Plus I would imagine that everyone wants their illness looked into, thus that's where funding tends to go. I care much less for physicists to figure out what dark matter is than how to treat health problem X that bothers me daily. (Just an example. In my particular case I'm healthy and would actually be quite excited about dark matter findings compared to any individual illness solution... but still.)
This comment would be worth a lot more with some stats about funding going towards the different fields, though. Not sure where to find that.
Or is there some other reason for the discrepancy?
Relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/2085/
There are several medical subfields that on their own get more funding than the entire NSF (i.e. all other science).
I am not sure how Sci-hub can get past this, unless they get a good Indian court ruling and can use Indian friends to scan printed copies of journals - if they exist in this online age?
Quite trivially, actually, thanks to the good old analogue hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084193
All sci-hub would have to do in this case is download the same paper through three or more accounts (different institutions, networks, countries?) at three different times, rasterize them and keep the common denominator. If a pixel has no common denominator, they'd have to fall back to a default value. This is by no means a perfect method and it has its weaknesses and pitfalls, but the resulting PDF will be far less useful as a means to de-anonymize accounts using information from the PDF itself.
Publishers still have other sources of information to de-anonymize accounts if the multiple accounts/downloads aren't truly isolated from one another.
Edit: also the sysadmin that keeps this database safe without 'accidental' data loss on UUID to downloader mappings.
I was struck by very low number of German downloads. Did I miss something?
I don't know if sci hub bothers with publications that are available freely from an official source.
Don't use the term "open access" like this. A paper published on arXiv is free to read, and was freely published. "Open access" is a scam by the big publishers, where they don't take money from the readers, but make the authors pay. Or, putting it another way, anyone can pay their way in those journals and publish (sometimes sub par) papers.
Do note though that most math and ML practitioners use arxiv over sci-hub.
Sites like ResearchGate make this very easy. And often a simple email does the job, too.
Advantages:
* It is legal
* The author gets feedback that someone out there reads their research
* Making direct contact to your peers is a good thing.
A community of scientists sharing their papers would be a good thing already now.
I personally know active scientists who don't even try anymore to look up the paper, but rather go directly to sci-hub for any doi they need. I can understand why, but I also think that this doesn't lead to a sustainable publishing culture.
But honestly, how often does one have to skim that many papers in a day, to a level where the freely available abstract is not sufficient?
Perhaps every once in a while when one compiles a survey of a new field they enter. Once the project is set on the rails, one rarely has to read that much.
Are you sure that the usual suspects don't make authors assign copyright or at least distribution rights? I wouldn't put it past them...
why are our scientists made to rely on elsevier et al to sift through the junk and find for them the perfect paper instead of doing it themselves? is science now such a cutthroat quick competition that it requires you to give a company the priviledge to work for you so that you dont have to do your own due diligence?
in india, we have a lot of local research that is done on open databases like shodh ganga and many more. but if you have to access foreign research material, better luck your university has an agreement with elsevier and others to pay them millions for a login. the alternative, go to scihub and find what you need.
i understand the whole quality/delivery debate but doesnt the average user already know who the big players in the specific domain are and who are trusted? or you want discoverability at the hands of a "trusted third party" without doing the legwork yourself.
then at the other end you have non-academics like me. I might have heard of a research paper in some article and i cannot read it without paying an arm and a leg. why? if we use the whole ebook/book argument that compensation is commensurate to the sales so more popular book means more money to the author but here authors arent compensated but elsevier so why should i pay elsevier? because they filtered through 1000 papers to provide 10 and for that privilege, they require unlimited royalty for ever? why?
Scientists do do that themselves. That‘s why it is called peer review. Journals take scientists work for free, they just pre-select papers, but don‘t do the review.
is the pre-selection such an important thing that these companies necessarily have to remain in business?
Basically: medicine as a whole is already some sort of expert system.
- Data collection and cleanup: Researchers conduct experiments to produce meaningful data and extract conclusions from that data.
This part isn't more automated because we have strict rules that prevent medical data collection and analysis without a clear purpose. Otherwise we'd be able to collect a lot more information to try and extract results from it using more inference-oriented techniques (deep learning and the like).
- Modeling & training: Expert panels produce guidelines from the results of that research. These panels are the "training part" of the system.
As a sibling comment said, replacing these panels with ML-based techniques isn't trivial because the data produced in the previous step is fairly noisy (p-value hacking, difficulty of capturing all the variables, etc.). Furthermore, the techniques that yield best results nowadays also produce them without clear explanations on why they hold, which is not something we are prepare to accept in medicine.
- Execution: Doctors diagnose and treat following said guidelines. In fact, they use decision flows that they themselves call... algorithms!
The main reason why execution is not automated is that we do not have the technology for machines to capture the contextual and communication nuances that doctors pick up on. There can be a world of difference between the exact same statement given by two different patients or even the same patient in two different situations. Likewise, the effect of a doctors' statement can be quite literally the opposite depending on who the patient is and their state of mind. One of the most important aspects of the GP's job is to handle these differences to achieve the best possible outcomes for their patients.
All that being said, there are companies trying to produce expert systems to help doctors diagnose. See https://infermedica.com/product/infermedica-api for instance.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu...
https://mobile.twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/143435621720862...
Scihub used to be a great resource, now it's only a resource for old research. Still useful for background material, but not for current work.
I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian. There doesn't seem to be any actual reason to stop adding new articles, other than some idiotic halfbaked point that only hurts the people who need the articles, like when Project Gutenberg banned anyone from a German IP, except this is much worse since there is no way around it for people who need new papers.
The court case has also been delayed for over a year now, so if it is delayed indefinitely, like it seems to be, then we will also not get access to new articles, also indefinitely? That's ridiculous. The last update from the court proceedings claimed that there would be a new update over a month ago, which in turn got delayed yet again to a few days ago, and there's been nothing [1].
[1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/dhc_case_status_oj_list.asp?pn...
She has done more than any other organization or individual in the history of mankind when helping people in second and third world country pursue advance research since the advent of internet. Well she and the people who pirate and distribute MS Office. Faculties around the world recommend scihub as the main and only source of research and journals.
This has been ongoing for a while now:
Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: We are the library https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
Nobel is a political tool that's mostly there to make a point (especially that peace prize).
Alexandra Elbakyan, who created SciHub, was born is Kazakhstan (exUSSR) and later studied in Russia where she lives now. I'm proud that Russia is one of the few countries on the planet where American exterritorial law doesn't apply.
That we have to rely on single person effort that's risking their freedom to do so is fucking insane.
