3 ms·

Their content is not illegal whatsoever. They are not like Sci-hub where the content is actually owned by someone else. On Academic Torrents, the submissions

• aab0 10y ago
  Academic journals* rarely host large datasets (it's fairly unusual to even see some PDF supplements with vital summaries or results), and if you want to share data >10MB, you're mostly stuck doing it yourself through your own website or some institution's, or not sharing it at all. Also, academic datasets aren't free of copyright concerns. Consider the famous Imagenet dataset for image classification. It's made of a million images pulled from Google Images. Did they get each photographs' creators' permission for such unlimited redistribution? Of course not. But there's no way the 'implied license' of posting a photo online extends that far... Like so much of the Internet, it's only possible in the absence of enforcement of copyright law. * which is particularly frustrating because academic publishers make such enormous profits and hosting large datasets is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing if they were remotely interested in supporting science rather than making more money