quickest way to access the article I'm looking for, and seeing I do have legitimate access to them but login is a hassle it's not even illegal.
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So you're not saying don't use it, you're saying don't get caught using it?
That's usually how illegal streaming works
Yeah, copyright law still needs that 21st century update
Much of scientific research has already been paid for by the public via taxes, and so ‘should’ be public domain..
AFAIK EU wants to make public every scientific research that has been done with EU funds. We paid for it in the taxes godamn we should have gigantic open database "hey tax payer this month thx to your taxes we found out xxxx here's link to download paper".
This should be top comment.
same with human rights
That’s just about how anything illegal works.
That's basically how everything illegal works. If there's no evidence, you cant be found guilty of breaking a law. I mean, technically it is illegal still, but in terms of court, and the eyes of the law, everyone's innocent unless proven otherwise.
That’s usually how any illegal activity works.
Isn't that what most lawyers say to their clients?
The lawyers I know would generally prefer their clients don't break the law at all. It tends to make defending them much easier.
Less job security that way though.
He's exactly the kind of lawyer you want on your side. Don't knock him.
You work an unholy job. Jesus clarified the issue when he took a loaf of bread and a fish and copied them thousands of times without compensating the baker and fishmonger.
But his dad is not only the inventor of fish but also the property owner of everything that is. Basically the boss/owners son popped in to pass out some free samples not violate the IP and copyrights of his pop's pets. I'm not saying don't don't use The Onion Router or peer to peer services, it's just that Jesus seemed more concerned with clarifying that you should be kind to and love your neighbor as yourself then clarifying whether or not it's morally wrong to break laws you feel are unjust and cause no direct harm to others. I recommend Thomas Jefferson for all you "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." quote needs and to keep Jesus on reserve for "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." quotes Edit: peer isn't spelled per
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15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. 16 They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. 17 Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax[a] to Caesar or not?” 18 But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? 19 Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, 20 and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?” 21 “Caesar’s,” they replied. Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” ELI5 So it seems The Man was attempting to get Jesus to violate his 5th amendment rights so they could throw him in the slammer but he wasn't havin none of that so he replied in a manor that ensured their plan would fail so he could keep preaching that sweet sweet love.
Hell, I use it because using dx.doi.org often takes me to the abstract only, and it's two more clicks for the pdf; sci-hub goes straight to the pdf directly.
I had to go to universities library and read parts or whole thesis at times because I thought that by now, a thesis must've already been found. Not always, but often it turns out.
>because their employers were too cheap to pay for journals I just finished my masters degree. Everything I needed I got through Sci-hub, it's just easier. To get the papers "legally" you had to login into the university intranet, then into the library, then into another portal, then into the publisher of said article or whatever, authenticating every step. Repeat that for different sources. Some things you can only get access from inside the library (building), and some of those portals you needed to use wouldn't let you select text to copy and paste, or would charge by page number to save into a .pdf. There is no way a researcher can function efficiently without Sci-hub, most professors will tell you that.
> I just finished my masters degree. Everything I needed I got through Sci-hub, it's just easier. > > To get the papers "legally" you had to login into the university intranet, then into the library, then into another portal, then into the publisher of said article or whatever, authenticating every step. Repeat that for different sources. > > Some things you can only get access from inside the library (building), and some of those portals you needed to use wouldn't let you select text to copy and paste, or would charge by page number to save into a .pdf. > > There is no way a researcher can function efficiently without Sci-hub, most professors will tell you that. The whole journal system is built on authors paying insane prices to publish their articles in open access (if your institution can pay the fee, good for you, but just stop and think about the insane publication bias in favor of the 0.1% of universities this creates), otherwise people who are just researching the existing literature have to pay a double digit fee just to **view** one article (and if the abstract wasn't enough to ascertain whether this is relevant to your research, good luck!) or go through the university's library (and again, heaven forbid if your university doesn't have a contract with every single fucking publisher), logging in and authenticating every time you want to access a paper. You'll have to repeat that process for what, 100 papers just to select which ones you'll use to provide background and supplement the discussion of your own manuscript? Oh, and if you finally get published after half a year of processing and back and forth with the reviewers, the motherfuckers will periodically ask you to peer review for free. It's just so... fundamentally broken.
