How employable is Brock Turner?

At first, I was aghast to come across a question that seems insensitive and preposterous. Evidence unanimously proves a privileged young white man, Brock Turner, committed a heinous crime, sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. Such odious behavior has now been amply compounded by consistent absence of remorse and flagrantly disingenuous attempts to deflect responsibility. Yet, there is apparent solicitous concern about how this affects such a sorry soul's future career prospects? If that isn't a blatant example of misplaced sympathy, I don't know what is. Of course, Quora offers a tool to deal with 'bad' questions, just downvote them. However, sometimes bad questions also provide teachable moments. I think this one certainly does.

One teachable moment comes from probing why such solicitous concern for Brock Turner's but not for Cory Batey's future career options. Cory who you ask?

Another teachable moment comes from asking why such different sentences for two rather similar crimes. If anything, for such heinous crimes both defendants should have received similar, harsh sentences. So why such difference in sentencing?

Black (Batey) versus white (Turner) defendant, is one possibility (see below from 1).

Black (Judge Monte Wilkins; Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts) versus white (Judge Aaron Persky; Aaron Persky) judge, is another possibility (see below from 1).

Obviously some justice enforcers are color-blind as indeed they should be while justice itself is apparently blind...to racial disparity that is. A 2013 report to the UN Human Rights Committee shows blacks in the US are routinely disproportionately arrested, convicted and sentenced for comparable crimes (2). Are such disparities surprising in a culture where solicitous concern expressed for a white but not black perpetrator of rather similar, heinous crimes is apparently normal?

Teachable moments do have a problem in that there's no guarantee they're equally learnable moments. The latter depends on the students, questioners and/or readers in this case. After all, one can take a horse to water but can't make it drink.

Bibliography

1. King: Brock Turner and Cory Batey, two college athletes who raped unconscious women, show how race and privilege affect sentences. Shaun King, New York Daily News, Tuesday, June 7, 2016. KING: Brock Turner, Cory Batey show how race affects sentencing

2. Report of The Sentencing Project to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Regarding Racial Disparities in the United States Criminal Justice System. August 2013. http://sentencingproject.org/wp-...

https://www.quora.com/How-employable-is-Brock-Turner/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What is the reputation of John Carreyrou, the investigative reporter who wrote a critical piece about Theranos, like?

John Carreyrou 's Wikipedia page does a good job of summarizing his rather stellar journalism career thus far. Focusing on American journalism awards, during his time at the The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), he's won two Pulitzer Prizes and one Polk Award,

• One, a shared Pulitzer prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2002 for coverage of some corporate scandals (1, 2),
• Two, a shared Pulitzer prize for Investigative Reporting in 2015 for coverage of widespread US medical doctors' bilking of Medicare (see photo below from 3; 4, 5, 6).

• Three, in 2016, the George Polk Awards bestowed Carreyrou an individual Financial Reporting award for his coverage of Theranos. The Polk citation states (7, 8),

'The award for Financial Reporting will go to John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal whose investigation of Theranos, Inc. raised serious doubts about claims by the firm and its celebrated 31-year-old founder, Elizabeth Holmes, that its new procedure for drawing and testing blood was a transformational medical breakthrough in wide use at the firm’s labs. Carreyrou’s well-researched stories, reported in the face of threats of lawsuits and efforts to pressure some sources to back off of their accounts, led to a reevaluation of Theranos’ prospects among investors and have been followed by regulatory actions against the company and widespread discussion that publications and institutions from Fortune and The New Yorker to Harvard and the White House may have been too quick to hail Holmes, a Stanford dropout whose personal wealth at the height of her startup’s rise was an estimated $4.5 billion, as a success story in the tradition of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg'

Let's also be clear. John Carreyrou didn't write 'a' but rather all the relevant critical WSJ pieces about Theranos either alone (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20) or with Rolfe Winkler (21) or with Christopher Weaver and/or Michael Siconolfi (22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28).

In contrast to the 'access-driven cheerleading' (29) currently consuming technology journalism, Carreyrou pursued the Theranos case with dogged determination. Key aspect of the Carreyrou-WSJ Theranos exposes includes the numerous former and present as-yet anonymous employees who apparently proffered sensitive information at considerable peril to themselves. Clearly Carreyrou is skilled in seeking out and cultivating confidential contacts crucial to his story. Kudos to Carreyrou-WSJ for continuing to maintain their contacts’ confidentiality and for not caving to the alleged intimidating legal tactics used by Theranos (see excerpt below from 30).

