I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.
Honestly, even though as a consumer I don’t like it, I don’t mind it that much. Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.
Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn’t interact with anything and can’t be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.
Plus, if you have two people with legit access, you can pretty easily figure out what’s going on and defeat it.
I object because my public funds were used to pay for most of these papers. Publishers shouldn’t behave as if they own it.
That’s true. I was actually thinking/talking about this practice in general, not specifically with regards to Elsevier.
I definitely agree that scientific journals as they are today are unacceptable.
It can be used to spy on any decent scientist who will send papers his/hers/theirs institution has access to, but their friend doesn’t. Much fun. As a reminder, publishers don’t pay reviewers, don’t pay for additional research, editing is typically minimal, and research is funded publicly, so what they own is social capital of owning big journal
It can be used to spy on any decent scientist who will send papers his/hers/theirs institution has access to, but their friend doesn’t.
By “spy” I mean things like: know how many times I’ve read the PDF, when I’ve opened it, which parts of it I’ve read most, what program I used to open the PDF, how many copies of the PDF I’ve made, how many people I’ve emailed it to, etc. etc. etc.
This technique can do none of that. The only thing it can do is: if someone uploads the PDF to a mass sharing network, and an employee of the publisher downloads it from that mass sharing network and compares this metadata with the internal database, then they can see which of their users originally downloaded it and when they originally downloaded the PDF. It tells them nothing about how it got there. Maybe the original user shared it with 20 of their colleagues (a legitimate use of a downloaded PDF), and one of those colleagues uploaded that file to the mass sharing site without telling the original downloader. It doesn’t prove one way or the other. It’s an extremely small amount of information that’s only useful for catching systemic uploaders, e.g. a single user who has uploaded hundreds or thousands of PDFs that they downloaded from the publisher using the same account.
And a savvy user can always strip that metadata out.
As a reminder, …
All true, and fucked up, but it’s not related to what I was talking about. I was talking about the general use of this technique.
Imagine thinking any of the half dozen industry specific publishers have a right to exist in the 2020s
Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”.
That’s a fun opinion but have you considered that property is theft and intellectual property is bullshit
Without IP your favourite books, movies, TV shows, music and video games would not exist.
the artists still exist and would continue to make art even if we abolished the systems of exploitation we apply to that art.
frankly, art would instantly become far better without capitalism weighing it down
It’s not the artists, creators, researchers etc. who profit off ip laws. It’s always capitalists
The famously uneditable PDF format.
In metadata, no less.
Elsevier is the reason I donate to Sci-Hub.
Imagine they have an internal tool to check if the hash exists in their database, something like
"SELECT user FROM downloads WHERE hash = '" + hash + "';"You set the pdf hash to be
1'; DROP TABLE books;--they scan it, and it effectively deletes their entire business lmfaoo.Another idea might be to duplicate the PDF many times and insert bogus metadata for each. Then submit requests saying that you found an illegal distribution of the PDF. If their process isn’t automated it would waste a lot of time on their part to find the culprit Lol
I think it’s more interesting to think of how to weaponize their own hash rather than deleting it
Bobby tables has started his academic career!
That’s using your ass. This is an active threat to society and it demands active countermeasures.
I’d bet they have a SaaS ‘partner’ who trawls SciHub and other similar sites. I’ll try to remember to see if there is any hint of how this is being accomplished over the next few days.
i think this is less of a meme, and more of a scientifically dystopian fun fact, but sure.
“fun”
the fact, is in fact, rather fun(ny)
Just print it to a PDF printer.
This feels like it should be a browser plugin that automatically anonymizes anything you download.
I feel like this will cause quality degradation, like repeatedly re-compressing a jpeg. Relevant xkcd
Edit: though obviously for most use cases it shouldn’t matter
You can ask ChatGPT to spit out the latex code
What
Can’t we all researcher who is technically good at web servers start a opensource alternative to these paid services. I get that we need to publish to a renowned publisher, but we also decide together to publish to an alternative opensource option. This way the alternate opensource option also grows.
Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):
The goal of this project was to create an open access “Peer Review” platform:
Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.
It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.
I just looked it up now to see how it is going… And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: https://www.theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-probably-wont-work , and related posts referenced therein.
It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.
Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that’s easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!
Like arxiv.org?
Does it have all the new research paper regarding medicine and pharmacological action and newer drug interactions and stuff?