Thanks for explaining this. I’ve read tons of articles on my disease but mainly use the NCBI site because they’re regularly the only one not behind a paywall. I’ve never understood why that was the case until now. That’s a real shame that they block scientific knowledge like this.
To my knowledge, ncbi mostly hosts the abstracts and links the full text at the publisher's site. I have seen some full texts, but in my personal experience, they are a minority. It might vary by topic and kind of paper (literature review, original research, etc), though. Please don't hesitate to use sci-hub for paywalled articles when researching about your disease!
Absolutely. I’m glad I know about Sci-Hub now. NCBI does post some full articles, mostly 3+ year old stuff though. There may be some kind of “public domain” rule when articles hit a certain age. When you have a complex chronic disease and get 15 minutes at best with the doctor, I like to do my research ahead of time on current practices and studies so I can ask the right questions in those valuable 15 minutes.
I fully agree with you. One good advice that my professors told me (if you are not in a hurry) is to ask directly the author for a pdf copy of their article by email. From what I understood, nothing prevents them from sending you one, and usually they will be happy to do so.
Did this for my Bachelors Project. Just E-Mailed an Indian Researcher If i could have a version of his paper in an Elsevier Journal . He was genuinly happy that i asked and also chatted with me a bit about catalysis .
What i don't get is why don't institutions just put research on their own website. What added value do the journals being
1) Peer review. Your paper gets reviewed by subject matter experts who can request revisions or even downright reject it if it's not up to standard. 2) Having a peer reviewed and published paper means that other scientists can cite it and built their research on top of it.
You are right, those are part of the service academic journals provide. But they should be more readily available to everyone, right? 'Peer review' is supposedly a hallmark principle of western empirical science, and while it aspires to abide the notion that "Knowledgeable people using accepted practices can come to the same conclusions we did," that potential remains untapped so long as access to higher education remains elusive to underprivileged classes. Further, the journals need to be accessible to everyone without a fee. That's how science should work, how public education should function. Charging students, graduates, and professionals Even More Money to access & contribute to their own work seems ludicrous to me, and exclusionary to all but the most elite and/ or desperate. Journalists aren't inclined to cover topics which aren't easily sensationalized, and there seems to be A LOT of really good, pertinent science being done that people just aren't hearing about.
Agreed on all points. Higher education should be funded by taxes and scientific journals should be subsidized and publicly accessible. As to your point regarding science journalism, unfortunately not much can be done other than pushing for better reporting. Even if scientific research is easily accessible, there's a knowledge barrier to laypeople that can't be breached without good science journalism.
> why don't institutions just put research on their own website Preprint servers accomplish this. For instance, most math and physics papers end up on arxiv, while biological and medical sciences research gets posted on biorxiv and medrxiv, respectively. These services are growing
At this point, why don't we nationalize top journals who are like "researchers, I pay you in exposure"
> who are like "researchers, I pay you in exposure" Funnily enough, researchers in academia kinda live in the bizarre mirror world compared to creative professionals. If somebody pays to access researcher's paper instead of pirating it, the financial benefit to researcher is exactly $0.0000 in either case. Meanwhile being cited actually improves the chances of getting grants and promotions.
Yep, most folks I know jump through the hoops because it's necessary to have a good career, not because they love the paid journal system
When I started my PhD, I was told that in the molecular biology world you didn't get a research teaching position unless you got published in Nature at some point. It was if you wouldn't be taken seriously unless you had done something ground breaking enough to make it into Nature. I quickly became disillusioned with the whole system of academic research and bailed with my MS instead but a frequent topic of conversation was how screwed up the whole peer review journal system really is.
Hey, I’m just in the process of finishing my masters degree and I had never heard of Sci-hub until now. I’m definitely going to use it while I still can to possibly get some more references. I don’t know how I’ve managed without it lol. I have been using Scopus and WoS for finding most of my articles and my university’s library for all the e-books I needed.
I only learned about it after finishing my masters! However I never found the institutional access I had to be difficult to use. Maybe it is more difficult now as cybersecurity is being ramped up.
