I’ve written many times about how much I’m irked when scientific journals charge exorbitant fees for non-members (or libraries) to access their papers—papers often reporting taxpayer- funded research. You can pay up to $50 for a single short paper, and it just isn’t right.
Now, however, there’s a way around this for both scientists and laypeople. As Big Think reports, an altruistic researcher from Kzakhstan, Alexandra Elbakyan, has created a site called Sci-Hub that bypasses the paywalls for many journals. Its database now contains over 47 million papers and is easy to use. You just need either the link to the paywalled paper or the Sci-Hub link itself (Google “Sci-Hub”; the Wikipedia description of the site is here). From Big Think:
Users now don’t even have to visit the Sci-Hub website at all; instead, when faced with a journal paywall they can simply take the Sci-Hub URL and paste it into the address bar of a paywalled journal article immediately after the “.com” or “.org” part of the journal URL and before the remainder of the URL. When this happens, Sci-Hub automatically bypasses the paywall, taking the reader straight to a PDF without the user ever having to visit the Sci-Hub website itself.
If, at first pass the network fails to gain access to the paper, the system automatically tries different institutions’ credentials until it gains access. In one fell swoop, a network has been created that likely has a greater level of access to science than any individual university, or even government for that matter, anywhere in the world. Sci-Hub represents the sum of countless different universities’ institutional access — literally a world of knowledge.
Elsevier, that evil and venal locus of capitalistic exploitation, has filed suit against Elbakyan, and the website was temporarily removed. It’s now been reinstated, but may not last long. Lest I get in trouble for linking to it directly, just put Sci-Hub in your search engine and it will come up. In a day or so, I’ll post on a new paper in Nature purporting to link moral behavior to fear of God’s wrath, and since the paper’s behind a paywall, you may want to get it this way.
And while I’m at it, let me get in a few licks against Elsevier, the one company that, more than any other, tries to benefit from impeding public access to scientific research. Remember, WE THE TAXPAYER fund that research, and yet we don’t get to see the results without paying big bucks. Here’s what Big Think says about that company:
Elsevier is the world’s largest academic publisher and by far the most controversial. Over 15,000 researchers have vowed to boycott the publisher for charging “exorbitantly high prices” and bundling expensive, unwanted journals with essential journals, a practice that allegedly is bankrupting university libraries. Elsevier also supports SOPA and PIPA, which the researchers claim threatens to restrict the free exchange of information. Elsevier is perhaps most notorious for delivering takedown notices to academics, demanding them to take their own research published with Elsevier off websites like Academia.edu.
The movement against Elsevier has only gathered speed over the course of the last year with the resignation of 31 editorial board members from the Elsevier journal Lingua, who left in protest to set up their own open-access journal, Glossa. [See my post on that here.] Now the battleground has moved from the comparatively niche field of linguistics to the far larger field of cognitive sciences. Last month, a petition of over 1,500 cognitive science researchers called on the editors of the Elsevier journal Cognition to demand Elsevier offer “fair open access”. Elsevier currently charges researchers $2,150 per article if researchers wish their work published in Cognition to be accessible by the public, a sum far higher than the charges that led to the Lingua mutiny.
I myself have signed the first Elsevier petition boycotting the company, and since then I have not helped the company nor any journal it publishes.
Here’s our hero, Alexandra Elbakyan:
h/t: Snowy Owl
She looks like a hardened criminal. 😉
Careful, she has that impish look – reminds me very much of young Richard Feynman. I hope this goes well for her.
Sounds a little like the current brouhaha over the Pirate’s Bay and Kickass torrents.
Except that, unlike with movies and music, in the case of academic publishing, the artists (authors) and investors (largely, government grant agencies subsidized by taxpayers) would never see a penny of the profits from the product – it accrues entirely to the publisher.
I have a secret, google filetype:pdf “title of article” and most time you’ll find it on a personal website of an author.
I have heard about this laudable effort. And now I may have the url. Or maybe not.
Reminds me of “BugMeNot.com”, which used to be a good source of logins for payment-required websites. They eventually had to stop doing that.
Physicists have long used:
http://arxiv.org
And recently:
https://www.researchgate.net
Unfortunately, Sci-Hub is off limits at my work.
Researchgate is useful, but patchier.
I’ve actually got a window onto Sci-Hub open in this browser at the moment. I tried it a couple of days ago, and it worked, so I was planning to do more field testing on it.
It certainly seems to work, and the way that it’s described to work would explain why even very random requests worked.
Another handful of references chased down. Working OK.
Of course, the commercial journals will try to fight back – probably by … well, why should I do their BOFH’s jobs for them?
I know who I want to win in this battle over open access to taxpayer funded science, but there is a lot of precedent in support of defending copyright law. So I am not going to be surprised if Elsevier and the other holders of journals will win this one.
When I fight authority, authority always wins.
