Sci-Hub & the future of publishing: Library Science Talk in Zurich
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In March 2020, many Steem users, including @dhimmel, migrated to the Hive blockchain in response to the hostile takeover of Steem. Please use the Hive link when sharing this post and comment on the Hive version to get in touch.
Here is the recording of a presentation I recently gave on June 26, 2018 at Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Switzerland. The topic is Sci-Hub and the future of publishing.
Introduction by Lothar Schmitt. The talk is followed by a discussion between Rafael Ball (Director of the ETH Library), @dhimmel, and Lothar Schmitt. Dr. Ball and Schmitt are from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).
The slides for this presentation are online at https://slides.com/dhimmel/switzerland. This presentation is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This video is also on YouTube at
@dhimmel You are a very well-spoken public speaker. I enjoyed this lecture and I enjoyed the presentation with the slideshow and learned the new term "The Streisand Effect". I also like the point you made about if science reaseach papers should be published for free. I will be looking into more about the writing of Simon Oxenham to read more about how this fits into the publishing. And I may have missed this in the lecture, but do you think that all research papers should be published for free? And wow! 60 million articles? Unbelievable!
This was a very interesting lecture. Thank you for sharing this!
Definitely! By the way, he's @simoxenham on Steem.
I think the scientific record should be freely available under an open license. This would allow anyone to access and reuse scientific publications, datasets, and software. For science to rest on a healthy foundation, I think it's important to have these basic building blocks be open. Furthermore, most science of this category is publicly or philanthropically funded. All of the stakeholders (besides publishers looking to extract profit) want the research outputs to be open.
Now this doesn't mean that publishing is free. Of course, sometimes there are costs, although experiments like Steem show that costs don't need to be paid by paywalls. In the open access model for scholarly publishing, oftentimes the authors (usually their grants / employer) pays an APC (article processing charge) to fund the publication process enabling the resulting paper to be distributed for free. While this system has a ways to go in becoming cheaper, it creates a much better foundation for science.
@dhimmel Thanks for the information! I have been sick today but will check out @simoexnham's steemit page in a day or two. Thank you for pointing me in that direction!
I understand your point that there are costs with publishing the materials but I am glad that you think the scientific records should be made freely available under an open license. This allows people like me to better understand certain topics and the research that has been put into it! Thank you for the informative explanation! :)
The Library Science Talks are jointly organized by the Swiss National Library, the Association of International Librarians and Information Specialists (AILIS) and CERN. Here's the schedule for this season:
Previous Steem posts of mine related to this topic are:
Finally, see this tweet with a picture of the gift I gave to the people of Switzerland via Tullio Basaglia of CERN. Tullio is the one who suggested me as a Library Science Talk candidate!
Big respect to Elbakyan. Couldnt listen all the presentation but I will soon, thanks for your efforts also. There are many attempts to stop sci-hub especially court decisions made in USA. The domain name/s constantly under attack by law enforcements. Other than some radical (or marginal lets say) groups there is no open support for sci-hub organization and what it does for science community. Its officially shown that even in academia of USA, students and colleagues prefer to use sci-hub even though they have access to free accounts for publications. (because sci-hub is faster)
Here is the link for the research of sci-hub usage: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
On the other hand even though many academics use sci-hub, we see no support from them about this organization directly. An almost death silence there is. We also dont see any support or brave claims about the dark side of the scientific publication system currently going on all over the world.
On that manner I found your talk and related stuff pretty encouraging and hopefull for future...
Great presentation @dhimmel. I hope to see more and more science papers free, too! However, whenever some research needs substantial funding, it is difficult to expect that such researches would be free to public. There is also issue of intelectual property, which you raised in your lecture.
Many people assume that money spent on accessing papers goes to the researchers or somehow funds more research. This is not the case. All of the money goes to the journals, who do not fund research. In general, funders and researchers want their research papers to be freely available.
i resteemed your post because i love the sci-hub
Sci hub good post like that