That’s not what was asked for though lol
I mean a paper is renowned if many people cute from it
We could just try citing more free papers, whenever possible (as long as they still have peer review)
Citation count is a shoddy metric for a paper’s quality. Not just because there’s citation cartels, but because the reason stuff gets cited is not contained in the metric. And then to top it all off as soon as a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric.
That’s where you print the downloaded PDF to a new PDF. New hash and same content, good luck tracing it back to me fucko.
Unfortunately that wouldn’t work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)
Now that this is known, It’s not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they’re apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won’t stop here.
There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.
It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you’re sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it’s worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.
Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.
Wouldn’t printing the PDF to a new PDF inherently strip the metadata put there by the publisher?
it’s possible using steganographic techniques to embed digital watermarks which would not be stripped by simply printing to pdf.
Got it. Print to a low quality JPG, the use AI upscaling to restore the text and graphs.
You should spread that idea around more, it’s pretty ingenious. I’d add first converting to B&W if possible.
This is a great point. Image watermarking steganography is nearly impossible to defeat unless you can obtain multiple copies of the ‘same’ file from multiple users to look for differences. It could be a change of a single 5-15 pixels from one rgb code off.
rgb(255, 251, 0)
to
rgb(255, 252, 0)
Which would be imperceptable to the human eye. Depending on the number of users it may need to change more or less pixels.
There is a ton of work in this field and its very interesting, for anyone considering majoring in computer science / information security.
Another ‘neat’ technology everyone should know about is machine identification codes, or, the tiny
secrettracking dots that color printers print on every page to identify the specific make, model, and serial number (I think?) of the printer the page was printed from. I don’t believe B&W printers have tracking dots, which were originally used to track creators of counterfeit currency. EFF has a page of color printers which do not include tracking dots on printed pages. This includes color LaserJets along with InkJets, although I would not be surprised if there was a similar tracking feature in place now or in the future “for safety and privacy reasons,” but none that I am aware of.I wonder if it’s common for those steganography techniques to have some mechanism for defeating the fairly simple strategy of getting 2 copies of the file from different sources, and looking at the differences between them to expose all the watermarks.
(I’d think you would need sections of watermark that are the same for any 2 or n combinations of copies of the data, which may be pretty easy to do in many cases, though the difference makes detecting the general watermarking strategy massively easier for the un-watermarkers)
Okay, got it. Print the PDF, then scan it and save as PDF.
Or get some monks to get a handwritten copy, like the good old times.
When will scientists just self-publish? I mean seriously, nowadays there is nothing between a researcher and publishing their stuff on the web. Only thing would be peer-reviewing, if you want that, but then just organize it without Elsevier. Reviewers get paid jack shit so you can just do a peer-reviewing fediverse instance where only the mods know the people so it’s still double-blind.
This system is just to dangle carrots in front of young researchers chasing their PhD
As if peer review weren’t massive fucking joke.
We should just self publish and then openly argue about it findings like the OG scientists. It didn’t stop them from discovering anything.
Editors can act as filters, which is required when dealing with an excess of information streaming in. Just like you follow celebrities on social media or you follow pseudo-forums like this one, you get a service of information filtration which increases the concentration of useful knowledge.
In the early days of modern science, the rate of publications was small, make it easier to “digest” entire fields even if there’s self-publishing. The number of published papers grows exponentially, as does the number of journals. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333487946_Over-optimization_of_academic_publishing_metrics_Observing_Goodhart’s_Law_in_action/figures
Just like with these forums, the need for moderators (editors, reviewers) grows with the number of users who add content.
Bone wars electric bugaloo. In the end you really do need a way to discern who is having an appreciable impact in a field in order to know who to fund. I have yet to hear a meaningful metric for that though.
Edit: I should clarify, the other option is strictly political through an academy of sciences and has historical awfulness associated with it as well.
Because of “impact score” the journal your work gets placed in has a huge impact on future funding. Its a very frustrating process and trying to go around it is like suicide for your lab so it has to be more of a top-down fix because the bottom up is never going to happen.
Thats why everyone uses sci hub. These publishers are terrible companies up there with EA in unpopularity.
It sounds like all it would take to destroy the predatory for-profit publication oligarchs is a majority of the top few hundred scientists, across major disciplines, rejecting it and switching to a completely decentralized peer-2-peer open-source system in protest… The publication companies seem to gate keep, and provide no value. It’s like Reddit. The site’s essentially worthless. All of the value is generated by the content creators.
Succesfully iniating this from the fediverse would be such a massive boost in public visibility and discoursive strength of the project of collectivization of information infrastructure (like lemmy).