Elsevier might win a skirmish, but in the longer run they are doomed. All it takes is for the funders of research (governments) to demand that the resulting papers must be open access — and that is exactly what they are getting round to doing.
This still leaves the journals a predatory opening. They typically charge authors large sums instead of charging readers.
… at which point authors start to move to lower-cost journals and the impact factors change to reflect the readership (harder to assess online ; harder =/= impossible). Simply changing citation practices to avoid (where possible) citing work in charged journals where an equivalent citation can be made to work in an Open Access journal.
Researchers have to PAY to have their peer-reviewed articles published?? I didn’t know that.
Yes, and often quite a bit!
If your work contains color photographs, the cost can be substantially higher. There’s often a “per page” charge, as well.
That should be ethically prohibited based on conflict of interest for the peers and journal.
I found that Chrome redirected back to the original, but I may or may not have accessed a free link by using a site-based search function. 😉
By the way, before I forget it, re “In a day or so, I’ll post on a new paper in Nature purporting to link moral behavior to fear of God’s wrath”:
The current issue of Nature has a followup summary “News & views”. [ http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16879.html ; the un-free link.]
Templeton funded…! as Jerry pointed out to me before his talk on Friday.
I must admit I have some sympathy for Elsevier and the like.
Being someone who likes to hold the journal in hand: I really don’t want to take any electronic devices to the bathroom. 😉
I understand the paper side of these journals is dying.
Incidentally my favourite journal is Hydrometallurgy.
Moral behavior due to fear of God’s wrath? Sure, if by “morals” you mean attending Mass every week, not cursing and not masturbating. These are hardly moral guidelines that help any other human.
To paraphrase Karl Marx,
‘[Intellectual] Property’ is theft.
At least when Elsevier get their hands on it.
As a shining example of the opposite approach, not quite scientific papers but maps, I’m happy to cite LINZ, the New Zealand government mapping agency. Any of their large-scale 1:50,000 maps can be downloaded from their site for free. (Certainly from within NZ, and I can’t see any indication of a block on overseas downloads).
To quote their site,
“Acknowledging copyright
You are welcome to reproduce LINZ maps at no cost.
Where maps or other images are reproduced, derived or copied from Land Information New Zealand material, the following acknowledgement note should be shown on the product and associated media:
Sourced from [product name]. Crown Copyright Reserved”
I think that’s incredibly enlightened.
cr
Maybe it is best to access these journals through the TOR browser, for a bit of anonymity, especially location anonymity, rather than Google (Chrome), etc.
Thank you, PCC(E), for the access info. Last night, I found out just how rusty my skills have become, thanks to lack of access. This should surely help.
We have the same problem in musicology: JSTOR wants per article fees that approach the annual subscription prices of the original journals of publication. Such journals also bear a partial responsibility, as subscription fees have become crippling, and resulted in hugely decreased print circulation.
As the old Southern saying goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. Serves them right for seeing dwindling subscriptions cut into their overly important profit margin.
Isn’t JSTOR the one young Swarz had a problem with, leading to federal bullying and ending with his suicide?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
🖇
I want it to be free but as with newspapers, no omne has a model for the digital age that really works. Why would they bother publishing if they make no money? The Independent Newspaper is closing down its print version & moving online as they were losing by priinting
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/14/independent-first-victim-confounding-digital-future
I meant to add, we have entered a digital age but that threatens an age when nothing is written or printed, there will be nothing on paper if the lights go out or if the digital format changes. Try getting an early floppy disc read, or even a 3.5 inch disc…
We need the support of publishers to have continued print copies of articles & journals. Digital information is far more vulnerable than print.
Look at this story … there are good reasons to preserve things in long lasting written/printed format…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35569281
I agree about the importance of hard copies. More than one professional library around here has been transferring every document to digital format and then trashing the originals–why not keep both?!
Is’exploitation’ really unique to capitalist economics? Are all other systems magically immune to exploitation? I would argue, however, that the act of boycotting IS capitalistic; where humans peacefully express their dissatisfaction with policies and/or products and express their values by voting with their wallets.
Interesting approach. I wonder how the credentials which are tried out were obtained. I take it that it is likely that these will simply be revoked eventually.
The thing is, good journals actually do have costs to run and things like mandatory open access or internet work-arounds threaten their financial model. (Full disclosure, I work with one.) It costs money to maintain things online of course, but also to hire editors and staff to ensure quality of the product. With prestigious journals, at least in principle, the value isn’t in the access but in the quality of peer review. However, the financial model is still somewhat based on the access system from when you had to ship a hard copy to everyone who might be interested. That may seem silly but if you take it away then no one, including tax payers, is paying for the quality control.
That doesn’t mean this is the only way to do things, and it doesn’t mean that the for-profit Elsevier doesn’t exploit it’s position. But people should be aware of the role of journals in peer review and considering how to fairly fund them or if it is worth it to lose them.