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Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

I don't support piracy. So I don't support Sci-hub. But I believe that publishers are bilking the public and that publicly funded research should be made freely available. The real way to fix this is to disrupt the reputational incentives academics (and deans supporting this) have to keep publishing in these journals. For some reason, I think this is an unpopular opinion on HN.

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For most academic researchers, publishing is a net cost: they aren't getting royalties when people pay to read their work. "Piracy" of these documents does not deprive the creators of anything. The only entities it hurts are the organizations of questionable social value who exist by gatekeeping this information.

No one is putting the proverbial gun to academic researchers heads to use these publishers.

Yes they absolutely are. Decoupling academia from this horrendous publishing parasites is an ongoing project that has taken a vast amount of effort from a vast number of academics and continues.

You have metrics. You pulish with the parasites, they're bigger than with some open-source journal nobody has heard of. Your career progression relies on getting published by the "most prestigious" journal.

You want your work read. Everybody in your field read parasite journal A, there isn't a good substitute. You're stuffed.

You don't get to decide. You're one author. the head of school had decided for you.

I can go on. The parasitic publishers are /hated/ by everybody. They provide nothing at all of value. They have been a very successful example of rent-seeking through the puchase of prestige titles then jacking up the subscription prices.

You underestimate the level of hatred accross the political spectrum from socialist to libertarian of these parasitic (insert metaphor here).

The gun they have to the head isn't perfect. They will go but they continue to extract a vast amount of rent on the way down.

You should support piracy and especially Sci-hub. In bilking the public, the publishers restrict access to scientific knowledge. This restriction delays and limits progress. While any individual hinderance is minor, this is repeated millions of times over. The lost progress is lost to you, as much as to everyone else. How can anyone support parasites who hurt the whole of humanity and don't even have the decency to pay the scientists whose work they profit off? Piracy in this case is not only acceptable, it is a moral imperative.

I'd say it's the publishers who cause the problem and which need to be disrupted. When scientific societies ran most publishing, journal prices were quite reasonable.

BTW, you have to thank Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell and friend of Jeff Epstein for the state of affairs: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

The only "disruption" required is for funding agencies, especially governments, to mandate immediate open access as a condition of grants. Milder approaches such as the NIH's current policy have been spectacularly successful, because nobody turns down that kind of money. The main problem has been intense lobbying by publishers, including some academic societies. But open access is not an issue where it should be difficult to assemble a large bipartisan coalition in favor, even in the US!

As a scientist I can tell you that Sci-hub is critical to the progress of humankind. I can't even describe how many times we rely on it and how much poorer the world would be without it.

Maybe you should reconsider your position on "piracy" if it would lead to a significant slowdown in solving the serious challenges that face us in the 21st century.

There are legal avenues to do this. We already have Arxiv (admittedly not peer reviewed) and I believe that there are some open Wikipedia-style journals in the works as well.

It's unpopular because that disruption hasn't happened yet, and there's no guarantee that it will happen in the next 50 years. In the mean time, the average American is stuck interacting with cutting edge research--research which is often funded publicly--via:

1. Shitty science journalism with paywalled citations

2. $300/yr textbooks

3. Crime

Intuitively, it's difficult to imagine something less copyrightable than a scientific discovery. The world is upside-down.

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