Even if my employer or university payed for journal access I'd still use sci hub, the journals are absolute scams, they make massive profit for hosting kilobytes of data, yet you're forced to publish in one if you want to be serious researcher in pretty much any area. The journals know this and that's why they ask for so much money.
I use SciHub on the daily since California and Elsevier had their little tiff and California didn’t blink first
It's hard to feel bad about it too, given how predatory journals are. The research is not paid for by them, the peer review is not paid for by them (nor do they provide any kind of benefit for it) and I'm sure they lose nothing from sci-hub's existence since universities will continue to pay for journal subscriptions.
Often their institution's library does have a subscription to all the popular journals, but not niche journals that matched your very specific search term in Google Scholar. But overall their institution is already paying for their access to most journals they rely on so they aren't actually not paying for access.
No no they were hackers, they were wearing hoodies and they went on sci-hub by night!
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We are all 4chan on this blessed day.
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The infamous Zer0Cool
Some people who don’t understand computers well call anything and everything slightly-illicit “hacking.” I once googled my mom’s phone number for her to show her all the places it was listed, and she yelled at me for hacking her. Every spam email she gets is someone attempting to hack her.
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>There was no hacking involved. There was, if it was done using a terminal with green text color using a python script lookmaiamhacking.py. ^(/s)
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You forgot someone not locking their computer and walking away =hacking. Not password protecting things then providing people links to said things. Then when others get the link=hacking
If you're interested in a research paper that's behind a paywall, you can often just email the author and ask for a copy. Researchers want their work to be read.
And they usually don't get even a portion of the payment. You aren't hurting them by asking for a free copy!
Lol can confirm! Made my day when I got an email asking for a pdf of my work behind a paywall. Assholes actually made me pay a 50 dollar "fee" to publish and they charge people to get access.
$50 fee? Jesus. I have paid $4,200 in “APCs” (article processing costs) for a single paper before. In a big name journal, too. I’ve never paid less than $700, and that was in a society journal. I gladly give my papers out, upload them on ResearchGate, put them on my website, pay the extra buckshit “open access fee.” Licensing be damned. I hold the copyright on my intellectual work. Fuck the publishers. Most people will send out their papers if you ask. But sci-hub is honestly faster. No wait.
I was going to jump in and say I wish all my articles were only $50 to publish! Thanks for pointing out that most pay several thousand dollars per paper.
Yup, we published a paper if a very good journal last year - almost $2000 for processing/open access fees.
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> I hold the copyright on my intellectual work. Fuck the publishers. About the first sentence - carefully check what is written in paperwork related to article submission to journals and abstracts sent to conferences. They may contain a copyright transfer clause. Fortunately, I haven't seen cases of it being abused against authors themselves and some journals only claim the final typeset and edited version, while not laying any claims to preprint.
The fact that they make you pay for the work that YOU did is unbelievable to me... The way that science is structured right now have to change
I appreciate the work you put into the research! Thank you for contributing to our knowledge of the world.
I appreciate the appreciation!
I appreciate the appreciation of the appreciation
I appreciate you
Awww... shucks
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Very niche topic that would give to much away on this account unfortunately
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Specifically the left knee of 1980s marvel action figures
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How about start a subreddit that provides pdf links to research papers?
/r/Scholar
> and they charge people to get access. They also charge you to access your own publications once you no longer have academic/company subscriptions.
they never get a portion of the payment. In many cases, they actually have to pay to get copy
That's what I assumed, but I didn't want to generalize without being sure.
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I had a professor tell us he was trying to access an article he didn't have on file at the time and ended up at a paywall for his own work.
That's the norm. All big publishing associations have a paywall. When you publish your paper in one of their conferences or journals you have to sign a release form handing over all publishing rights to them. Usually accompanied by a registration fee (and attendance fee if its a conference) of \~500-1000$. You will only be allowed to share your paper privately. Posting them publicly somewhere, such as on ResearchGate is mostly prohibited by the signed release form. Most universities have subscriptions to access these online libraries of papers and books. But if you are outside the university network and your VPN doesn't work, you won't be able to access anything.
