[Wellsy]

https://sci-hub.io/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Any one use it? Thoughts?

[Wellsy]

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

[ThirdTerm]

I have come across a Russian website which illegally stores academic articles that are not usually accessible. But there are plentiful of open access articles online and I don't have to visit the Russian site very often.

Open Archive
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2013.07.006

Archaeological and linguistic studies provide support for the genetic findings of a mixture of at least two very distinct populations in the history of the Indian subcontinent. The earliest archaeological evidence for agriculture in the region dates to 8,000–9,000 years before present (BP) (Mehrgarh in present-day Pakistan) and involved wheat and barley derived from crops originally domesticated in West Asia.9, 10 The earliest evidence for agriculture in the south dates to much later, around 4,600 years BP, and has no clear affinities to West Eurasian agriculture (it was dominated by native pulses such as mungbean and horsegram, as well as indigenous millets11). Linguistic analyses also support a history of contacts between divergent populations in India, including at least one with West Eurasian affinities. Indo-European languages including Sanskrit and Hindi (primarily spoken in northern India) are part of a larger language family that includes the great majority of European languages. In contrast, Dravidian languages including Tamil and Telugu (primarily spoken in southern India) are not closely related to languages outside of South Asia. Evidence for long-term contact between speakers of these two language groups in India is evident from the fact that there are Dravidian loan words (borrowed vocabulary) in the earliest Hindu text (the Rig Veda, written in archaic Sanskrit) that are not found in Indo-European languages outside the Indian subcontinent.12, 13
http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(13)00324-8

PLOS is a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license.

Due to its pivotal geographical location and proximity to transcontinental migratory routes, Iran has played a key role in subsequent migrations, both prehistoric and historic, between Africa, Asia and Europe. To shed light on the genetic structure of the Iranian population as well as on the expansion patterns and population movements which affected this region, the complete mitochondrial genomes of 352 Iranians were obtained. All Iranian populations studied here exhibit similarly high diversity values comparable to the other groups from the Caucasus, Anatolia and Europe. The results of AMOVA and MDS analyses did not associate any regional and/or linguistic group of populations in the Anatolia/Caucasus and Iran region pointing to close genetic positions of Persians and Qashqais to each other and to Armenians, and Azeris from Iran to Georgians. By reconstructing the complete mtDNA phylogeny of haplogroups R2, N3, U1, U3, U5a1g, U7, H13, HV2, HV12, M5a and C5c we have found a previously unexplored genetic connection between the studied Iranian populations and the Arabian Peninsula, India, Near East and Europe, likely the result of both ancient and recent gene flow. Our results for Persians and Qashqais point to a continuous increase of the population sizes from ∼24 kya to the present, although the phase between 14-24 kya is thought to be hyperarid according to the Gulf Oasis model. Since this would have affected hunter-gatherer ranges and mobility patterns and forced them to increasingly rely on coastal resources, this transition can explain the human expansion across the Persian Gulf region.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0080673

[mikema63]

I have pretty broad access through my university.

Really though, I don't think journals should be for profit.

[Kaiserschmarrn]

Any one use it? Thoughts?

In my opinion this deserves support, mainly because journals don't do the job they are supposed to do, i.e. quality control of the published literature. It starts with their useless pre-publication peer reviews, goes on to their lack of enforcement of making the data of published articles available, and ends with their reluctance to publish post-publication corrections let alone retract papers.

There are of course better and worse journals, but it's frustrating to see that not even the PLOS journal which prides itself to require that the underlying data of all published articles must be available on request seems to be unable (or unwilling) to enforce this policy. I'm following a case where the data of an article published by PLOS has been requested by a researcher and all PLOS seems to do is drag its feet. It's been almost half a year since the data request.

Sci-hub doesn't address all of the problems with scientific research but at least it makes it possible for individuals to check whether the abstract reflects the facts as they appear in the whole article, because the sad truth is even that is often not the case. In many cases abstracts are pure spin and not an accurate summary of the results. So journals even fail at this most basic check.

One has to wonder just what value journals actually provide. And to top it all off, their profit margins are the envy of companies such as Apple and BMW.

As for the absurdity of journals' role in the publishing process, I'll quote somebody else since I wouldn't be able to put it better or more succinct.

Let's take a look at the flow of money in the production of research. The government takes tax revenue from citizens and uses it to fund university research groups and libraries. Researchers obtain government grants and use the money to conduct experiments. They write up the results in manuscripts that are destined to become published papers. Manuscripts are submitted to journals, where they are handled by other researchers acting as unpaid volunteer editors. They co-ordinate the process of peer-review, which is done by yet other researchers, also unpaid. All these roles—author, editor, reviewer—are considered normal responsibilities of researchers, funded by grants.

At this point, researchers have worked together to produce a publication-ready, peer-reviewed manuscript. But rather than posting it on the Web, where it can contribute to the world's knowledge, form a basis for future work, and earn prestige for the author, the finished manuscript is then donated gratis to a publisher: the author signs away copyright. The publisher then formats the manuscript and places the result behind a paywall. Then it sells subscriptions back to the universities where the work originated. Well-off universities will have some access to the paper (though even they are denied important rights such as text-mining). Less well-off universities have access to varying selections of journals, often not the ones their researchers need. And the taxpayers who funded all this? They get nothing at all. No access to the paper.

[Wellsy]

Ned mor syhob