Elsevier

Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.

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

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.

i think this is less of a meme, and more of a scientifically dystopian fun fact, but sure.

Just print it to a PDF printer.

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

The famously uneditable PDF format.

Purge metadata, convert PDF to rendered graphics (including bitmaps), add OCR layer.

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.

Elsevier is the reason I donate to Sci-Hub.

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.

If we build a decentralized system for paper publishing, like lemmy based on activitypub.. will it work?

is there hassle free software that simutates low quality printing and rescanning with text recognition?

I know that not many here are computer savvy, but I use qpdf and ocrmypdf in tandem to strip and rewrite metadata from PDF files and store them in PDF Type-A format.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QPDF

https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

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.