The quote from Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer that "Sci-Hub will then use [stolen credentials] to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers" shows some fairly serious misunderstandings of how scientific research is funded, carried out, written up, shared, and published ... and which multinationals get rich from selling access to the very last bit.
It's not ideal though, but search engines like Google Scholar are good at finding the open-access versions of paywalled academic works and linking to the PDF of them.
(I'm not connected with Nature).
They call it "open access" if I remember correctly and it's a couple of times more expensive than it already is.
Universities pay a lot of money to publish in these journals.
The end result is that the vast majority (i.e. almost all) such research (regardless of how funded) is public and accessible on the institution's repository, or otherwise deposited with an open access library, such that it can "count" towards the metrics.
A clever approach if you ask me - find what matters to the individuals concerned (the metrics), and discount work from those metrics unless made freely available within X days, with appropriate audit trail to match.
Why?
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/...
> Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia.
Fantastic!
> Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers.
A) Is this true?
B) If so, is it a bad thing?
B) Yes, but only due to the potential sensitive nature of the credentials unrelated to the downloading of papers.
Phishing, though, crosses the line. Once you start tricking people and removing their agency, you’re the bad guy.
Note that Sci-Hub's model wasn't concerned citizens uploading articles, but academics (allegedly, at least) sharing their credentials and Sci-Hub using those to download requested articles if they didn't have it in their own caches yet. With that method, it seems a lot less unlikely to me that a relatively small number of academics could have "contributed" many articles.
The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen.
Was this even touched by a human?
Here's an example:
Mar 14 "Ageing equipment puts Army at risk, MPs warn British army armoured vehicle. The British army is likely to find itself "outgunned" in any conflict with Russian forces" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56386446
Then 3 days later a new UK foreign policy increasing military spending https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56391994. The fact check here from the BBC is interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56417924
What happens here is that voters see the first article, it sits in their mind a bit and they think "well maybe we should increase military spending, we need a good armed forces" then lo and behold their wish comes true a few days later.
We're just living in an real world Yes Minister episode.
Very short paragraphs in a semi-random order, together with a smattering of out of place headings. I assume they must have some internal style document, because it applies to a good chunk of their stories on diverse topics.
"The occasional quote which is unsourced, and doesn't have an end quotation mark.
Questions have been asked
Not unlike this comment really.
I suck at writing in general but it just seems so odd to me that the article quotes such short phrases.
Then you get several sentences on the police's view, and several on Sci-hub's.
It's mechanically straightforward, like most news.
Later the uni found out, asked questions and the person just lied they were 'tricked'. Uni makes a police report and the police just takes it at face value.
The BBC could have asked Sci-Hub and students for comment to add more sides of the story.
It seems clear that Sci-Hub is a great boon to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
It wouldn't even be unprecedented to have laws that "encourage" contributions. Think of the old library of Alexandria, or even the modern library of Congress.
That's the first I've heard about this, and it would represent a very different perspective on Sci-Hub to the traditional anti-copyright Robin Hood styling.
That said, even though CoLP is a rather strange police force within system here, it would be surprising for it to make a definitive public statement like that without being reasonably confident that it was correct. Is there any truth to that allegation?
> The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.
Police (and politicians in general) should be careful about the fire they're playing with. There are some valid reasons to be concerned about hacking based out of Russia, but if every time they want to try to cast aspersions on things they don't like by highlighting connections to Russian they run he risk of people just totally discounting that warning in all cases.
If people see a "WARNING: This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm" label on every other product they buy, they tend to completely ignore that label. And the reasoning behind it is very simple too, because if almost everything causes cancer, then what is there to do about it and why even worry.
Compare
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/police-forces/city-of-lon...
https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/...
And it's weird that the police are advising people not to use Sci-Hub. In England copyright violation is a civil matter, not a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of business or you're doing so much of it you're distorting trade. It's simply not a police matter.
This isn't about enforcing scientific orthodoxy. It's about making sure that the journals get their inch of green for accessing that orthodoxy.
Non-official science views are everywhere. These are the gatekeepers of official science views, maintained by copyright. The people who can't get past those gatekeepers are usually desperate to get them into your hands.
Until we actually understand what's being done to us, we're all just blowing in the wind.
I think I remember the Indian government proposing something similar to this current sci-hub initiative.
Obviously I don't know if sci-hub is the right way to go about these things, and I wonder how this would change the incentivization behind research. From my understanding though the main gatekeepers here like elsevier act as more of a financial leech on the system rather than providing any real value; since they aren't the ones funding the research to begin with. Would be interested to hear other's take on this.
