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Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can Be Dangerously Useful
- mirimir 8y ago> In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is. Damn, I am impressed!
- crtasm 8y agoAnd a screenshot of some of the search results on science direct, beautiful. Plus I'm imagining the blog writers grinning with glee when they were provided/discovered this.
- jacobolus 8y agoThe sad part is that the linked sci-hub domain name has been shut down, so those are now dead links.
- nightcracker 8y agoI wish I had Sci-Hub as a teenager. Many times I was interested in some algorithm, but got presented with Elsevier's "you shall not pass" page. Very frustrating to know the knowledge exists but being unable to access it with no recourse. For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field. But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.
- tschwimmer 8y agoWhen you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely? I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
- dojor 8y agoNot that much human progress honestly. Most of the people who push the progress ball forward, do so not just because of access to information. They need to be in the right labs, receiving the right training, surrounded by the right mentors etc.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoI suspect your being downvoted because labs, training, and mentors are knowledge.
- projektir 8y agoTo be fair, they're not equivalent knowledge. Labs often imply equipment that cannot be gotten by normal means. Training and mentors know which knowledge is important, and sometimes possess knowledge that is hard to find because it's too specific and/or deep. Research papers are a more obvious problem that is also easier to fix, but labs is nonetheless also a problem. Especially in fields where physical experiments are required, such as biology and chemistry, it's really hard to get anywhere without a lab, and running your own may be prohibitive and at times even illegal.
- akqu 8y agoI do think you have a good point. What I have been telling people who wants to learn things for a few years now is to make sure they have a pipeline to test their ideas. To many people are perpetually learning, tinkering and building fantasies in their head without having the opportunity to make something out of it. I would say "to each their own" if it wasn't for the fact that it usually becomes sort of destructive. So while I do support more generous access to information it is also important that it doesn't just become "window shopping".
- wolfgke 8y ago> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? More general: How much human progress has been lost to copyright laws?
- n4r9 8y agoI feel obliged to point out that a 17 year old and/or an interested amateur absolutely has the option of emailing the author, and will find most academics very responsive. I concede though that they may not be aware of the option, or might find it intimidating.
- Hermel 8y agoThis method is extremely slow. You have to spend 15 minutes to write a nice email just to get a paper three days later that after looking at for five minutes does not appear as helpful any more as you hoped it to be. Sci-hub is much more efficient.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoMany academics also link to preprints on their CV/homepage. It is often worth a thirty second search to check for that.
- denzil_correa 8y agoIn 2018, yes. In 2006, not so much. Google Scholar was a very new thing back then.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoPoint taken, but it was still fairly common around ~2008-2010 when I was an undergrad. :-)
- the8472 8y agoBut that's like saying you don't really need fiber when you could just use avian carriers.
- bla2 8y agoWhen I was 19, I did use this option a few times. Success rate was about 50%, not awesome.
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- userbinator 8y agoI would also say that the blooming "bookz" (ebook scanning) community around a decade ago was instrumental in making much knowledge accessible, especially to those in poor or developing countries who wouldn't be able to afford even a single book or access to a library with them. Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...)
- JadeNB 8y ago> Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...) Do you know a good place where one could find this lots of other stuff? Asking, let us say, for a friend.
- userbinator 8y agoEverything else is scattered over the rest of the Internet, including archive.org and various more specialised forums (e.g. if you are looking for service manuals for farm equipment, petroleum industry machinery, etc.) That said, whenever I do find something rare and useful, I upload a copy to LibGen too.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> That said, whenever I do find something rare and useful, I upload a copy to LibGen too. Thank you. You're doing God's work.
- marvy 8y ago> don't even know they exist That's the worst part. In truth, the 17-year-old amateur has most of the same options (especially library and asking the author). But it might never occur to them that the library will have it, or that the author will happily email them a copy.
- raverbashing 8y ago> But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist. You find a local university library that has those or you write the author of the paper
- improbable22 8y agoTo be fair about this, the time window in which a large proportion of papers were online but gated was about a decade (depending on field, obviously). Was this worse than before? The option of going to a suitable library did not suddenly vanish. The web just let you know what was there.
- SoylentYellow 8y agoIf you live in the Midwest, that "local" university library can easily be 4+ hours away. Writing the author is a fine idea and could lead to some great correspondence. It could also be a huge time sink if, like me, you look at a few dozen papers on the topic only to find one or two are really applicable.
- kgwgk 8y agoIf only 17-year-olds and interested amateurs had access to email and could write the authors in the same way that academics can...