'After two months of being stonewalled by the Theranos P.R. team, Carreyrou told me an entourage of lawyers arrived at the Journal ’s Midtown Manhattan offices at one P.M. on June 23. The pack confidently sauntered past editors and reporters in the fifth-floor newsroom and was led by David Boies, the superstar lawyer who has taken on Bill Gates, the U.S. government, and represented Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount case. Four other attorneys and a Theranos representative accompanied him. Before anything was said, the lawyers placed two audio recorders at either end of the long oval wood table, and recalcitrantly sat across from Carreyrou, his editor, and a Journal lawyer. Then they hit record.

Almost immediately, one person present told me, Boies and his team threatened legal action against the paper, accusing it of being in possession of “proprietary information” and “trade secrets.” The Theranos legal team then did their best to discredit dozens of independent sources whom Carreyrou had interviewed. The legal team roared, they showed teeth, they tried to intimidate. After a very tense five hours, the person told me that Boies and his platoon exited the newsroom, leaving behind the very serious specter of a lawsuit. (A spokesperson for both Boies and Theranos declined to comment. But one person close to the company said that Boies had been dispatched because Theranos executives had learned that the Journal possessed sensitive internal documents.)

For four months after that meeting, Carreyrou continued to try to secure an interview with Holmes, and for four months he was continuously threatened. Finally, in October, the Journal published its now-famous article suggesting that the Theranos narrative was all wrong—that the company’s technology was faulty, that it relied on other companies’ machinery to run many of its tests, and that some of those tests yielded inaccurate results. In fact, as Carreyrou reported, the company was hawking a tale that was too good to be true.'

Bibliography

1. The 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. Staff of The Wall Street Journal

2. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou and Martin Peers, October 31, 2002. How Messier Kept Cash Crisis At Vivendi Hidden for Months

3. The 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. The Wall Street Journal Staff

4. Medicare Unmasked. The Wall Street Journal forced the government to publicly release important Medicare data that had been kept secret for decades. http://www.pulitzer.org/files/20...

5. Medicare Unmasked. Sprawling Medicare Struggles To Fight Fraud. http://www.pulitzer.org/files/20...

6. Medicare Unmasked. Doctor “Self-Referral” Thrives on Legal Loophole. http://www.pulitzer.org/files/20...

7. 67th Annual George Polk Awards in Journalism. LIU 2015 Winners

8. http://www.liu.edu/~/media/Redes...

9. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, October 16, 2015. Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology

10. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, October 16, 2015. Hot Startup Theranos Dials Back Lab Tests at FDA’s Behest

11. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, October 21, 2015. Theranos CEO: Company Is in a ‘Pause Period’;

12. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, November 6, 2015. Theranos Searches for Director to Oversee Laboratory

13. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, November 10, 2015. Safeway, Theranos Split After $350 Million Deal Fizzles

14. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, December 20, 2015. U.S. Probes Theranos Complaints

15. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, December 27, 2015. At Theranos, Many Strategies and Snags

16. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, January 27, 2016. Theranos Lab Practices Pose Risk to Patient Health, Regulators Say

17. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, February 10, 2016. Walgreens Threatens to End Theranos Agreement

18. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, March 28, 2016. Theranos Results Could Throw Off Medical Decisions, Study Finds

19. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, May 12, 2016. Theranos Executive Sunny Balwani to Depart Amid Regulatory Probes

20. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, May 18, 2016. Theranos Voids Two Years of Edison Blood-Test Results

21. The Wall Street Journal, Rolfe Winkler and John Carreyrou, October 28, 2015. Theranos Authorizes New Shares That Could Raise Valuation

22. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, Christopher Weaver and Michael Siconolfi, January 24, 2016. Deficiencies Found at Theranos Lab

23. The Wall Street Journal, Christopher Weaver, Michael Siconolfi and John Carreyrou, February 10, 2016. Walgreens Threatens to End Theranos Agreement

24. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou and Christopher Weaver, March 8, 2016. Theranos Ran Tests Despite Quality Problems

25. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou and Christopher Weaver, March 31, 2016. Theranos Devices Often Failed Accuracy Requirements

26. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou and Christopher Weaver, April 13, 2016. Regulators Propose Banning Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes for at Least Two Years

27. The Wall Street Journal, Christopher Weaver, John Carreyrou and Michael Siconolfi, April 18, 2016. Theranos Is Subject of Criminal Probe by U.S.

