ScienceLeaks

http://scienceleaks.blogspot.com/

by kilian • 16 years ago

71 49 16 years ago

scienceleaks.blogspot.com

Bud2• 16 years ago

How is this site planning to stay in existence for longer than about an hour after it costs some organization a significant amount of money? Does Blogger just ignore takedown requests?

hugh3• 16 years ago

It isn't, but if you read down it's described as a stop-gap solution. If people are actually using it by the time it gets taken down then it will get resurrected elsewhere.

Here's my question: suppose I, as a kind-hearted university-based individual who respects the needs of the journals to make money but is also interested in making sure that the general public can read important scientific research, decide to upload some papers to this site. How can I be sure that it'll never be traced back to me?

pornel2• 16 years ago

Make sure documents you're uploading don't contain any of your personal metadata.

Ensure that you're not the only person who owns the copy you're uploading (it could be watermarked or be a unique revision of the document).

Upload via TOR or similar.

stevenbedrick• 16 years ago

You don't. Many journals' PDF-downloading systems embed metadata as well as visible watermarks containing your institution and often a timestamp and an IP address (of course, if your institution uses EZProxy, the IP address might not be immediately trackable back to you).

wvoq2• 16 years ago

I am curious about your understanding of "the needs of the journals to make money". As I understand it, the purpose of an academic journal is to communicate new research. For about 300 years, a published print journal was about the most reasonable method of accomplishing this. Printing and shipping cost money, so a subscription model was a natural means of recuperating costs. Historically, academic journals were non-profit enterprises, and stipends were rare for the academic work involved, viz: writing, refereeing, editing, &c. Since a non-profit journal loses money on each print copy it has to produce, why shouldn't they reduce physical circulation by converting to an open-access model? The only people who stand to lose from a norm of open access are the for-profit publishing houses. Their influence on academic publishing, on the whole, has not exactly been encouraging so far.

If we can find a more efficient way to communicate research (perhaps some kind of global network of computers might do the trick?), then we should do that. We ought take no more consideration of the needs of the journals than we should for the needs of the buggy-whip makers.

pornel2• 16 years ago

Isn't this copyright violation? It might be difficult to defend publication of entire papers as freedom of speech.

Also it's hosted on Google Blogger which will respond to DMCA complaints and enforce their TOS ("Google may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any reason, terminate the Service"), so it won't last long anyway.

It should be ScienceTorrents.

dmix• 16 years ago

If you're going to do something like this at least put some effort into not getting shutdown.

Buy your own domain with private whois, servers in europe, etc.

mahmud• 16 years ago

Isn't this copyright violation?

Who gives a crap? there are plenty of laws on the books that you should be honored to violate.

Rip. Rar. Host. Upload. Seed. Knowledge wants to be free.

Alex3917• 16 years ago

For what it's worth, reddit.com/r/scholar is a much better resource for exactly the same purpose.

Geee2• 16 years ago

Also if somebody isn't aware, Google Scholar finds all sources of articles and there's usually a PDF available somewhere.

djacobs2• 16 years ago

Mm... I'm not sure about that. Google Scholar is a good resource, that's true. But there are hundreds of papers I've looked for that are simply not accessible without proper access.

That said, I don't support this site.

aedocw• 16 years ago

On the topic of journals, and what gets published, "Wrong" by David H. Freedman should be required reading. Fascinating book, he documents how hard it is for researches to get negative results published (i.e. 10 studies on a new drug, 9 studies show it does nothing, 1 study finds there might be something positive - only the positive study will be accepted.)

jls11• 16 years ago

Huge problem. It affects more than just medicine. Negative results are not collected or disseminated in many fields. They never show the "messy kitchen." Succinct lists of failed paths would be more useful than a lot of positive results that get published.

elvirs3• 16 years ago

Most of the university students have to almost all scientific documents thanks to the library subscriptions of their universities. It will be really easy to fill the website with thousands of papers but is it worth it? is it right to do so? If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries and get access to any paper you need without violating copyright.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

If you are doing academic work you can easily apply for membership to any of those libraries

Warning: Pet peeve alert.

