>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
Comment 1:
>The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia.
Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub:
>In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years.
Please don't take HN threads further into political, ideological, and/or nationalistic flamewar. This comment manages to be all three, and it's a step change in the thread—a step down. Let's climb the other way please.
Agreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively broadening access to works of scientific research.
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
> Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action (...)
The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
Yes, capitalism is a worthy ideal. But don't forget that rentism is one of its failure modes, and a very common one; I don't think it's inaccurate to describe attempts to fight rentism as anti-capitalist.
The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized.
It was an improvement over feudalism, but the subsequent improvements have occurred with the general replacement of capitalism, in its original sense, with the modern mixed economy; capitalism is now a reversal of progress, not an ideal to aspire to.
>The “ideals” of capitalism were shallow post-hoc rationalizations that came after people called out the problems resulting from the mode by which the elite mercantile class had replaced the feudal hereditary aristocracy as the class around whose particular interests the political and economic order were organized.
This is completely untrue, classical liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke were espousing those ideals well before the word "capitalism" was even coined, it just used to be called Liberalism.
> Finding ways to maximize profit, as is being done here, is exactly the ideal of capitalism
That's just like, your opinion, man.
I could also say that finding ways to maximize individual freedom is the ideal of capitalism, and that's exactly the opposite of what Elsevier et al do, so they're the anti-capitalist ones and freedom of information is a capitalist ideal.
Intellectual property is a good example of the contradictions of capitalism. It destroys the principles of freedom, but in truth is necessary to perpetuate the capitalist system.
As for that being my opinion, it isn't. Capitalism has never been about maximizing individual freedom.
The foundational act of capitalism was the Enclosure Act. How does the Enclosure Act increase individual freedom? It doesn't.
You're conflating a specific subset of negative freedoms for human freedom in general. Which itself was a post-hoc justification for capitalism.
As for freedom of information being a capitalist ideal, why then is it that institutions like state secrets, patent law, copyright law and so on were created under capitalism? You claim that it is controversial, so why is there no capitalist country that doesn't have it? And why was it specifically lobbied for by early capitalists and created with capitalist?
This is just a nice fantasy that was established after capitalism already started. The very birth of capitalism, the Enclosure Act, was to restrict freedom to increase profit.
In fact, the original libertarians and anarchists were a movement that sought to end capitalism, precisely because of its coercion.
> Intellectual property is a good example of the contradictions of capitalism. It destroys the principles of freedom, but in truth is necessary to perpetuate the capitalist system.
Your assertion is quite wrong and far-fetched. Intellectual property is not necessary to "perpetuate the capitalist system", at all, and asserting otherwise has no bearing in reality. Your right to private property and to own means of production does not depend in any way on the state being able to stop others from copying concepts or ideas.
Profit is not human nature, until you abandon actually senseful definitions of profit. People selling their labour at a market price by definition cannot make profit, meaning that the vast majority of people don't make a profit, so how can it be claimed that it is human nature?
Human nature is to sometimes, with a ton of exceptions, maximize resources and utility. This does not mean maximizing profit, unless you redefine profit to be a meaningless word.
The ideals of capitalism are the ideals of classical Liberalism: small government limited mainly to the protection of citizens rights under the standard of "natural law". Intellectual property isn't such a right, because unlike with real physical property, when you "steal" intellectual property from somebody you're not preventing them from using it in future. I can't imagine many of the founding fathers would be supportive of the massive state apparatus for enforcing IP.
These are the ideals of capitalism in the same way that the ideals of European feudalism are those of upholding the natural order of things as mandated by God.
Authors choose to publish in these journals. They could choose to publish purely in open source journals and this would be a non-issue.
And “communal resources”? What if a private institution publishes a paper? You have a right to access that free as well? All public ally funded research is already available for free.
They choose it as much as I choose to implement whatever my PM asks me to. I could weasel my way out of it, most likely by changing jobs, but at a significant personal monetary and career-development expense.
Publishing open access in journals maintained by the cartel is expensive. Scientists can't really afford to pay this out of pocket, so they tack it onto grant costs, reducing the money they get to actually do science. And it's overall not a pleasant experience.
Yes, all of that. And it's even before we talk about how your worth as a researcher depends on which journal you publish in. There's a number of them where if you get accepted, it's like winning a small lottery and you will do it, whatever the rules are.
"hey could choose to publish purely in open source journals and this would be a non-issue."
These journals often offload the cost of publishing onto the authors themselves, and that money is tight. An open access publication is about the same cost as keeping an undergrad employed in my lab for a semester.
And that ignores, as others have noted, that career incentives put "Only publish in open access journals" as the kind of principled stand that might kill a new researcher's career.
