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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

In metadata, no less.

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).

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

Like arxiv.org?

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!