28. The Wall Street Journal, John Carreyrou, Christopher Weaver and Michael Siconolfi, May 25, 2016. Craving Growth, Walgreens Dismissed Its Doubts About Theranos

29. Gawker, J.K. Trotter, May 26, 2016. This Is Why Billionaire Peter Thiel Wants to End Gawker

30. The Vanity Fair, Nick Bilton, May 2, 2016. The Secret Culprit in the Theranos Mess

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reputation-of-John-Carreyrou-the-investigative-reporter-who-wrote-a-critical-piece-about-Theranos-like/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Why is home birth in America so dangerous when compared to other comparable countries?

Refers to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/opinion/sunday/why-is-american-home-birth-so-dangerous.html?ref=opinion

 

Firm conclusions aren't possible from the New York Times article referred in the question since it examines a minuscule piece of the pie. However, analyzing in conjunction with other relevant data such as excess medicalization propensity of US births, total US maternal mortality and overall medical error rates suggests US home births are unlikely to get a fair chance because they simply aren't integrated with OB/GYN practices and hospitals, making it practically impossible to optimally co-ordinate care, if and when an in-labor transfer is necessary from home/birthing center to hospital. However, doing so would not only greatly reduce short- and long-term costs and rates of medically unnecessary C-sections but also improve both short- and long-term outcomes for maternal and fetal health.

Unfortunately this is easier said than done since, perhaps more than in other countries, US medicine in general and US births in particular exist at the uneasy intersection of medicine, politics and law. Unfortunately, this toxic mix pollutes every aspect of the birth process, from greater propensity for unnecessary medicalization (off-label use of Misoprostol for cervical ripening and excessive C-section rates being examples) to questionable data, all predictable responses of a system driven more by need for institutional control and liability avoidance rather than scientific allegiance to evidence-based medicine.

US Births Increasingly Medicalized, Having Among The Highest Rates Of C-Sections

The late American perinatologist and perinatal epidemiologist Marsden Wagner, divided current human birth processes into 3 broad categories (1).

• Highly medicalized, 'high tech', doctor-centric, midwife-marginalized. Examples found in Belgium, urban Brazil, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Russia, USA.
• Humanized, more autonomous, strongly midwife-centric with much lower intervention rates. Examples found in the Netherlands, New Zealand and Scandinavia.
• Mixture of both approaches. Examples found in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Japan.

Problem with the first option that dominates in the US is that over the course of the 20th century and beyond, it helped inculcate an institutional and cultural memory of medicalized birth at the expense of humanized birth. To quote from the 1985 report Wagner helped publish as the Director of the WHO's Women's and Children's Health (1) (emphasis mine),

'By medicalizing birth, i.e. separating a woman from her own environment and surrounding her with strange people using strange machines to do strange things to her in an effort to assist her, the woman’s state of mind and body is so altered that her way of carrying through this intimate act must also be altered and the state of the baby born must equally be altered. The result it that it is no longer possible to know what births would have been like before these manipulations. Most health care providers no longer know what “non-medicalized” birth is. The entire modern obstetric and neonatological literature is essentially based on observations of “medicalized” birth.'

For example, according to the US National Center for Health Statistics, 1 in 3 babies is delivered by C-section in the US (2). US C-section rates are much higher compared to other OECD countries (see figures below from 2, 3, 4, 5). This even though the WHO has recommended for more than 30 years that C-sections shouldn't be >10 to 15% of total births (5, 6).

US C-sections rates are one of the clearest pieces of evidence for excess medicalization of US births. C-section risks aren't limited to mothers' immediate higher risks of post-surgical complications either. As we learn more about the importance of immediate post-birth microbial colonization, epidemiology is steadily building a hefty database of children's long-term adverse outcomes of C-sections, namely life-long increased risks of allergies and autoimmunities (7, 8).

Since home births are a minuscule proportion of total births, accounting for a mere 1.47% of total births as recently as 2014 (see table below from 9), obviously US C-sections can't simply be attributed to home birth complications that necessitate in-labor transfers to hospitals for emergency C-sections. Rather, they're a logical expansion of excessive medicalization of US births in general.