- messe 8y agoSci-Hub is so much more convenient than attempting to find things in my university's library system. There are browser plugins that let you click on DOI links, taking you directly to a pdf of the relevant paper. For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.
- dorchadas 8y agoAs a non-academic who is interested in reading academic articles (and doing personal research), sci-hub is a blessing for those of us without university affiliation and access.
- devoply 8y ago> dangerously useful Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I would say the real danger is third party using other people's research to pocket billions and denying legitimate access of the research to millions and billions of people. That's extremely dangerous.
- wolfgke 8y ago> Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I see no problem in a profit motive. I see the problem that countries enforce censorship via violence (I am talking about copyright laws).
- Derived 8y agoThis. Imagine how much faster we could lift the world out of poverty if copyright & IP weren't strangling us to death.
- anticensor 8y agoAll countries do that, even ones that do not observe copyright (NK does not observe domestically but enforces foreign copyrights, Micronesia has an IP regime stricter than copyright).
- Pica_soO 8y agoImagine if they wouldn't have held back the telephone- the danger that device could have wreaked. Thank you bell labs, for protecting us from all those market-destroyers, and all those evil copy cats.
- chrisamiller 8y agoThose of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects. This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.
- miketery 8y agoWhat's stops people from publishing in both?
- celrod 8y agoYou're only allowed to publish in one. When you submit an article, you're normally specifically asked to confirm that the work hasn't been accepted / isn't under review elsewhere.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- drb91 8y agoThat seems like it would necessarily lower the quality of the journal, not to mention your own paper.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoSounds a lot like traditional fiction publishing. They want exclusivity, sometimes indefinitely.
- machiavelli1024 8y ago
- OisinMoran 8y agoFor anyone interested in getting to the relevant paper in Sci-Hub in one click, there is the Sci-Hubify bookmarklet: https://bookmarkify.it/9864 https://bookmarkify.it/9864
- alejohausner 8y agoIn computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
- ahnick 8y agohow does citeseerx compare to arxiv? Are they just different networks (PSU/Cornell) that function independently or do they index the same content?
- bnewbold 8y agoThey are very different beasts. Arxiv (and most pre-print repos) accept submissions (with filters, like requiring academic affiliation or vouching, and requiring reasonably-formatted metadata), have a moderator do a skim-level review of the work, and then post it. CiteseerX is an automated crawler, like Google Scholar, which finds PDFs on author homepages and extracts metadata from the PDF. There is no human review or cleanup process, and there can be a long delay before content gets discovered.
- JadeNB 8y ago> Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free. The arXiv (http://arxiv.org http://arxiv.org) has a good claim on allowing one to extend this "more free"ness to math and many of the physical sciences, too.
- flibble 8y agoWhy are the authors of the papers giving rights to Elsevier? If the papers are being peer reviewed for free, why doesn’t SciHub corral the reviewers and allow authors publish directly to SciHub. Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those published by any named journal.
- jacoblambda 8y agoIt's unfortunately detrimental to one's academic career to not publish in the most "prestigious" journal one can. This results in researchers publishing in closed journals either to try and maintain their own careers or due to pressure from their department as a way of looking more attractive in grant applications. Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing career/department suicide by allowing this to happen. Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from the trenches until this situation changes.
- dqpb 8y agoI really don't want to insult anyone with this comment, but after hearing about how shitty academics are treated during their entire career (phd, postdoc, faculty, publishing), including the low pay, politics, and giving away the rights to their work, they seem like one of the most manipulated and least self-confident demographics in the global workforce.
- williamstein 8y agoAnd it is especially ironic given how many of us have tenure...
- tomkat0789 8y agoThat's why I keep my PhD in academia. The papers I published in grad school just felt like a more grown up version of school homework, with a small clique of prominent guys at the top getting most of the attention.
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- confounded 8y agoGod bless scihub! Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like: wget --recursive --span-hosts --no-directories --accept '*.pdf' --quiet \ --execute robots=off https://sci-hub.tw/$DOI And instantly get a local copy of the .pdf. It's a hacker's dream!
- komali2 8y agoWhat's the $doi bit?
- imode 8y agoA variable representing the DOI of the resource in question, fill it in with whatever you're searching for (the DOI of a paper, for instance).
- westmeal 8y agobeat me to it
- westmeal 8y agoThe DOI number of the paper you're looking at. You just need to set $doi to a string that contains the DOI. (In bash this would literally be doi=<some doi string>
- garmaine 8y agothe DOI number identifying the article.