Imagine we fluffin freed science from capital and basically all the scientists openly stated how useful this was
(What I’m trying to say is you have my bow)
I can only get so erect, please stop.
oh so this is the kind of stuff that turns on asexual people?
That would make them scisexual or politisociosexual I guess.
Thank you, this justifies to introduce myself as campaign porn producer from now on
When will scientists just self-publish?
It’s commonplace in my field (nuclear physics) to share the preprint version of your article, typically on arxiv.org. You can update the article as you respond to peer reviewers too. The only difference between this and the paywalls publisher version is that version will have additional formatting edits by the journal.
If you search for articles on google scholar, it groups the preprint and published versions together so it’s easy to find the non-paywalled copy. The standard journals I publish in even sort of encourage this; you can submit the latex documents and figures by just putting the url to an arxiv manuscript.
The US Department of Energy now requires any research they fund be made publicly available. So any article I publish is also automatically posted to osti.gov 1 year after its initial publication. This version is also grouped into the google scholar search results.
It’s an imperfect system, but it’s getting much better than it was even just a decade ago.
Yeah I know about this, but personally in our field I don’t see anybody bothering with preprints sadly. Maybe we should though, sounds like the first step.
If the paper is worth it and does have an original not OCR-ed text layer, it’d better be exported as any other format. We don’t call good things a PDF file, lol. It’s clumsy, heavy, have unadjustable font size and useless empty borders, includes various limits and takes on DRM, and it’s editing is usually done via paid software. This format shall die off.
The only reason academia needs that is strict references to exact page but it’s not that hard to emulate. Upsides to that are overwhelming.
I had my couple of times properly digitalizing PDFs into e-books and text-processing formats, and it’s a pain in the ass, but if I know it’d be read by someone but me, I’m okay with putting a bit more effort into it.
Well, I guess PDF has one thing going for it (which might not be relevant for scientific papers): The same file will render the same on any platform (assuming the reader implements all the PDF spec to the tee).
What format do you suggest?
FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn’t got any traction yet.
EPUB is mor/e popular, so it’s probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn’t much better.
Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I’d recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it’s imperfect format, it’s still better.
Docx doc rtf and all those have a different purpose than pdf, word docs don’t even necessarily look the same on two different computers with the same version of word, and rtf doesn’t even attempt any kind of paper description, it’s literally only a rich format for text. None of these are a true “if I give this to someone to print I know what I will get” “portable document format”
I will look at fb*, I had not heard of them. Thanks!
I don’t like docx because it looks different in libreoffice compared to Windows, also you can run into problems with fonts
Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.
I feel like most of the academia in the research side would be happy to see it collapse, but the current system is too deeply tied in the money for any quick change
I worked in academia for almost a decade and never met a researcher who wouldn’t openly support sci-hub (well, some warned their students that it was illegal to type these spesific search terms and click on the wrong link downloading the pdf for free)
Yep. But that is all a part of the problem. If academics can’t organise themselves enough to have some influence over something which is basically owned and run them already (they write the papers and then review the papers and then are the ones reading and citing the papers and caring the most about the quality and popularity of the papers) … then they can’t be trusted to ensure the quality of their practice and institutions going forward, especially under the ever increasing encroachment of capitalistic forces.
Modern day academics are damn well lucky that they inherited a system and culture that developed some old aristocratic ideals into a set of conventions and practices!
Tbh they already do everything they can, if you ever need a paper, e-mail the author and they’ll most likely send you the “last version” before publication they still hold the rights to distribute
So you’re saying the problem is capitalism…
One lecturer actually had notes on their slides for the differences between the latest version of the course book and the one before it, since the latest one wasn’t available for free anywhere but they wanted to use couple chapters from the new book (they scanned and distributed the relevant parts themself)
Imagine there must be a payoff for them ? Wider distribution ?
Nope, you just can’t get a job unless you suck it up and publish in these journals, because they’re already famous. And established profs use their cosy relationships with editors to gatekeep and stifle competition for their funding :(
It’s chicken/egg or “you first” problem.
You spend years on your work. You probably have loans. Your income is pitiful. And this is the structural thing that gets your name out. Now someone says “hey take a risk, don’t do it and break the system.”
Well…you first 🤷♂️ they publish on this garbage because it’s the only way to move up, and these garbage systems continue on because everyone has to participate. Hate the game. Don’t blame those who are by and large forced to participate.
It would require lot of effort from people with clout. It’s a big fight to pick. I am very much in favor of picking that fight, but we need to be a little sympathetic to what that entails.