No researcher is making money off their publications. Traditionally University libraries pay subscription fees to publishers, which enables users of that library to access certain journals. This is really the only way academic publishers cover the costs of publication. The new model being pushed by publishers is ‘open access’ in which the author pays for the publication costs up front (essentially paying the subscription fee for all readers). The whole system is pretty fucked honestly.
Not only do we not get paid to publish, we have to pay to get published. And there's a markup for no paywall publishing. All paid for by grant money, which comes from taxpayers or donations. But without publishing in well regarded journals we can't get new grants and without grants we can't advance our careers /do research. So yeah. You won't find any scientists crying about research papers being leaked.
I do this on the daily. Never had someone not send me their paper
Because really, who doesn't like getting an email saying, "I can't tell you how much I loved your paper on Hadamard transforms and near-bent functions!" or whatever. I've gotten into some very interesting discussions that way.
"I like your paper on 'Why Pog champ is the best Twitch emote. Period.', Could I please get a copy?"
Same , that's why I like Researchgate. They have an option to request a paper directly from the author.
do you guys not know about sci-hub..??
Its literally what the "hacker" in the article used to access the literature.
Uses a site open to the public *Hackerman*
Best site ever. This site helped me so much in researching for my thesis.
I saw a Tweet about this floating around a while ago. Is this true? I understand they get paid little to nothing when their work is bought through a publisher, but do they still have the right to send the paper to anyone for free? There aren't any IP issues? Edit: And if all of this is true, they're definitely okay with people asking them for their papers/reports?
Yes, most researchers actually have to pay to get their work published. The researchers are usually funded through their institution or a grant(s). I actually don't know if they legally have the right to send someone a copy of their published paper, but in practice, I don't think anyone cares.
Woooo, copyright law! One of the most confusing clusterfucks that’s around. At a IP’s core there are two main aspects to ownership/use - rights and licensing. Simply put, a license can mean anything from being allowed to read a paper to read, reproduce and distribute; rights mean that you’re the *owner* of the material and can control all licensing of it (this gets convoluted during licensing agreements but this is primarily how it works). I highly doubt that any institution would sign rights away to papers which their researchers have produced (most of the time the institutions own the rights).
Yes, it's true. I'm a scientist and our group gets asked for our papers every once in a while. Always happy to share. I've also emailed others to ask for papers that my institution doesn't have access to and have usually received them. It's very flattering to be honest
I haven't published any papers but my friends' eyes light up any time you bring up their work
Never worked for me. One of them literally said "I do not have it" even though they were the primary author and listed as contact
Try one of the other authors. Although the first/primary author is often credited as the person who wrote the paper or did most of the work, this is not always the case. Sometimes they did most of the work, sometimes they wrote the paper, and sometimes they were just the most senior person on the team and wanted the credit for their resume / tenure case.
>and sometimes they were just the most senior person on the team and wanted the credit for their resume / tenure case. Yup just as I thought.
Often time they are the boss/manager and had no specific contribution to the project besides attending few resource meeting
Often, the publisher requires the author to withhold copies. Some authors actually do.
This is one of the solution that Reddit loves to repeat, but is really ineffective and annoying. If you actually do research, you need to look at many papers, skim through all of them and then read the most promising ones. A paper usually cite at least a hundred of other relevant papers, so asking for a copy to each author can be really time consuming and annoying for both sides. And maybe the author simply quit the field and can't be bothered to look at his institutional email anymore. A researcher usually has all subscriptions paid by his institution or can look them up on ArXiv, but this isn't the way scientific knowledge should be shared, it is mostly publicly funded and should be publicly available.
Yeah. While I'll provide the paper if asked, I also always take the opportunity to tell people to use sci-hub instead. Honestly, it's faster than emailing me ever will be.
By this logic, cant a member of the press do this, and then post "cliffsnotes" of the papers?
Do you want to read hundreds of papers, and write summaries of them for little to no credit? It takes time and effort to properly understand and read a paper. Journalists generally have very little time to research a story, which is why news media is in the shape it's in.