No Firm Conclusions Possible When Available Data Are Suspect

Inextricably linked to the larger issue of births and maternal health in general, not just home births but also maternal mortality rates in the US buck global trends. A 2014 assessment of global maternal mortality rates shockingly revealed that the US is the only developed country where the maternal mortality rate seems to be increasing even as it's decreasing across the globe (10). According to this study, US maternal mortality rate per 100000 live births were 12.4 in 1990, 17.6 in 2003 and 18.5 in 2013, meaning they increased 2.7% from 1990 to 2003, increased 0.5% from 2003 to 2013, and increased 1.7% from 1990 to 2013 (see figures below from 11). Since home births are a minuscule proportion of total US births, this implies maternal mortality rate is increasing in US hospital births.

Increasing US maternal mortality fits into the larger issue of medical errors. A 2016 study extrapolated data to suggest medical errors have now become the 3rd leading cause of deaths in the US (12). While statistical over-reach is a major weakness of this study, it's long been an open secret that frank admission of error is practically impossible in medical culture (13). Since deaths incurred during or through hospital births (complications following C-sections for example) fall under the medical error rubric, data related to births, be they home or hospital, especially data on adverse outcomes, can only be taken with a generous pinch of salt.

Doubts about accuracy of maternal death data become an even more pressing issue given that there are no US federal requirements to report maternal deaths and US authorities themselves concede they may be twice as high as reported (14). According to Amnesty International (15) (emphasis mine),

'reporting of pregnancy -related deaths as a distinct category is mandatory in only six states – Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. Despite voluntary efforts in some other states, systematic undercounting of pregnancy -related deaths persists'

Bottomline, data on US deaths due to either home or hospital births are far from reliable.

Amy Tuteur, Author Of This New York Times Article, Has A Patently Clear Conflict Of Interest

As author of the blog, The Skeptical OB, Amy Tuteur, the author of this New York Times piece, has a patently clear conflict of interest regarding home births. She herself revealed this bias in her incorrect criticism (16) of a large, thorough 2013 British Medical Journal study comparing maternal mortality between home and hospital births in the Netherlands (17). After misunderstanding this Netherlands data and incorrectly critiquing it, a volte-face to say the least when she writes in this New York Times piece 'there are places in the world where home birth is relatively safe, like the Netherlands, where it is popular at 16 percent of births' (18). So, per this author, are home births in the Netherlands safe or not? When an author's opinion varies based on the context, better not to take such opinions at face value.

Birth Is A Normal Physiologic Process. Medicalizing It Changes It From A Sanctuary To Surveillance, Often To Mother And Child's Detriment

As we understand better the short- and long-term harms of birth medicalization, we see its costs are paid not just by mothers and children but by all of society, economic, physiological and psychological costs from avoidable chronic health conditions.

A highly medicalized, overweeningly C-section-favoring approach to birth prevails in the US. It represents a financial medico-legal culture highly resistant to the notion of home births. Primed to regard midwifery as a potentially harmful interloper, such a culture easily gives it short shrift, depriving it the integration and co-ordination necessary to thrive and succeed. This reveals a schism in the US birth process, a schism between need for sanctuary during birth to ensure physiological processes prevail and need for surveillance to ensure technology provides state-of-the-art safe care (19).

Examining and importing best practices and structures from countries like Netherlands, adept at straddling the divide between home births and best of medical care, is an obvious approach. However, such measures require humility and an open mind. Is US medico-legal culture up to that challenge? That's the crucial question.

Bibliography

1. Wagner, Marsden. "Fish can't see water: the need to humanize birth." International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 75 (2001): S25-S37. http://www.midwiferyservices.org...

2. Menacker, Fay, and Brady E. Hamilton. Recent trends in cesarean delivery in the United States. US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 2010. http://www.gapha.org/wp-content/...

3. Health at a Glance 2011. OECD Indicators.

4. Brazil Isn't The Only Country With A Startlingly High C-Section Rate

5. World Health Organization. "WHO statement on caesarean section rates." (2015). http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstre...

6. Moore, Ben. "Appropriate technology for birth." The Lancet 326.8458 (1985): 787).

7. Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Is giving birth in water bad for the development of the child's immune system?

8. Tirumalai Kamala's answer to Do you think there is sufficient evidence for the "hygiene hypothesis"?

9. Grunebaum, Amos, and Frank A. Chervenak. "Out-of-hospital births in the United States 2009–2014." Journal of perinatal medicine (2016). http://www.degruyter.com/dg/view...