Funding agencies have huge power here; demanding that research be published in OA journals is perhaps a good start (with limits on $ spent publishing, perhaps).
There are a couple things we can do:
- decline to review for the big journals. why give them free labor? Do academic service in other ways.
- if you’re organizing a workshop or conference, put the papers online for free. If you’re just participating and not organizing, then suggest they put the papers online for free. Here’s an example: https://aclanthology.org/ If that’s too time-consuming, use: https://arxiv.org/
Fully agree but I can tell you about point 1 that there enough gullible scientists in the world that see nothing wrong with the current system.
They will gadly pick up free review when Nature comes knocking, since its “such an honour” for such a reputable paper.
Such a reputable paper that’s no doubt accepted dozens of ChatGPT papers by now. Wow, how prestigious!
Something else we can do: regulate. Like every other corrupt industry in the history of the world, we need the force of law to fix it–and for pretty much all the same reasons. People worked at Triangle Shirtwaist because they had to, not because they thought it was a great place to work.
100% ppl need stop thinking big changes can be made “by individuals”, this kind of stuff needs regulation and state alternatives made by popular pressure or is impossible to break as an average worker dealing with in the private sector.
applied for a grant last month, now to finalize grant you need to publish things in open access format. (EU country; there’s a push for all publicly funded research to be open access, with it being a requirement from year ??? on, not sure when, but soon) there’s some special funding set aside just for open access fees, which is still rotten because these leeches still stand to profit. then, if you miss that, then there’s an agreement where my uni pays a selection of publishers to let in certain number of articles per year open access, which is basically the same thing but with different source of funding (not from grant, but straight from ministry)
Exactly. Asking some grad student to take on these ancient, corrupt publishing systems at the expense of their career and livelihood is ridiculous
I’m sympathetic, but to a limit.
There are a lot of academics out there with a good amount of clout and who are relatively safe. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything remotely worthy on these topics from any researcher with clout, publicly at least. Even privately (I used to be in academia), my feeling was most don’t even know how to think and talk about it, in large part because I don’t think they do think and talk about it all.
And that’s because most academics are frankly shit at thinking and engaging on collective and systematic issues. Many just do not want to, and instead want to embrace the whole “I live and work in an ideal white tower disconnected from society because what I do is bigger than society”. Many get their dopamine kicks from the publication system and don’t think about how that’s not a good thing. Seriously, they don’t deserve as much sympathy as you might think … academia can be a surprisingly childish place. That the publication system came to be at all is proof of that frankly, where they were all duped by someone feeding them ego-dopamine hits. It’s honestly kinda sad.
I’m sympathetic but to a limit
That’s all I’m saying 🤷♂️
If we build a decentralized system for paper publishing, like lemmy based on activitypub… will it work?
Probably won’t take off because scientists need reputable journals and not some random fediverse publishers.
Is it fucked up? Absolutely. But something else needs to be changed before this would be possible.
Also, why not ditch the concept of a “publisher” to begin with? Why not have a national or international article index, graded by the article level? It’s not that we live in a paper era, and for those who still need it, we can always print.
Institutions could easily form their own journals. National organizations that provide grants could also require you to publish in their journal. Universities can run their own journals. These sorts of entities already exist and provide article access for free, publishing in them would just need to be normalized.
These are just a few options without researchers organizing anything for themselves.
Fair enough, though why should journals even be a thing? Why not just university publishing papers online as soon as they are accepted?
Currently we already have this thing with some journals publishing online the articles that are meant for future issues, which fucks up citations quite a bit. Why not just ditch the entire “journal” format altogether?
I was kind of thinking of that with the institutional journal bit. It doesn’t need to be a traditional journal, the only things important to me are:
-
peer review (skip #2)
-
open access
-
professional editors to help improve phrasing, spelling, flow, etc.
-
DOI link or similar unique identifier
I’m totally down to ditch the traditional journal format otherwise. It was just a quick comment not meant to go in-depth, but point out that we already have public institutions that can host publications.
-
Purge metadata, convert PDF to rendered graphics (including bitmaps), add OCR layer.
There are tools for this already… but it sure would be nice to have a Firefox plugin that scrubs all metadata on downloads by default.
(Note I’m hoping this exists and someone will Um, Actually me)
It’s a multi step process, but if you still have the XPS Viewer from windows 10, you can ‘print’ the file to XPS, then open it in the XPS Viewer and ‘print’ to PDF using your favourite print to pdf solution. That strips the metadata but doesn’t rasterize everything.
I feel like why not just print to pdf from your pdf viewer?
