Science Magazine: Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed, data analyst suggests. “There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading papers from Sci-Hub.) But just how enormous is its repository? That is the question biodata scientist Daniel Himmelstein at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues recently set out to answer, after an assist from Sci-Hub.”
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Science: Want to analyze millions of scientific papers all at once? Here’s the best way to do it
Science: Want to analyze millions of scientific papers all at once? Here’s the best way to do it. “There is long-standing debate among text and data miners: whether sifting through full research papers, rather than much shorter and simpler research summaries, or abstracts, is worth the extra effort. Though it may seem obvious that full papers would give better results, some researchers say that a lot of information they contain is redundant, and that abstracts contain all that’s needed. Given the challenges of obtaining and formatting full papers for mining, stick with abstracts, they say. In an attempt to settle the debate, Søren Brunak, a bioinformatician at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby, and colleagues analyzed more than 15 million scientific articles published in English from 1823 to 2016.”
SCMP: VPN crackdown an ‘unthinkable’ trial by firewall for China’s research world
South China Morning Post: VPN crackdown an ‘unthinkable’ trial by firewall for China’s research world. “Like most academics, biology researcher Dr Jose Pastor-Pareja relies heavily on Google’s search engine, using it ‘every 10 minutes’, he says. But access to this resource is not guaranteed as he works at Tsinghua University in China – where the government has been tightening what are already among the strictest controls over the internet in the world.”
Chronicle of Higher Education: After Professors’ Criticism, Group Updates List of Google-Funded Scholars
Chronicle of Higher Education: After Professors’ Criticism, Group Updates List of Google-Funded Scholars. “A group that created a list of scholars who’d received money from Google has updated the database in response to critics, including professors who said they didn’t belong on the list. In some cases the Campaign for Accountability, the creator of the dataset, defended putting professors on its list; in others, it clarified why scholars had been included; and in others, it removed academics from the list altogether.”
The Next Web: Google responds to Wall Street Journal accusations of paying professors
The Next Web: Google responds to Wall Street Journal accusations of paying professors. “According to the report, Google (and others) are influencing politics and students by paying high-dollar stipends to the professors who are willing to do its evil bidding. … Google, in its response, says that the Campaign for Accountability is a biased organization pushing an anti-Google agenda.”
Nature: US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub
Nature: US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub. “One of the world’s largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.”
Phys.org: Open imaging data for biology
Phys.org: Open imaging data for biology. “A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only if you understand what you are looking at. The life sciences rely increasingly on 2-D, 3-D and 4-D image data, but its staggering heterogeneity and size make it extremely difficult to collate into a central resource, link to other data types and share with the research community. To address this challenge, scientists at the University of Dundee, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge have launched a prototype repository for imaging data: the Image Data Resource (IDR). This free resource, described in Nature Methods, is the first general biological image repository that stores and integrates data from multiple modalities and laboratories.”
