Filling in Aaron Swartz footsteps
Hopefully not all the way…
“stolen” is such an exaggerated misrepresentation…news organizations should really do better. When you steal something from someone, the owner loses access to it. She just liberated public research.
I totally agree that she just liberated it. But since many lawsuits said she was “stealing” from them, and people who don’t know the details at first glance may think that too. So I think the headline is correct in a news sense. And the article is very accurate and favorable of her.
This is why I hate the recent trend where people are saying “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
“Piracy”, or more accurately “copyright infringement” was never stealing. What you’re doing is violating the government-granted monopoly on copying something. That’s so different from stealing.
Also I have met people who have published some pretty important papers, most of them use scihub on a weekly basis, and none of them care that their papers get “stolen”. And they all have some strong opinions about Elsevier.
like stealing video games that you technically license if you buy, you’re not stealing anything except access which is fundamentally the only thing they can sell
These articles were stolen, by the paywall operators. Elbakyan rescued them from the thieves. 🎉
Stolen papers. Absolutely. Stolen by corporations.
Yep, before sci hub you could always just email an author and probably get the paper that way, they aren’t the ones profiting.
I wrote one of those papers. The fuckers charged me $1000 to publish it as open access, then other journals download it and stick it on their websites and charge $60 to read it. What a joke!
Ignorant person checking in with probably a dumb and oversimplified question, but what prevents you and other science researchers from posting your writing independently? Why must you submit to these corpo controlled publications?
If you don’t get published, you don’t get cited. If you don’t get cited, it appears your work isn’t important.
That said, every researcher I’ve emailed requesting a copy of a paper gladly supplied it, and many put them up on their uni sites.
That’s such a fuckin’ racket!
Still insane to me that one woman literally saves the world of science from all this corruption
And she still doing it. And still pretty much alone in doing it.
Perhaps not saved, but I’d venture the most significant nail in the coffin of the scientific publishing mafia so far, pursued with integrity and honor. The rise of open publishing that followed is very telling, and in my mind directly attributable to Alexandra’s work and it’s popularity, they know they need to adapt or (probably and) die.
Still need to work on the publish or perish mentality, getting negative results published, and getting corporate propaganda out of the mix, to name a few.
Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I’m so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn’t be able to graduate without debt (or “even more debt” for the Americans) otherwise.
That’s fucking great that your profs even recommended it!
When my wife was getting her masters degree, her professor told her about it too lol. All of her professors pretty much used it. When I myself, tried to tell her about sci-hub and libgen, I was surprised that she was already well acquainted
I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it’s just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren’t familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she’s the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.
And she’s my personal hero. :)
Thanks for sharing!
What would Jesus do?
Following in Aaron Swartz’s footsteps.
Hopefully she doesn’t get treated the way he did.
I get so pissed when I think about Aaron Swartz. He was a bit before his time. I’d love it if here were still around. There would be so much more people rallying behind him these current times.
I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).
They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.
You see, the problem, publishers, is that your “business” should not have been a business in the first place.
As someone in science that has used this many times, I can’t emphasize enough how much this has accelerated research in the modern era. I am so grateful for her work.
Fr. After I graduated I was cut off from access to scientific literature, which is a major blow when trying to keep up in ones field.
Yep, I just found out about it recently because I was doing research on a project. I had heard, but never explored or looked into, sci-hub. I had no idea about it. I don’t know how I missed it all of these years!
Sadly no longer updated but I think libgen and some other services are filling the gaps.
Yeah, I was bummed to find out it’s no longer updated. But there are so many articles that it’s still helpful and great. And she still is holding the flame by keeping it up. I’m checking out libgen right now actually.
A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.
She looks nice.
How old is she?
Good for her.
I’m surprised it was an actual woman instead of a trans woman, for once.
actual woman
you might want to rephrase that (cis woman, for example)
Hmm, guess we’re not allowed to call actual women ‘actual women’ anymore.
What a world.
“Actual woman”? Yikes.
She also has a very funny article about how Stalin is a God of Science
While it’s true that publishers do something of value, the amount they charge is absurd.
What makes it even worse is that so many of the people involved are donating their labour. It reminds me of college sports in the US. The actual people doing the work, the athletes, are forced to do it for free. Meanwhile, a few select groups: coaches, TV networks, etc. are making huge amounts of money.
Yeah, I have no problem with people being compensated for their work.
The problem is that the discussion usually ends at “compensation” and never includes “how much?” Useful idiots believe that whatever price is charged is always fair and necessary, which is sad.
In a system literally built around the amount of money we have, we sure do like to believe that magnitude doesn’t matter.
Badass
