Sci-Hub is the piracy network for academic journals and it has many a publisher and author pointing fingers and calling names. Researchers are likely calling names as well, but they might actually be repeatable. This interesting information came to us from The Chronicle of Higher Education in their article, “What Do the Authors of Sci-Hub’s Most-Downloaded Articles Think About Sci-Hub?”
A lawsuit filed by Elsevier led to the suspension of one of Sci-Hub’s most prominent domain names recently, but the network continues to allow millions of academic articles to be downloaded around the world.
What do the paper authors think about this situation? The article’s author spoke to three of the authors whose articles appeared on the 10 most-downloaded papers on Sci-Hub to find out their opinions.
When asked what he thought about one of his papers being on the list, Jordan S. Pober from Yale University responded, “It’s flattering, but it’s a dubious honor.” Mr. Pober wasn’t aware of the site’s existence until recently. At 67 years old, he depends on university libraries to gain access to journal articles. “It’s a generational thing,” he says of Sci-Hub’s success.
Maybe the entire thing is a generational thing? Many think it would be better for the science community if findings were made freely available. If this were the case then how would you sustain the functions of society journals? Maybe they are of another generation too.
Melody K. Smith
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