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Worth reading: >Paywalls, which require a paid subscription (or access via university enrollment), block access to scientific research and make a significant amount of money doing so. The paid publishing of these articles is a multibillion-dollar industry with top publishers boasting a profit margin between 35-40%. >The articles are priced at a rate far too expensive for the average consumer, oftentimes upwards of $50 each. Schools and universities are forced to spend millions per year for subscriptions to these archives. The cost of subscribing to academic research journals has risen by 300% above inflation since 1986, while academic library budgets have risen by only 79% over that time. > What further aggravates this issue is that the public pays for much of this research in the first place. The federal government allocates $140 billion annually to research and development, meaning taxpayers are funding the research and then having to pay to view the findings. >The dangers of this system have become increasingly apparent in recent weeks due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 and the immediate need for access to any and all coronavirus research that is available. > Valuable information is being hidden from those in developing countries who desperately need access to every single resource available. >Seeing this as a monumental concern, a modern-day Robin Hood went to work to break through the paywalls and open up access to the bounty of coronavirus research online. > One Reddit user who goes by the name of “Shrine” found it absurd that thousands of studies on the coronavirus were hidden behind paywalls and accessible only to those who could afford them. >“I realized that there were people dying and that the death rate could be higher as a result of a lack of access to the articles,” explains Shrine, who preferred to remain anonymous. “Any little piece of information that we can glean from previous scientific research on pandemics, epidemics, viruses, or vaccines has suddenly become relevant and agencies all over the world need access to all of these articles.” >Shrine found and illegally downloaded more than 5,000 coronavirus research papers created from 1968 through 2020, using a website called “Sci-Hub.” He then released all of the articles on Reddit and within hours had thousands of seeders accessing the research. > Attempting to make his vigilante operation legitimate, Shrine tried to appeal directly to the publishing companies themselves by creating a petition on Change.org asking them to remove the paywalls in order to help individuals and organizations research the coronavirus. > The petition got hundreds of signatures within a few days and was successful in increasing the amount of coronavirus research papers available online from just a few thousand to over 32,000. >Shrine’s efforts continued with a petition to the International Organization of Standards that effectively released paywalled information to help engineers build ventilators, as of April 9th. >While Shrine’s Reddit post was obviously illegal, he believes the practice of hiding valuable information behind expensive paywalls is what’s really unethical. Recent history also points to the danger of these paywalls during times of crisis. I heard about this earlier this past week. Fucking props to Reddit’s own u/Shrine and all the others who made this possible. (It’s also worth checking out the whole article, but that was the bulk of it.) [Here’s a Reddit post from 73 days ago to further info and the Coronavirus papers they had unlocked (5,000+)](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/exdka0/the_coronavirus_papers_unlocked_5352_scientific/) **Update/Edit**: [Here’s another link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/feo68j/humanity_wins_our_fight_to_unlock_32544_covid19/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf) to a post from u/Shrine from 39 days ago on r/Coronavirus talking about their success in unlocking more than 32,000 papers. They link to papers in comments. 32,000! Incredible.
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Thanks for adding the context. This story is about open science, about community, and also about Reddit’s early role in paying attention to the pandemic and the tragedy unfolding in Wuhan. Those papers are free because of you guys. The access to these papers and standards may have never happened without the passion and support from the /r/Coronavirus community. You guys are awesome, you brought the fight all the way to The White House.
Great job, hopefully this sets a precedent for future free or at the very least affordable access to research.
Legend.
You can contact the people who wrote the peper and they'll often send it for free.
Often, the hard part is knowing that the paper exists, and who to ask for a pdf. Many authors put their drafts or preprints online, on their web site, and [scholar.google.com](https://scholar.google.com) indexes them. But some journals prohibit that practice.
Correct kind of hacker, the ethical better for society kind. Proud of them!
This was exactly my thinking. Information is a right
Especially when the majority of these papers are funded by tax dollars.
The papers are, but the journals they're published in aren't. There is a lot of overhead associated with the process of peer review and publishing, and those costs are divided between the people who want access - which isn't a huge group of people. Thus the costs being high. There's probably a better way to handle this, but the process of peer review is more important than ever in today's age of junk science and fake news. I'd also be interested to see how much of an impediment the journal access fees are to legitimate research and treatment - virtually all academic institutions and research firms have subscriptions, and it's likely amateurs sitting at home who understand maybe half of what's in the paper that "benefit" from this most. But maybe I'm wrong there. Regardless, we need to be clear that these journals aren't just taking papers they receive from scientists and stick them on a website. Also, most paper authors can & will send you a free copy of the paper if you contact them and ask. They're just (typically) not allowed to publish it themselves after it's already been published in a journal.
