8 ms·

All this is an excellent ad for sci-hub, which avoids most of the serious drawbacks of publishers like Elsevier. It was interesting how that was relegated to a

All this is an excellent ad for sci-hub, which avoids most of the serious drawbacks of publishers like Elsevier. It was interesting how that was relegated to a veiled comment at the end, "or finding access in other channels". But basically if the mainstream publishers can't meet the need, we do need other channels, and right now sci-hub is the only one that actually works at scale.

fifnir 8y ago
Unfortunately, they've started blocking it (via DNS) in some countries, and large amounts of people don't know how to access it now
- Vinnl 8y ago
  A while ago I made https://whereisscihub.now.sh https://whereisscihub.now.sh, which can be of some help. It also lists IP addresses at the moment, so presumably those should still work.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    Thanks for this.
- brianpgordon 8y ago
  The easiest option is via the Telegram bot. You message it the name of a paper and it sends you a PDF back! And it's unblockable. If you can afford it everyone should send a few bucks to the bitcoin address donation jar on the Sci-Hub site (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM - but don't take my word for it) so that Elbakyan can keep developing cool stuff like that.
- Cenk 8y ago
  I try to keep this post up to date with the latest scihub links (and it has some other links to similar sites): https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-articles-free-scihub/ https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scienti...
buhics 8y ago
I've always said that the problem is not framed correctly. Who gives money to the greedy publisher, for basically nothing? Blame them first and the problem will go away. EDIT: blame the academic management who gives the money to the publishers. This way the publishers will go away to greener pastures.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Well... It is pretty often framed as blaming the publishers?
  - buhics 8y ago
    Yes, most of the time. Publishers should be blamed because they ask money for a service which is no longer needed. But who gives them the money, nevertheless? Academic management. Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc). However, in management land everything is designed to support the publishers.
    - lixtra 8y ago
      > Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc). If powerful researchers cared, they wouldn’t review for journals they don’t like. Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access.
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        > Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access. Researchers don't usually benefit from doing peer review: they don't get paid for it, and it eats time they could spend doing research. It's more of a sense of duty they have that they're "supposed" to do those reviews, and I can't really fault them for that. (Though I would very much encourage them to only review for fully Open Access journals, and respond to review requests with invitations to submit the work to those journals.)
Vinnl 8y ago
> sci-hub is the only one that actually works at scale. Well, Unpaywall works pretty well, and is actually legal: https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org
- njarboe 8y ago
  Unpaywall is just a database of free(libre) scholarly articles. These articles can almost always already accessed at the journal website using the normal way of finding them. doi.org/$DOI or scholar.google.com is another. The problem is not with these articles but the larger number of ones that are behind paywalls the unpaywall. Unpaywall is not what they do (from the blurb on their homepage and a brief look at the site) and a very deceptive name for their site.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    That's only the case for so-called Gold Open Access artiles. However, many other articles are put behind a paywall, but also have a version uploaded elsewhere (e.g. arXiv) by their author ("Green Open Access") - Unpaywall helps you find those versions when you hit a paywall.
z2 8y ago
Sci-Hub's user flow is so ridiculously friendly, that I'd often use it even when I have credentials to some obscure authorization network. This is true even for the free SSRN which started requiring logging in around the time Elsevier bought them. Gabe Newell of Valve asserted something very similar: > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
- tanderson92 8y ago
  The following hack makes it even more friendly, removing the annoying sci-hub sidebar so you can view it purely as a PDF. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28331-remove-annoying-boxes-from-sci-hub https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28331-remove-annoying-boxe...
- tschwimmer 8y ago
  While I agree that access is a problem, I don't know how much I believe Gaben's comment anymore. Sites like Kinguin and G2A are doing very healthy business by selling grey market keys for mild to significant discounts to Steam. Their user experience sucks (like actively unethically user hostile bad). Search is horrible. Pricing is nontransparent, aggressive spammy upselling is rampant. The checkout system makes it feel like your credit card information is being posted directly to the dark web. You have to be careful to buy a key that matches the region where you live. Literally the only thing they have going for them is price. I'd guess those sites are two orders of magnitude smaller than Steam, but a quick search reveals G2A has 700 employees and 16 million customers, so they can't be doing too bad. If access truly was the problem than these sites wouldn't exist.
- amelius 8y ago
  > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. I don't know. Paying $25 or $50 for an article, just to see if it contains something useful is a lot ... And with the realization that the research was funded by tax dollars, that price becomes absurd.
zamalek 8y ago
I honestly think that the Oldenburg model (yes, he had good reasons that are no longer relevant) is going the way of the dodo. These companies are fighting a losing battle. They've already lost to pre-print on arXiv. The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation: "these are the papers you need to read this month" with links to open-access papers. Indexing and search that exploits that curation also comes to mind: "these are the papers you should read while researching your problem." The biggest problem that open-access is going to cause is volume. Although, that been said, that's an existing problem (though far less pronounced) in the Oldenburg model due to bad science.
- ImaCake 8y ago
  >The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation Scientists (and lay people) already have access to excellent tools for this kind of thing. Pubmed provides functionality for performing automated and regular searches of their basically complete index of biological literature. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-automatic-ncbi-searches-and-new-record-alerts/ https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-...
mirimir 8y ago
Indeed. And the fact that requests for Elsevier stuff have "not increased correspondingly" implies that using Sci-Hub has become routine and unremarkable.
yesenadam 8y ago
http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php I use this Library Genesis search page as portal to Scihub's papers, it's amazing being able to get just about any paper ever, even totally obscure ones from 70 or 100 years ago. I do check Google Scholar first - a lot of recent papers are available online from academic sites, and it's a great way of discovering author home pages.

