Alchemy looks a lot like science: an alchemist observes a phenomenon, hypothesises a causal relationship, and designs and performs an experiment to test the hypothesis.
The difference is in what happens next.
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The difference is in what happens next.
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The scientist publishes their findings so that others can critique it. The alchemist does not. Scientists aren't smarter than alchemists, so scientists are every bit as capable of making themselves believe that drinking mercury is good for their health.
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But scientists have to expose their work to peer-review, which means that their self-deception can be exposed and corrected. Alchemists just die of mercury poisoning.
Today, most peer-review happens through publication by a handful of giant, monopolistic journal publishers.
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Today, most peer-review happens through publication by a handful of giant, monopolistic journal publishers.
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Scholarly and scientific research, most of it publicly funded, is given for free to these multibillion-dollar empires, who then charge the institutions where the authors work millions to access the journals in which that work appears.
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The editorial boards and reviewers of these journals are volunteer positions, filled by scholars from those same institutions that pay millions to access the journals they're producing.
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The journals themselves are pure rentiers, useless intermediaries that barely even edit the papers they publish:
arxiv.org/pdf/1604.05363…
And yet, scholars send them work, because their career advancement depends on publication, preferably in widely cited journals.
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arxiv.org/pdf/1604.05363…
And yet, scholars send them work, because their career advancement depends on publication, preferably in widely cited journals.
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For more than a decade, scholars have been fighting back, switching to "open access" journals that fund their (minimal) costs by charging to submit a paper for review and then publish for free. Major science funders now demand that grantees promise open access publication.
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But the paywalled journals are still hanging in there. They have huge warchests of money looted from universities, and they have massive, locked up back-catalogs of scholarly work whose copyright they extorted from uncompensated researchers.
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Enter @Sci_Hub, an unauthorized repository of millions of scientific and scholarly papers liberated from paywalls and made available for free to all comers.
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The scholarly publishing industry hates Scihub so much that they've actually gone to courts around the world to demand that Scihub and its mirrors be blocked by national firewalls, censoring science in a bid to restore the mercury-swilling days of alchemy.
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But what about the scholars - the actual researchers whose uncompensated words publishers sue to suppress when they go after Scihub?
For them, Scihub is a godsend.
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For them, Scihub is a godsend.
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Not only does Scihub make it possible for scholars to see all the literature they need to review to continue their work, irrespective of institutional affiliation (this is especially important in the Global South, where many universities can't afford subscriptions).
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But - as a quartet of scholars from Brazil, Colombia, Czech, and Australia show in a new paper...well, the title says it all, really: "THE SCI-HUB EFFECT: SCI-HUB DOWNLOADS LEAD TO MORE ARTICLE CITATIONS."
arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979…
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arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979…
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That is, when your work is freely available, more people read it and cite it. And for scholars, more citations means more career opportunities: jobs, grants, conference invites...Everything that matters to the progress of scholarship.
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I mean, yes, it's obvious, but it has some pretty fascinating implications - like, "If you're a scientist who wants to progress, you should let Nature publish your work and get the prestige, then defeat Nature's paywall so that Scihub can distribute it and get the impact."
eof/
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