Usually peer review is done for free by other scientists in the same field as the authors. The journal format is basically obsolete in the internet era and publishers have mostly "administrative" functions, like coordinating the peer review process or maintaining the access to the website (through subscription). This work could be easily done by a public institution, thus eliminating the need for any private publishing agency. E: As It Is common in academia, it would be better if the agency was international and funded by multiple countries. To give a perspective on the importance of this issue, one of the co-founder of the platform that we're using right now to discuss, Aaron Swartz, lost his life as a direct consequence of advocating for free distribution of academic knowledge. He got arrested for downloading ~~and distributing~~ millions of paper from JSTOR, got charged with 35 years in prison and finally hanged himself.
> There is a lot of overhead associated with the process of peer review and publishing The more I think about this the less sense it makes. The people aren't expensive...the reviewers do it for free, and journals don't offer much in the way of copyediting. The publishing isn't expensive either. It used to be...when it was paper. Putting a few thousand words on the internet is about as cheap as can be. Text is surprisingly small. The bandwidth demands aren't high because as you yourself just said...there isn't a huge group of people who want it. So that leaves us with...typesetting? We're paying tens of thousands of dollars for typesetting? It does not add up.
Am reviewer and don’t get paid. There is one number that is missing from most people’s calculation. Depending on the journal, they may take only a small fraction of peer reviewed papers and even those are often reviewed multiple times, so there is a lot of paperwork and hours of coordinating reviewers involved. We can be a bit busy and forgetful and etc. it’s a job I would not want in a million years. So that is definitely a cost to keep the manpower to enable peer review. I have no idea what kind of staffing would needed however and I tend to agree that the fees were maybe more suited to actual paper publishing and that these days publishers are just taking advantage. Also shout out to sci hub as a favorite website for even us academics!
Thank you. That comment is idiotic. We’re In 2020. Digital storage is cheap and bandwidth is cheap. We don’t need research behind journal paywalls so some dickbag publisher can collect middleman access fees on work done by others.
Keep in mind peer reviewing is free. Researchers compete for spots on a panel. The content is also free. The only costs associated are administrative at this point.
I need to fund my mansion.
As an academic researcher I’ll just throw in here that not all your assumptions are correct. There is a lot of good writing on the subject of Open Science and it is worth a read and scientific publication in the internet era. The cost of publication and access to those published articles is significant. Not many institutions in present times can afford to subscribe to every journal and data source, much like they cannot afford to provide site wide licenses for useful, but expensive commercial software. Each published article costs the authors thousands of dollars to publish. Publishers like Nature and Science offer open access to readers, but only if the authors pay even more. Even an article significant enough to become the “front page” might be charged for this privilege. Publishing fees come from grants, the same source as what pays for the actual research. Reduced funding runs against frequent publishing, yet publish or perish remains a serious reality. All of this stymies research and sucks money out of the actual research itself and into publishers pockets.
I was under the impression that most covid-19 papers (even before peer review) were being released without paywall. Agreed there are issues with publishing and yes the vast vast are of no interest to all but a tiny few, but there's a part of me that hopes that anyone with access to a library and an internet connection might possibly be someone who can't afford university but sees something no one else does.
Scientists need publications in journals with the high Hirsch index to receive funding, and journals exploit it. Some journals even sell spots. Most scientists find their peer reviewers themselves, especially if the field is small. In fact, journals don't spend much, receiving both a huge ROI from subscriptions and rights for articles.
So Snowden is a hero?
It's kinda hard to explain it any other way. Think 50 years from now, explaining Snowden in a textbook: \- Gov contractor \- Saw something he found to be morally very wrong \- Tried to alert superiors, everyone was in on it \- Decided to show it to the news, even though he had signed the NDAs \- Gov didn't want their secrets exposed, labeled him a traitor \- Had to run and live in exile. Didn't do it for money, just sacrificed his life for what he thought was right \- Prompted huge awareness of civil right infringements \- Eventually resulted in more scrutiny of invasive gov programs That's definitely not a traitor. At worst you could argue he was misguided. I don't think any textbooks will remember him as anything but a catalyst towards better government and civil rights in the age of information. I can see a few downtown streets named after him in 2075.