Scientists routinely complain that the public unfairly brands them as isolated ivory-tower eggheads whose work is too insular and rarefied to have any relevance to the real world. They also complain that the general public has a poor idea of how science actually works: People often view it as some kind of alternative religion in which the priests stand in front of documentary cameras wearing white coats and handing down dogma.

Then these scientists turn around and publish most of their actual writing and almost one hundred percent of their data, data-driven reasoning, and detailed experimental design in journals which are prohibitively expensive to read unless you're currently affiliated with a university. Which is, in turn, exorbitantly expensive, either in cash or in opportunity cost.

Trying to understand science without reading the primary literature is like trying to understand jazz by reading the New York Times and watching the occasional Ken Burns documentary. Reviewers do write a lot about jazz, and they go on an on about how important and highbrow it all is, but if you haven't actually listened to a jazz piece for more than two minutes you're never going to get the point. Jazz is about the music. Science is about the detailed methods and the data and the literature.

elvirs3• 16 years ago

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

archgoon• 16 years ago

If you live in California (or ar visiting), all UC libraries are publicly available, and typically have guest login access, which allows you to access the online resources. You can access the journals there, with no affiliation with any university.

You'll have to actually physically walk into the libraries, which some campuses make it harder than necessary (mostly due to bad parking planning, see UCSC), but campuses like Berkeley are very easy to walk onto.

tensor• 16 years ago

I would guess that all scientists would rather their work be distributed for free. Certainly all that I know feel this way. The problem, as usual, comes down to money. To publish in an open access journal, it can cost over a thousand dollars for just a single article.

With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options.

Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality.

The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research.

It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.

wvoq2• 16 years ago

A data point: I have actually tried this. As a student at No Name State, I often found myself travelling to nearby Prestigious Research University for books and journals which weren't in circulation at NNS. PRU only had reciprocity agreements with other PRUs, so I couldn't ILL materials or check them out in person with my NNS card. Indeed, without a PRU ID I couldn't even enter the library except at certain designated hours, for reasons that had no discernible relation to crowding or public safety.

PRU did offer a private membership, but its annual circulation fee was in the hundreds of dollars. It was 2008, and one of the richest universities in the country wanted to charge a student--who was already enrolled in NNS down the street, hardly any kind of flight risk--the equivalent of 20 hours of labor for the privilege of reading books.

Now PRU has one of the worst academic cultures I've ever experienced or heard of, and I would be glad to learn that the state of public access to academic libraries is not so dire in general. It remains, though, that it is not always so trivially easy to do academic work at university libraries, even if you're already in "the academy".

bigfudge• 16 years ago

I'm curious, why not name names? Are PRU's librarians that evil?

dxjones• 16 years ago

Prediction: ScienceLeaks will be taken down within 1 week. The only reason it wouldn't be shut down is if nobody uses it.

The copyright holders for academic journals have a huge financial incentive to crush ScienceLeaks. The law is on their side, right? ... and why would Google Blogger defend ScienceLeaks? They prefer people to use Google Scholar instead.

roadnottaken4• 16 years ago

This is plain-old piracy and I'm a little surprised to see it getting up-voted on HN. There are plenty of open-access journals, but most scientists choose to publish in closed journals instead for a variety of reasons. I think the results of research funded by taxpayers should be free and, indeed, that is now required by the NIH and there's a huge resource available here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

However some of the research published in traditional journals is funded from elsewhere and, as such, I can't think of any reason why we "deserve" free access to it.

forkandwait3• 16 years ago

For the most part, scientists publish in the highest prestige journal possible, because that counts the most toward tenure/ pay raises/ grant application chances; the most prestigous journals are -- for historical reasons -- still closed since they are profit centers for big for-profit publishing houses like Wiley.