10. Kassebaum, Nicholas J., et al. "Global, regional, and national levels and causes of maternal mortality during 1990–2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013." The Lancet 384.9947 (2014): 980-1004. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/...

11. The US Is The Only Developed Nation With A Rising Maternal Mortality Rate. Anna Almendrala, The Huffington Post, May 19, 2014. This Is The Deadliest Industrialized Country For Pregnant Moms

12. Makary, Martin A., and Michael Daniel. "Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US." BMJ 353 (2016): i2139. http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/3...

13. Medical errors in America kill more people than AIDS or drug overdoses. Here's why. Vox, Sarah Cliff, April 22, 2015.

14. Berg, Cynthia, et al. "Strategies to reduce pregnancy-related deaths: from identification and review to action." (2001)., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001. http://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6...

15. Delivery, Deadly. "The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA." London: Amnesty International (2010). http://www.amnestyusa.org/sites/...

16. Severe adverse maternal outcomes among low risk women with planned home versus hospital births in the Netherlands: nationwide cohort study

17. de Jonge, Ank, et al. "Severe adverse maternal outcomes among low risk women with planned home versus hospital births in the Netherlands: nationwide cohort study." BMJ 346 (2013): f3263. http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/3...

18. Why Is American Home Birth So Dangerous? The New York Times, Amy Tuteur, April 30, 2016.

19. Stenglin, Maree, and Maralyn Foureur. "Designing out the Fear Cascade to increase the likelihood of normal birth." Midwifery 29.8 (2013): 819-825.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-home-birth-in-America-so-dangerous-when-compared-to-other-comparable-countries/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What do scientists think about Sci-Hub?

 Refers to articles: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-founded-sci-hub-thwart-journal-paywalls

Presumably most respondents who took Science magazine's recent survey were scientists (1). Results suggest they whole-heartedly endorse Sci-Hub (see figures below from 1).

• 88% say it isn't wrong to download pirated papers.
• For >50%, it's the only way to access scientific papers.
• >60% think Sci-Hub will disrupt traditional scientific publishing.

Sci-Hub and Alexandra Elbakyan have accomplished two important breakthroughs

• Provided pirated access to paywalled scientific journals and in doing so, revealed the previously unimagined extent to which scientists the world over lacked access to scientific papers, often to even their own published work.
• Brought Scientific Publishing to mainstream awareness. While the odium and coercion inherent to its structure are well-known to scientists themselves or should be at the very least, Sci-Hub and Elbakyan have helped cast a more prominent spotlight on it so it's under broader scrutiny, helping fuel its long overdue Napster moment.

What Sci-Hub and Elbakyan have done and why can only be fully appreciated by understanding what Scientific Publishing's odium and coercion consist of, and why in hindsight it seems inevitable something like Sci-Hub would come up sooner or later.

Scientific Publishing In A Nutshell

• Most basic science research is taxpayer-funded.
• Scientific credibility and career advancement, especially in academia, depend on peer-reviewed scientific publication of such research.
• Enter Scientific Publishing.
• Dominated by for-profit publishing houses like Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Wiley to name a few, whose platforms publish among the most prestigious scientific journals in the various scientific specialities.
• Publishing in such journals is considered necessary for scientists to accrue credibility and advancement.
• In a throwback to post-Renaissance Independent scientist, scientists, as editorial board members and even just peers, perform peer-review of each other's manuscripts pro-bono (free), meaning free of cost to Scientific Publishers.
• Burden of Scientific Publishers is mainly limited to page layouts, editing and publishing, now mainly online.
• Since the internet exploded in the mid-1990s, most Scientific Publishers have migrated online and their costs have dramatically reduced since electronic publishing costs a fraction of print.
• Scientific Publishers manage to cut administrative costs even more to the bone by out-sourcing editing processes to back offices in developing countries.
• Scientific Publishers typically own the copyright to papers scientists publish on their journals. Why? Answer's lost to the mists of time.
• For-profit Scientific Journals are typically Paywalled: Scientific Publishers charge an arm and a leg for accessing just one paper on their web-sites. Such paywalls can range from US $6 to >$50 for just one paper, even for papers published decades earlier, and even for scientists who've published in those same journals and/or have peer-reviewed pro bono on their behalf.
• Annual subscriptions to the thousands of journals published by these Scientific Publishers is an onerous financial burden even for the best-endowed universities in the world like Harvard (2).