fifnir 8y ago

Unfortunately, they've started blocking it (via DNS) in some countries, and large amounts of people don't know how to access it now

Vinnl 8y ago
A while ago I made https://whereisscihub.now.sh https://whereisscihub.now.sh, which can be of some help. It also lists IP addresses at the moment, so presumably those should still work.
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  Thanks for this.
brianpgordon 8y ago
The easiest option is via the Telegram bot. You message it the name of a paper and it sends you a PDF back! And it's unblockable. If you can afford it everyone should send a few bucks to the bitcoin address donation jar on the Sci-Hub site (1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM - but don't take my word for it) so that Elbakyan can keep developing cool stuff like that.
Cenk 8y ago
I try to keep this post up to date with the latest scihub links (and it has some other links to similar sites): https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-articles-free-scihub/ https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scienti...

buhics 8y ago

I've always said that the problem is not framed correctly. Who gives money to the greedy publisher, for basically nothing? Blame them first and the problem will go away. EDIT: blame the academic management who gives the money to the publishers. This way the publishers will go away to greener pastures.

Vinnl 8y ago
Well... It is pretty often framed as blaming the publishers?
- buhics 8y ago
  Yes, most of the time. Publishers should be blamed because they ask money for a service which is no longer needed. But who gives them the money, nevertheless? Academic management. Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc). However, in management land everything is designed to support the publishers.
  - lixtra 8y ago
    > Researchers have very little to say about this, except if you look at their real behavior (arXiv, sci-hub, etc). If powerful researchers cared, they wouldn’t review for journals they don’t like. Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      > Obviously the benefit from doing the reviews is bigger than their preference of Open Access. Researchers don't usually benefit from doing peer review: they don't get paid for it, and it eats time they could spend doing research. It's more of a sense of duty they have that they're "supposed" to do those reviews, and I can't really fault them for that. (Though I would very much encourage them to only review for fully Open Access journals, and respond to review requests with invitations to submit the work to those journals.)

Vinnl 8y ago

> sci-hub is the only one that actually works at scale. Well, Unpaywall works pretty well, and is actually legal: https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org

njarboe 8y ago
Unpaywall is just a database of free(libre) scholarly articles. These articles can almost always already accessed at the journal website using the normal way of finding them. doi.org/$DOI or scholar.google.com is another. The problem is not with these articles but the larger number of ones that are behind paywalls the unpaywall. Unpaywall is not what they do (from the blurb on their homepage and a brief look at the site) and a very deceptive name for their site.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  That's only the case for so-called Gold Open Access artiles. However, many other articles are put behind a paywall, but also have a version uploaded elsewhere (e.g. arXiv) by their author ("Green Open Access") - Unpaywall helps you find those versions when you hit a paywall.

z2 8y ago

Sci-Hub's user flow is so ridiculously friendly, that I'd often use it even when I have credentials to some obscure authorization network. This is true even for the free SSRN which started requiring logging in around the time Elsevier bought them. Gabe Newell of Valve asserted something very similar: > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

tanderson92 8y ago
The following hack makes it even more friendly, removing the annoying sci-hub sidebar so you can view it purely as a PDF. https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28331-remove-annoying-boxes-from-sci-hub https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/28331-remove-annoying-boxe...
tschwimmer 8y ago
While I agree that access is a problem, I don't know how much I believe Gaben's comment anymore. Sites like Kinguin and G2A are doing very healthy business by selling grey market keys for mild to significant discounts to Steam. Their user experience sucks (like actively unethically user hostile bad). Search is horrible. Pricing is nontransparent, aggressive spammy upselling is rampant. The checkout system makes it feel like your credit card information is being posted directly to the dark web. You have to be careful to buy a key that matches the region where you live. Literally the only thing they have going for them is price. I'd guess those sites are two orders of magnitude smaller than Steam, but a quick search reveals G2A has 700 employees and 16 million customers, so they can't be doing too bad. If access truly was the problem than these sites wouldn't exist.
amelius 8y ago
> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. I don't know. Paying $25 or $50 for an article, just to see if it contains something useful is a lot ... And with the realization that the research was funded by tax dollars, that price becomes absurd.

zamalek 8y ago

I honestly think that the Oldenburg model (yes, he had good reasons that are no longer relevant) is going the way of the dodo. These companies are fighting a losing battle. They've already lost to pre-print on arXiv. The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation: "these are the papers you need to read this month" with links to open-access papers. Indexing and search that exploits that curation also comes to mind: "these are the papers you should read while researching your problem." The biggest problem that open-access is going to cause is volume. Although, that been said, that's an existing problem (though far less pronounced) in the Oldenburg model due to bad science.

ImaCake 8y ago
>The future of making money from journals could potentially lie with curation Scientists (and lay people) already have access to excellent tools for this kind of thing. Pubmed provides functionality for performing automated and regular searches of their basically complete index of biological literature. https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-automatic-ncbi-searches-and-new-record-alerts/ https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2013/11/14/setting-up-...

mirimir 8y ago

Indeed. And the fact that requests for Elsevier stuff have "not increased correspondingly" implies that using Sci-Hub has become routine and unremarkable.

yesenadam 8y ago

http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php http://libgen.io/scimag/index.php I use this Library Genesis search page as portal to Scihub's papers, it's amazing being able to get just about any paper ever, even totally obscure ones from 70 or 100 years ago. I do check Google Scholar first - a lot of recent papers are available online from academic sites, and it's a great way of discovering author home pages.