<story><title>The Robin Hood of Science</title><url>http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beloch</author><text>While at university, you just take having free access to journals for granted.  When you leave academia the withdrawal hits you.  A lot of journals will make an article free &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; the author pays extra.  (For those unfamiliar with how journals work, you submit your work, they get other scientists to review it for them for free, and then they charge you to publish it if the reviewers are all happy enough).  The result of this practice is that you don&amp;#x27;t automatically know if an article will be possible to view or not.  You can&amp;#x27;t just say, &amp;quot;Oh that&amp;#x27;s in Journal X, there&amp;#x27;s no point in looking it up because it won&amp;#x27;t be free&amp;quot;.  You have to check and be randomly denied!&lt;p&gt;The effect of this is that you can no longer freely follow the rabbit hole of an interesting chain of references, nor will you read articles outside your bailiwick for fun because they popped up on a blog somewhere.  Even if you carefully restrict the journals you&amp;#x27;re interested in reading, subscriptions will total several thousand per year.  Single articles will be priced at $40-50, which is just nuts when you&amp;#x27;re reading for curiosity.  Even if it pertains to your job, it&amp;#x27;s a chore to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to make your company pay for it.  The end result is that, once you leave university, you&amp;#x27;re cut off from legally obtaining access to a lot of interesting stuff.  How does restricting knowledge in this manner serve science or industry?&lt;p&gt;In physics, arxiv is pretty freakin&amp;#x27; awesome...  for &lt;i&gt;recent&lt;/i&gt; stuff.  If you&amp;#x27;re following a reference chain, you go off the reservation pretty darned quick.  I admit, I&amp;#x27;ve been guilty of using some slightly more labor intensive means of obtaining articles without paying for them, but it&amp;#x27;s a pain.  I honestly hope somebody succeeds in making all of history&amp;#x27;s scientific publications freely and easily available online in a very permanent way.  Hell, that research was practically all funded with public money anyways!  Why should private companies like Elsevier be collecting money for research Schrödinger conducted on the public dime before anyone alive was born?&lt;p&gt;Sci-Hub is new to me, but it looks promising.  This is something the world needs.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Robin Hood of Science</title><url>http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>entee</author><text>No question scientific publishers are effectively a racket. The problem is that as a researcher you&amp;#x27;re stuck. If you want tenure, you need a publication in a big journal. There are a few that are open access in some domains, notably biology, but even there Plos Biology et. al. doesn&amp;#x27;t quite have the cachet of Nature&amp;#x2F;Science&amp;#x2F;Cell.&lt;p&gt;In other fields, it can be even harder to find a good open access solution. In chemistry for example, I can&amp;#x27;t think of one. You can pay to have ACS or other publishers make something open access, but that&amp;#x27;s more money out a researcher&amp;#x27;s pocket that&amp;#x27;s not going toward better science.&lt;p&gt;Sure, publishing has costs, but nowhere near what gets charged. Also, much of the labor of reviewing papers is also provided to publishers free of charge, scientists review each other&amp;#x27;s work for no fee before acceptance in a journal that will charge dearly for it.&lt;p&gt;We as tax payers pay for this work, the people we pay to do it are caught in a catch-22 situation where they can either hand over their work to someone who will charge an arm and a leg, or be pushed out of science.</text></comment>