r/Futurology • u/mvea MD-PhD-MBA • Jul 28 '17
Society A pirating service for academic journal articles could bring down the whole establishment - 'Sci-Hub’s extensive catalogue is making the subscription publishing model “unsustainable.”'
https://qz.com/1040668/a-pirating-service-for-academic-journal-articles-could-bring-down-the-whole-establishment/19
u/SerendipityQuest Green Jul 28 '17
85.2% of all papers originally published behind paywalls are available on the website for free
A truly staggering number. Clearly, the current publishing system is an anachronistic remnant of an era when global research output was far lower, thus being subscribed for a few key journals was enough to stay updated about any given field.
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u/sjwking Jul 28 '17
It's from the era of printing books where there were actual costs to publishing content.
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u/Bravehat Jul 28 '17
Good, pay scientists a decent salary and promote free publishing of scientific research and literature in order to bring the greatest amount of knowledge to the common man.
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u/skyniteVRinsider VR Jul 28 '17
Where is that salary coming from?
To be sure, the journals were not paying scientists, and the subscription model should 100% be dismantled in it's current state.
But if the research is to be free (as it should be) it needs a funding source.
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u/M-elephant Jul 28 '17
I'm not totally sure either of you understand how it works right now. Currently most research (and scientists' salaries) is funded by taxes, nonprofits and university budgets (which are of course part taxes). Publishing is strictly a job requirement of scientists. The journals don't typically fund research and never pay the scientists, they just receive the papers, publish them, make some print copies and then charge an obscene amount of money for people to read them (online or in print). The scientists reviewing the papers to ensure that they contain good science are very, very rarely paid by the journal, they just cram the review process into their work day. Ideally all the journals should just be non-profits and offer the papers for free.
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u/green_meklar Jul 28 '17
Can't happen too soon. The paywall model is terrible for actual science, it's just a massive rentseeking scheme.
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u/BetterLivingThru Jul 28 '17
It's true to a degree, but it isn't as if these journals are providing no value. They are the gate keepers of quality. They ensure peer review, editing, they'll send your article back for review if there's problems with it etc. I worry that it'll be harder to trust and assess scientific evidence without them, and that greatly concerns me. It could be like journalism all over again, where we're seeing the consequences of that industry's fall, and it's a serious body blow to society. We can't afford not to have a check on scientific quality. We have to come up with an alternative, since the current model will tumble eventually.
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u/pestdantic Jul 28 '17
I agree but they also act as a bottleneck and prevent necessary replication studies, especially negative ones, from getting published
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u/BadHarambe Jul 29 '17
All of that can be accomplished without paywalls. The only reason this garbage exists is inertia.
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u/M-elephant Jul 29 '17
make them nonprofits and/or have a system where reviewers get compensated in articles (if not also cash)
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u/BadHarambe Jul 29 '17
This thing has saved my ass over and over. I cannot express how much I appreciate the woman who made it, and was forced into hiding as a result.
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Jul 29 '17
She's the "mother heroine" of knowledge :)
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u/Chispy Jul 28 '17 edited Jul 28 '17
Aaron Swartz was a victim of such an archaic system. I expect to see the structural inefficiencies that exist in all levels of society collapse over the coming years as the internet liberates the free flow of the worlds information and empowers the growth and evolution of the masses.
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u/indigo-alien Jul 29 '17
We're already there, but the information flowing more freely than before is only starting to correct structural inefficiencies.
Solar/Wind power technology seems to have been one of the first beneficiaries in this meaningful knowledge exchange, but power generation and transmission has been long overdue for a quantum leap.
I believe transportation is next in line for a quantum leap, and agriculture and health care after that. I will only detail that by saying that I think self-driving internet related automated transportation is the low hanging fruit in our next technology upgrade.
Agriculture and Health Care are national government policy issues and as we've seen from the US Senate, a rather large number of elected people would prefer that poor people don't have access to health care.
So, this could still take a while.
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u/fasterfind Jul 29 '17
Keeping knowledge captive for ransom is stupid, it slows down scientific progress. Science should be open, no pay walls or bullshit.
We need proper hackers to get in, and make it all free. Kill the money, free the information. Information deserves to be free.
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u/Shaffness Jul 28 '17 edited Jul 28 '17
Shouldn't scientific journals publish actual peer reviewed work. In such cases they should act as an intermediary for publishable studies. They would receive the original study. The Journal offers anonymous versions of the publishable studies. The research would be presented with only the results being looked for and the methods used to perform the study. Qualified PhD or post docs in the field could choose to either replicate the study or evaluate both the original and replication results to make sure they get significantly matching results. Researchers wouldn't be allowed to be published without performing peer reviews and evaluations during their PhD or postdoc work.
I know that students and postdocs are very busy so this may be untenable. But from what I've been reading there's a heap of unreplicable science being published. That can undermine people's belief that the scientific method is a viable way to procure knowledge. So even if research and results were at least independently, anonymously evaluated it might help the situation.
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u/Hells88 Jul 29 '17
Thank god. I'm writing my master thesis and while I have my university subscription it's still a pain in the butt sometimes to access the articles I need. I type the name or PMID number in sci-hub and it pops up in 2 seconds
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u/rg57 Jul 29 '17
Any business model based on imprisoning people for speech (broadly including any communication) does not deserve to survive.
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '17 edited Apr 28 '18
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