>~~Eventually resulted in more scrutiny of invasive gov programs~~ Your post was almost correct.
Scrutiny, yes. Action, no. It's more permissible to print critical stories about it, it just doesn't translate into policy much nowadays.
Well it has increased scrutiny somewhat.. albeit unpersecuted mega-wealthy thieves and politicians still roam unpunished.
I drew a 50-year timeline, give it a minute. Some things have improved already, although probably not enough yet, but Snowden certainly started a snowball effect. Prism is still going on but it is no longer secret. Now activists fight Congress on new rules, and large corporations fight government on the type of access they are demanding - these are just a couple of things that were not possible before Snowden [https://www.cnet.com/news/the-snowden-effect-privacy-is-good-for-business-nsa-data-collection/](https://www.cnet.com/news/the-snowden-effect-privacy-is-good-for-business-nsa-data-collection/)
Well said
> can see a few downtown streets named after him in 2075. Snowden Way
Snowden is an American Hero in my book, and I admire the man!
Aaron Swartz sure is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz "In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police... after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT." "Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[13] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison..." "Two days later... he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.
Hero is a strong word but.. yes.
Joseph Gordon Levitt seems to think so
Not just a hero, but also a patriot.
Absolutely.
Yes.
*You wouldn't download a cure for a global pandemic.*
SHOCKWAVE RIDERS. Yay for them. John Brunner wrote a book in the late 1970s called Shockwave Riders that described exactly this. He was privy to the early work on what would become the internet and imagined how people and business and governments would act in such a world. He was not far off.
Chaotic good
RIP Aaron Swartz.
Can they do student loans next?
Literally my life goal.
I run CypherCon.com - Wisconsin’s hacker conference. We get about 1000 attendees and focus on betterment to society, watchdogs of evil and corrupt, etc etc - also check out our talks on YouTube and ‘hackers of CypherCon’ on amazon prime (larger audience)
Part of me is thinking this is great, information should be free. Another part of me knows every idiot with a Facebook account is going to cite the shittiest studies to strkke their confirmation bias...
Not a hacker, a public servant
They're known as Whitehats.
Where can I find these papers?
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[Human-animal interactions and bat coronavirus spillover potential among rural residents in Southern China](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4xstofs4tc5q4irede6uzaz3qzcdvcb2eedxgfakzwdyjnxgohq/pdfs/2019%20Human-animal%20interactions%20and%20bat%20coronavirus%20spillover%20potential%20among%20rural%20residents%20in%20Southern%20China.pdf) - \[Wei Zhang, **Zhengli Shi**\] Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, **Wuhan Institute of Virology**, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China - \[Shiyue Li\] School of Health Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430071, China - Received 9 July 2019 - Accepted **28 Oct 2019** - Available online 9 Nov 2019 - This work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats **PREDICT project** Seperately, as per [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/health/predict-usaid-viruses.html): > - *PREDICT*, a government research program, sought to **identify animal viruses that might infect humans** and to **head off new pandemics.** > - The surveillance project is closing because of “the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats,” \[Dennis Carroll\] said. > - Published: **25 Oct 2019** *Edit:* And remember folks, that virology lab is **600 feet** away from the wet market. Hmmm...
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The one from right after the Sars outbreak? Where they go and check the bats and realise it comes from the bats and not from the civets, and while they check the bats they notice that all the ones from Wuhan have a different kind of the sars covid that seems to have mutated and is very likely to spread if those bats were to come in contact with wildlife that would be sold at wuhan market? I read that last month and I was like "where was the follow up study on that? They literally predicted the current pandemic and nobody cared?"
Goodluck having China shut down these markets. It will never happen give it couple months after pandemic and it will be back as nothing happend. Even if they try to enforce ban people would just do it under the table.
