Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.
It’s chicken/egg or “you first” problem.
You spend years on your work. You probably have loans. Your income is pitiful. And this is the structural thing that gets your name out. Now someone says “hey take a risk, don’t do it and break the system.”
Well…you first 🤷♂️ they publish on this garbage because it’s the only way to move up, and these garbage systems continue on because everyone has to participate. Hate the game. Don’t blame those who are by and large forced to participate.
It would require lot of effort from people with clout. It’s a big fight to pick. I am very much in favor of picking that fight, but we need to be a little sympathetic to what that entails.
There are a couple things we can do:
- decline to review for the big journals. why give them free labor? Do academic service in other ways.
- if you’re organizing a workshop or conference, put the papers online for free. If you’re just participating and not organizing, then suggest they put the papers online for free. Here’s an example: https://aclanthology.org/ If that’s too time-consuming, use: https://arxiv.org/
Something else we can do: regulate. Like every other corrupt industry in the history of the world, we need the force of law to fix it–and for pretty much all the same reasons. People worked at Triangle Shirtwaist because they had to, not because they thought it was a great place to work.
Fully agree but I can tell you about point 1 that there enough gullible scientists in the world that see nothing wrong with the current system.
They will gadly pick up free review when Nature comes knocking, since its “such an honour” for such a reputable paper.
Such a reputable paper that’s no doubt accepted dozens of ChatGPT papers by now. Wow, how prestigious!
As someone who’s not too familiar with the bureaucracy of academia I have to ask: Can’t the authors just upload all their studies to ResearchGate or some other website if they want? I know that they often share it privately with others when they request a paper, so can they post it publicly too?
Publishing comes with IP laws and copyright. For example, open access articles should be easy to upload without concern. “Private” articles being republished somewhere without license is “piracy”, and ResearchGate did get in trouble for it. It’s complicated. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/publishers-settle-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-with-researchgate/4018095.article
Pre-prints are a different story.
Elsevier is the reason I donate to Sci-Hub.
Imagine they have an internal tool to check if the hash exists in their database, something like
"SELECT user FROM downloads WHERE hash = '" + hash + "';"You set the pdf hash to be
1'; DROP TABLE books;--they scan it, and it effectively deletes their entire business lmfaoo.Another idea might be to duplicate the PDF many times and insert bogus metadata for each. Then submit requests saying that you found an illegal distribution of the PDF. If their process isn’t automated it would waste a lot of time on their part to find the culprit Lol
I think it’s more interesting to think of how to weaponize their own hash rather than deleting it
deleted by creator
When will scientists just self-publish? I mean seriously, nowadays there is nothing between a researcher and publishing their stuff on the web. Only thing would be peer-reviewing, if you want that, but then just organize it without Elsevier. Reviewers get paid jack shit so you can just do a peer-reviewing fediverse instance where only the mods know the people so it’s still double-blind.
This system is just to dangle carrots in front of young researchers chasing their PhD
Because of “impact score” the journal your work gets placed in has a huge impact on future funding. Its a very frustrating process and trying to go around it is like suicide for your lab so it has to be more of a top-down fix because the bottom up is never going to happen.
Thats why everyone uses sci hub. These publishers are terrible companies up there with EA in unpopularity.
That’s where you print the downloaded PDF to a new PDF. New hash and same content, good luck tracing it back to me fucko.
Unfortunately that wouldn’t work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)
Now that this is known, It’s not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they’re apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won’t stop here.
There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.
It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you’re sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it’s worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.
Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.
Wouldn’t printing the PDF to a new PDF inherently strip the metadata put there by the publisher?
it’s possible using steganographic techniques to embed digital watermarks which would not be stripped by simply printing to pdf.
Got it. Print to a low quality JPG, the use AI upscaling to restore the text and graphs.
I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.
Honestly, even though as a consumer I don’t like it, I don’t mind it that much. Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.
Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn’t interact with anything and can’t be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.
I object because my public funds were used to pay for most of these papers. Publishers shouldn’t behave as if they own it.
