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Sci-Hub has been blocked in India

(sci-hub.se)
260 points the-mitr | 3 comments | 28 Aug 25 04:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.667s | source
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megaloblasto ◴[28 Aug 25 12:10 UTC] No.45051186[source]▶
I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.

That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.

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kleiba ◴[28 Aug 25 12:53 UTC] No.45051583[source]▶
Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to me, if there's something offered to you for a certain price, and you're not ready to pay that price, the alternative should be to either get something comparable that's cheaper (hardly possible with scientific papers) or, unfortunately, abstain from getting that thing at all.

I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.

Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).

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1. thrance ◴[28 Aug 25 13:10 UTC] No.45051736[source]▶
Profiteering is bad, even more so when it's about science. That's my moral justification. Using Sci-Hub is illegal, but far from immoral in my book.
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2. kleiba ◴[28 Aug 25 15:27 UTC] No.45053426[source]▶
Why is that? Most relevant research in AI is done outside of universities and instead by companies these days. Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings? Their research is not funded by tax money.

(Note that that's not usually where the price tag for a research paper comes from these days, it's publishers charging for their added value. You might find it debatable whether said added value warrants the amount of money they ask for, but that's orthogonal to the underlying issue.)

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3. thrance ◴[28 Aug 25 16:20 UTC] No.45054019[source]▶
No one is selling their research through these papers. Researchers have to pay to publish their findings, and other researchers have to pay to access them. The only ones benefiting from this insane state of affairs are the journals, who are actively hampering the scientific process in the age of the internet.

> Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings?

These companies make profit by selling actual products, and by patenting what findings may be profitable. I don't think they can even begin to recoup their R&D expenses by selling papers... On the other hand, open science benefits everyone. It makes public research that much more efficient and allows private actors to make the most out of it.