Paul Graham remarks on SciHub and how broken our current system is that everyone’s advice for getting research results is to use a pirate site.
I was talking to a high school student interested in a certain technology and I suggested she try reading some papers about it. I told her to look on Sci-Hub. How broken is it that the default advice for a young student interested in research is to use a “pirate” web site?
— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 1, 2022
There’s not even a pretense that the proper method is find a library that has access to the needed journals. That doesn’t make sense even in a first world country but imagine you live in a third world country. It’s basically something like SciHub or go without.
Smart people who can change the world live everywhere—even in third world countries—and it’s simply crazy to deny them the resources they need to help humanity. Our current system is completely dysfunctional and just doesn’t make sense. That’s especially true when almost all of this research is being financed with public funds.
Sadly, the university system is collapsing and, even now, many researchers are choosing to publish in open access journals so things may improve but it’s too bad that it takes the destruction of our educational system to bring a little rationality to scientific publishing.