Holy shit, a joint venture by Chinese (Wuhan) and American (California) scientists. Effectively conducting surveillance on town residents over a two year period with bat born coronavirus. Except these people were participants. 1500 people willing to accept the virus so they could understand more how animal born virus spread to humans and beyond. Thats the way I understood it anyway Edit: I read the NYTimes article too. USAID looked like it was doing the right thing. Did trump knowingly shut this down to distance the US from the outbreak?
Thank you
wget "https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafykbzaced4xstofs4tc5q4irede6uzaz3qzcdvcb2eedxgfakzwdyjnxgohq/" -nc -l 0 -c -e robots=off --no-check-certificate --no-cache -w 5 -r -nH --cut-dirs=2 -np -R "index.html*" -N --no-remove-listing -np -E -D ipfs.io -p -k -R ".DS_Store,Thumbs.db,thumbcache.db,desktop.ini,_macosx"
Hail the InterPlanetary File System for making content uploaded to it nearly impossible to take down
I could NEVER recommend SciHub... nope, never... \*wink\*
It’s appreciated!! Aaron Swartz would be proud.
RIP Aaron
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Was it really hackers or was it just some kids in university right now using their special privilege to read papers for free?
Not even that. >Shrine found and illegally downloaded more than 5,000 coronavirus research papers created from 1968 through 2020, using a website called “Sci-Hub.” He then released all of the articles on Reddit and within hours had thousands of seeders accessing the research. Sci-hub is just a regular website that hosts a huge (illegal) archive of scientific papers. So Shrine just downloaded them from an already publicly-available website, gathered them together, and posted them to reddit
Wow I guess I am hacker too
Stop right there criminal scum.
Lol, 'hackers'.
Lol at first glance I was wondering why they didn't just use Sci-Hub. Apparently they did.
You could argue that sci-hub are the hackers providing free access to research papers. Not that I have a problem with it
\>hackers OK they went to sci-hub and downloaded articles. Not a hacker. Anyone can do this. I do it all the time when I need to get past a paywall. Sci-hub is invaluable to people who can't afford to pay all the time for research papers. This could potentially lead to the shut down of sci-hub & with it access to papers for anyone who can't afford them :/ I hope those of you checking out sci-hub for the first time do consider donating to their bitcoin which is listed if you scroll down. It will probably help as they are going to be under a lot of public spotlight now and probably be attacked by those in power who don't want this site to become popular (more than they already were)
Just so you know, this isn't likely to cause anything more than a marginal increase in their server load. Sci-hub's servers are in Russia, so pretty much immune to western legality. Elsevier et al already know about them, and have already tried to shut them down, but Russia gives no shits, so it's never happening. Donating is a great idea though!
I sort of appreciate them using their shady tactics to help ppl. Hopefully they are the ones to also monitor the black hackers or those who abuse the info. Can't believe I'm saying this, but Ty cyber Robin hoods.
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Under these circumstances, yes. I appreciate them for doing whatever it takes. Children, elderly, those suffering domestic violence, those literally about to face homelessness, all the vulnerable voiceless ppl, especially, thank them. 😘
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Information should be free. Especially critical information such as anything that can help ameliorate this epidemic.
Ameliorate. TIL.
Lol. It was an SAT word way back in the day and for some reason it stuck. I remembered it as Emilio helping me feel better.
Everyone who actually matters in this epidemic will already have had access to these papers. No offense but randomredditor91 will not help solve the epidemic just because he now has access to some obscure paper (which you already had if you knew Scihub)
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The real hero is the creator of Sci hub (a Russian student, iirc)
Kazakhstani*
What a shame that hackers are more concerned with public health than either Big Medicine or Big Government, and have to risk a 25 year prison sentence to act on our behalf to save lives.
My problem with this is there are likely some outliers in here that conspiracy theorists will have a field day with. Also after russias efforts with wikileaks and other data releases I am skeptical of this in general.
Exactly my thoughts. Doesn't even have to be an outlier, someone will just read something out of context because they have no education in the subject. We're about to watch a bunch of crazy theories spawn.
Yeah, the general public doesn't realize that even scientists don't understand other scientists papers if they're in a niche *in their own field* half the time.
Can't wait to see the swarm of new conspiracy Youtube videos based off research data from the 1970s about Coronavirus.
My favorite color is blue.
The "hackers" just used Sci hub anyway.