- brendanmc6 8y agoFor the people who don't speak the academic dialect: DOI stands for Digital Object Identifier. It is a unique ID number that all mainstream academic articles receive upon publication. The main function of the DOI is for copy-pasting into Sci-Hub to access the PDF of the paper you wish to read.
- jimnotgym 8y agoGovernment grants should come with open access strings (un)attached.
- votepaunchy 8y agoWhy should taxpayers be funding the massive profits of Elsevier and others?
- garmaine 8y agoYes, that's the point, right?
- jimnotgym 8y agoThat is the point. Currently lots of research is taxpayer funded, and then published in closed journals where the people who paid to create it have to pay to read it. Elsevier are the only winner. Taxpayer funded research should be open access, and this could be stipulated in the grant itself.
- samwise666 8y agoR.IP. Aaron Schwartz
- plaidfuji 8y agoI have so much that I want to say about this - but beyond all the politics and moneyed/tenured interests holding back change, I can see that Jupyter notebooks are the disruptive innovation that will force publishing to modernize. People I work with are producing notebooks that fuse text, formatted equations, code, and interactive figures in a way that looks and feels like a top-quality paper. Except with this paper, you can reveal the code that produced each figure, probe and alter the analysis methods directly, and download the raw data behind the figures (it's an attribute of the plot object! Imagine that!). This format will win. It's too useful and solves too many problems not to win. The only question is whether academicians have the foresight to build in a decentralized DARE I SAY blockchain/smart-contract-based peer review system to circumvent the rent seeking publishers.
- edanm 8y agoErr do you mind explaining what the blockchain has to do with this?
- majewsky 8y agoThis is HN, so you have to include the word "blockchain" once every hundred words. /s
- laichzeit0 8y agoThis is actually not a bad application, come to think of it.
- vishnu_ks 8y agoThis is the perfect application for Blochcian * Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian. * Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code. * The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.
- edanm 8y agoThanks for the reply! I'm not sure I fully understand (or buy into) Blockchain, so forgive me for probing further on this, but: I'm still not sure how blockchain is helping here? Can't you get the same results by just publicly publishing the articles with an open license? That's kind of how things work right now in open-access journals (or with something like StackOverflow, for that matter) and it works fine, what is blockchain adding here? There are tons of copies of StackOverflow's data running around in mirrors, they are (or it's easy to do) hashed for a crypto signature, so you can't just change their text on people. No one can ask money for the answers because they are licenses CC. So what is Blockchain adding to this? As I understand it, what blockchain provides is most importantly an incentive mechanism, to make people actually donate the PC time to store things (iiuc), but it seems to work fine in popular cases without having the incentive mechanism (e.g. StackOverflow), and I'm guessing if it isn't popular, then just cause it's on a blockchain doesn't change anything and no one will bother storing it? But again, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about, so I'd be more than happy to be corrected.
- jostmey 8y agoI work at a University and frequently need to read papers. I can only access the manuscripts on campus or through a VNP. That is way too much hassle, which is why I love Sci-hub. Sci-hub makes it easier to access the manuscripts than the providers themselves.
- buboard 8y agoit's barely piracy when you are pirating publicly-funded material that should be free in the first place.
- akerro 8y agoHow can I mirror all their pdf?
- akvadrako 8y agoLook at the libgen torrents - I'm not sure it's a complete copy, but it's massive.
- Cenk 8y agoFYI, this post is kept up to date with the latest scihub links: https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-articles-free-scihub/ https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scienti...
- Biqh1 8y agoWhat is the best way for me to access Sci-hub? Does it cycle through domains? If so, what is the best way for me to access the most up to date URL. Is there a UNIX command line method for doing this?
- tsomctl 8y agoI go to its Wikipedia page, but sci-hub.tw has worked pretty consistently for a while now.
- psychometry 8y agoBookmark https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go
- apazgo 8y agoWorked at a university dealing with this some years ago, the publishing companies blocked our IPs on regular basis because they had detected "hacked student accounts" Then we had to block them and swear they changed password before they unblocked us. They said that it was Chinese phising emails that tricked students to give up their password. If you dont know, a couple of years ago almost everyone accessed the publishers sites thought revese proxies at the school, so sci hub collected accounts and proxied you thought them, dont know if its still the case. We used this software called ezproxy, Think it was pretty common. Also pretty sure many students gave away their passwords freely, based on that nobody seemed that surprised/worried when we said their accounts was compromised.
- amthewiz 8y agoWhat would be the best way to help sci-hub anonymously if one wishes to do so?