On the other hand, all the scientists I know wish they could give their papers away for free because it builds their reputation to have people use and cite them, even undergrads at state colleges that can't afford the bigger database subscriptions.

Except for textbooks, scholars almost never make royalties, so the profit incentive isn't what you might think. A scholar makes more money by getting raises from the university, speaking and consulting fees, and publishing undergrad textbooks (sometimes). All of these are increased if their is a wider dissemination of their work.

Finally, .... in the US, almost all research is funded by taxpayers, directly or indirectly, it's just NIH funded stuff that must be free.

Finally, finally .... if it weren't for the fact that the prestigious journals are a ticket to tenure and promotion, there would be no reason to publish anywhere except for Arxiv: so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system...

roadnottaken4• 16 years ago

"so called "peer review", to be honest, is a broken system..."

To misquote Churchill:

Peer review is the worst system for scientific publishing... except for all the others.

A1kmm• 16 years ago

> This is plain-old piracy

That isn't clear - the relationship between a journal and an author is generally that the author retains copyright ownership (i.e. there is no assignment), but grants a copyright license to the journal, and in the case of non-open access journals, the license is generally largely exclusive.

Linking to a PDF put up by the author (i.e. the copyright holder) is not copyright infringement, because the copyright owner has clearly authorised it. However, the author may, in some cases, be breaching their contract with the journal, and if the site operators deliberately incite people to breach contracts, it could be tortious interference. However, in many cases, even where the journal has an exclusive license, the terms often allow for preprints to be distributed, sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a specific amount of time.

ajays• 16 years ago

The intention is noble, but the implementation is horribly broken.

I agree with Rosie that the current system of paywalls is horribly broken. (I spent 10 years in academia, so I have some idea about the system). The example cited (the "arsenic life" paper) happens all the time: you hear about some exciting new discovery, only to find that the paper is locked behind a paywall. This is NOT how it should be!

With the Internet, there is no reason for most (any?) of these pay journals to exist in their current form. The research is typically funded by the government (like the NASA "arsenic life" research), so why should its findings be closed?

We (in the CS/EE field) should be taking the lead here and getting rid of ACM and IEEE journals. After many years as a member, I cancelled my ACM and IEEE memberships because it was clear that these organizations existed solely to support themselves.

There are some courageous authors out there who will put up copies of their papers for public access. I even know of one author who put up a PDF of a book that he published. We need more such authors!

dnautics• 16 years ago

I wanted to start a 'scienceleaks' site that was actually a site that facilitated the whistleblowing on scientific fraud. A small raffle for a cash prize can be a huge incentive for underpaid grad students.

natnat• 16 years ago

I don't think a financial incentive for leakers would be a good thing. Wikileaks works fine without offering anyone money.

eplanit• 16 years ago

The new Misguided Morality: Theft = Liberation.

flipbrad• 16 years ago

unless, of course, it plays a useful role. an ecosystem can thrive with both predator and prey - even with paratism. Point here, expressed more eloquently above, is that free and unrestricted knowledge can be a tremendously beneficial thing to society. You lock it up for good cause. Do Nature et al provide a useful service, the value of which is commensurate to the fees they charge? I'd argue that they don't: the fees they charge for access are because they have the best papers. One does not submit to Nature on strength of service, but on strength of the goodwill attached to the Nature brand, nurtured mostly through exclusivity. Besides some possible but implausible effect as an effective signal-to-noise filter (which I would argue it isn't, given that it is so exclusive, being largely faithful to a print format which has limited capacity), that's not a very good reason to prevent those with curiosity about the world - but who don't have $32 per article they want to read.

Piracy of this sort, if it could be kept to those that would not otherwise purchase this article at any profitable price point for the journal, could actually be economically/education-optimal, perhaps?

Also, the last time I checked, copyright had exceptions for academic use. Although I think these are usually limited to copying/reproduction, not the right of publication/distribution, I find these to be distinctions that just aren't warranted in the digital era.

zzzeek• 16 years ago

DMCA in 3..2...1...

ScienceLeaks

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