In other words, established, for-profit Scientific Publishers are middlemen making money hand over fist for work product that's largely taxpayer-funded, then deemed worthy of publication free of cost by scientific peers, who then have to pay through their noses to access their own published work, which by the way they don't even own the copyright to. For people considered really smart by the rest of society, how could scientists have allowed themselves to be bamboozled to such an extent? A question for the ages, that.

The explosion of the internet brought the fruits of scientists' labor that much closer to their brethren the world over but in this case, the Digital divide's exacerbated by the outrageously priced paywalls. Science is a rather unique enterprise in that it's essentially cooperative and collaborative, and advances by Standing on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes. In practical terms, this means accessing and reading hundreds to thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers relevant to one's own field of study, both in helping formulate one's own scientific work as well as citing these other studies to help rationalize one's results and help justify one's interpretation. If Harvard finds it hard to subscribe to all scientific journals its students need, no way a Kazakhstan scientist like Elbakyan could access and download all the papers necessary for their research. Thus, sheer frustration with an untenable status quo likely drove the creation of Elbakyan's mirror site, Sci-Hub.

Open-access Scientific Journals: Their Advantages And Pitfalls

Since the 2000s, Open access journals have appeared as an economically less onerous alternative to the robber baron for-profit Scientific Publishers. However, open access journals have at least three obstacles they haven't yet managed to successfully overcome.

• One, path to successful grants and promotions is greased by prestigious peer-reviewed publications. This is still largely the purview of for-profit journals who accrued such prestige over decades, some, even centuries. Big names and big name wannabees in various scientific sub-fields prop up this status quo by continuing to publish their 'best' work in these journals rather than gravitating to their newer, less notable, open-access counterparts. Though big names like Fields Medal winning mathematician Timothy Gowers (3), and Nobel Prize-winner Randy Schekman (4) have openly proclaimed their rejection of these so-called 'luxury' journals, the trickle hasn't yet become a flood, and rank and file scientists continue to offer their 'best' work to long-established, for-profit, paywalled prestige journals.
• Two, current open-access largely subsidizes free access through prohibitive front-end costs to authors who publish in them. In the post-Great Recession world, when even government-funded labs are forced to cut costs to the bone, paying on average ~US $2000 to get a paper published in PLOS or BioMed Central is an onerous financial burden. Plos and BioMedCentral are examples of open access publishers who've managed to accrue prestige sufficient to be competitive against their older for-profit counterparts.
• Three, sensing opportunity, open-access has become a lure attracting a host of rapacious publishers looking to make a killing. They offer junior scientists the opportunity to both publish and peer-review on their journals, and use this imprimatur to attract their peers but ultimately their editorial processes are far less stringent to the established norms. Papers published in these ever-mushrooming journals muddy the scientific waters, making it more difficult for the rank and file traditional speciality science journals to distinguish themselves from their newer, predatory counterparts. This problem has assumed such epidemic proportions that Jeffrey Beall, librarian at Auraria Library, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, annually publishes his list of predatory, open-access publishers (5) to help scientists sift gold from dross in Scientific Publishing.

Science publishing, especially in biomedical research, is thus passing through one of its most momentous transitions. Heavyweights in the public health arena like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have instituted guidelines mandating publications ensuing from their grants be published in open-access journals starting in January 2017 (6). The Gates Foundation will pay the author fees charged by such open-access journals. The onus is now on governments, other science funders, universities and research institutes to develop approaches that ensure taxpayer-funded research becomes open-access for all from the moment they're published, regardless of the journal it's published in. After all, as things stand, imprimatur of peer-review remains the gold standard for grants and career advancement in science, at least in biomedical research. At this moment, it’s unclear how experiments like bioRxiv, pre-publication repository of raw biology data, will influence scientists’ careers.

Bibliography

1. In survey, most give thumbs-up to pirated papers. Science, John Travis, May 6, 2016.

2. Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices. The Guardian, Ian Sample, April 24, 2012.

3. Elsevier — my part in its downfall. Tim Gowers, Jan 21, 2012.

4. How journals like Nature, Cell and Science are damaging science | Randy Schekman, The Guardian, December 9, 2013.

5. Beall’s List of Predatory Publishers 2016.

6. Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles. Science, Jocelyn Kaiser, November 21, 2014.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-scientists-think-about-Sci-Hub/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala