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Comment by fazkan | Hacker News Reader

I dont get it, how is it shaking up science.

The heading is illogical. The article starts with how the film industry is being affected by piracy. Then it says that a court has granted a publishing platform damages from sci hub. Then in the next few paragraphs it lists the countries with the most users of the sci hub websites. Then it ends with how the creator of sci hub will be awarded a Disobedience award by MIT, which she likely wont attend...

I was expecting a detailed analysis of how something like sci hub affects research and science, not the middleman companies that earns from the research.

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This is very standard for the Economist. It used to be a good magazine, and occasionally still delivers a superb long form article (usually about the financial/corporate world), but its editorials are just a lazy mishmash of bullet points.

John Micklethwait, the old editor, left for Bloomberg. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the new editor, is nowhere near as good.

I have no insider knowledge about the relative merits of the two, but Micklethwait left LONG after the decline in quality started.

>An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions.

That alone could potentially have far reaching consequences. I agree that the article is a bit light on details though.

Yeah, that may be true.. But Scihub is an onion site. That means there's not much in the way of "who", but in the way of last hop before hitting the onionsite.

And I would daresay that one should probably not trust logs when going through Tor.

I expect very few people visit scihub on Tor. The logs may be for scihub.cc, then?

The article doesn't have a link but likely refers to users accessing the clearnet mirror, sci-hub.cc

> >An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions.

How did Science get Scihub's server logs? Did scihub give them to Science? It's annoying that the economist is not linking to this supposed Science 2016 publication. If they did, I would have known how to access and read that publication (because I know this one website which would let me read it).

> It's annoying that the economist is not linking to this supposed Science 2016 publication

The Economist's usual readership is literate and can use search engines. The Science publication is literally the first result of the obvious search term.

The readership of Science journal itself is literate and could use search engines. But they do the obvious task of linking to relevant references.

If the Economist is in the business of distributing information, linking to a journal should sort of be one of the things they do. Even Buzzfeed and such outlets now do the common courtesy of linking to papers that they are talking about.

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