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Sci-Hub and Alexandra Basic Information
- celticninja 8y agoThis is an excellent resource to understand sci-hub's genesis.
- raphlinus 8y agoSci-hub is truly a modern-day Library of Alexandra. I hope the modern day counterparts of Julius Caesar fail.
- xtracto 8y agoWe used to say the same thing about Gigapedia (later library.nu) and had the same sentiment about Smiley (the admin). And similarly about Grooveshark. The truth is that, these types of things always come to an end. It is of utmost importance and urgency for the Sci-hub infrastructure to be made distributed and resilient. This make me thing, could it be possible to set up a Smart Contract in some blockchain to achieve a similar thing? (I understand that this works by using user/passwords provided by some people, so it may not be feasible given the easiness to look at the information). That way the system will be very resilient given the nature of blockchain. Nevertheless, I think I give more merit to Library Genesis. Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge.
- raphlinus 8y agoThere's a pretty long history of technical efforts to achieve censor resistance, of which Ross Anderson's 1996 "Eternity Service" is probably the most influential. I'm not very hopeful, but it would be cool to see something like it come into existence. See this interesting 2004 review by George Danezis: https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/redblue.pdf https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/redblue.pdf
- comment_7171 8y ago"Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge." That may have been true in the beginning but the blog post says: "In 2014, I copied articles collected by Libgen to create Sci-Hub's own database. I did not fork Libgen: only the papers PDF files were copied. Then I configured new servers to serve these files to Sci-Hub users. Today Sci-Hub uses it's own servers to store research papers. However all new articles downloaded by Sci-Hub are mirrored to Library Genesis databases too. Libgen also publishes torrents to download these papers."
- clydethefrog 8y agowhat.cd is a similar example in the music department.
- AnaniasAnanas 8y agowhat.cd was private and invite only though with strict seeding policies.
- mirimir 8y agoGreat article! She is indeed a hero (or heroine, if you prefer).
- et2o 8y agoIt should also be noted that Elbakyan has suffered personally from her enormous contribution to science: she is currently living in fear of extradition to the United States, where scientific publishers have obtained several multi-million dollar judgments against her [Wikipedia].
- amanzi 8y agoI was wondering about that as I read this post. Under US copyright law, this would be no different to MegaUpload.
- Joakal 8y agoUnder most copyright laws, lets assume worst case scenario for real life example of broken laws. If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial). In USA, each infringement is $250,000 and/or 5 years jail according to RIAA [1]. With 100, that's $25,000,000 fine and 500 years of jail if USA decides to prosecute you. Her judgment would make sense. [1] https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/ https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/
- komali2 8y agoThat's the dumbest fucking thing I've heard all day. How do we change this unreasonable law?
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoI've lost count of how many articles I've been paywalled from accessing but ended up getting through sci-hub. I have gotten so much utility from it that I have donated a number of times. Frustratingly there's still certain papers that I've failed to find. Random example: http://jddonline.com/articles/dermatology/S1545961612P0742X/1 http://jddonline.com/articles/dermatology/S1545961612P0742X/.... I even tried paying for access to this journal and weirdly none of my credit cards worked. So, it's not always even an issue of "oh you're just not willing to spend money". It is shocking to me how much quality research is gated behind paywalls and thus hardly ever sees the light of day. The scientific ideals (or perhaps enlightenment ideals?) of free distribution of knowledge and community collaboration are completely forgotten. Academic science has been made a complete mockery. /end rambling semi incoherent rant
- UncleSlacky 8y agoYou can always try asking on Twitter with the hashtag "#icanhazpdf" - it's worked for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF
- woodrowbarlow 8y agoemail the authors. the authors own the rights, and the money you pay for access never hits their pockets anyway. they're usually happy to share a pdf if you're polite.
- tzs 8y agoWhat percent of Sci-Hub is research papers or other publicly funded material, and what percent is more general, not publicly funded material, such as articles from popular science magazines like "Scientific American"?
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoCertainly what people go on Sci-Hub to get are research papers.
- OrgNet 8y agoHow many terabytes is Sci-Hub today?
- kevingrahl 8y ago~70TB
- return0 8y agoa must for your bookmarks toolbar: javascript:window.location='http://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location
- steve19 8y agoElbakyan is a hero, but it seems like if anything happens to her sci-hub will die. Her writings in the past appear to make her seem she is at least a little anti-social, so I don't hold out much hope of her creating a team. As others have said, she has truly built a Library of Alexandria.
- Y_Y 8y agoIt has a bad "bus factor"[0] but at least Kazakh women have been allowed to travel on inside of bus for stone years now[1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kazakhstan/2198693/Borat-defeated-Kazakh-women-declare-victory-in-battle-of-the-sexes.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kazakhstan/2...
- dang 8y agoNationalistic slurs will get you banned here. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Y_Y 8y agoWhere's the slur? It's clearly a joke, and there's a link included if you didn't get the reference. I think it's absurd that Kazakhs would need to be protected from this, or that anyone would read my post as trying to elevate my country (which I never mention) over theirs. You're the boss, but I'd like if you set a different tone.
- dang 8y agoYou say "clearly", but intent doesn't translate clearly online. Often it doesn't come across at all. I believe you that your joke wasn't coming from any mean place. But I do wonder how it would land with HN readers in (or from) Kazakhstan, running across a comment like that on this site. Probably some wouldn't mind, but it's easy to see how some might, especially if they already feel a little bit like outsiders here. And the whole Borat thing did have a demeaning edge to it.
- hak8or 8y agoFor those of us datahoarders, how large is sci hub? Surely it compresses extremely well considering it's all human readable text? I would love to mirror it via a torrent or on ipfs and whatnot, and I have a gigabit connection with roughly 80TB of space I can throw at this.
- radus 8y agoIt's mostly composed of PDFs actually. Judging from my own library the average publication is about 2 MB, and I believe about 1e8 publications are currently indexed, so it's on the order of hundreds of TB.
- emilfihlman 8y agoEither a) those pdfs contain images or other graphics that don't compress easily or b) the text is not compressed.
- radus 8y agoThere are definitely many images and graphics. I don't know if my sample is representative of most literature, but I don't think it's too far off..
- gpm 8y agoOr c) The text is terribly compressed. Probably a lot of the "text" is also a scan of text as well. Could be an interesting project to try and make a sci-hub optimized compression system.
- Quiark 8y agoDejaVu format
- Reelin 8y agoThis got me curious. For reference, my Zotero library is predominantly biomedical in nature. This device currently has 810 of the pdf files pulled down to the local drive, of which the vast majority are journal articles (a very few of the largest ones are presentation slide decks). Size Range Count [0, 0.5) 255 (31%) [0.5, 1) 179 (22%) [1, 1.5) 108 (13%) [1.5, 2) 69 (9%) [2, 3) 80 (10%) [3, 10) 95 (12%) > 10 24 (3%) That's ~50% < 1 MB and ~25% > 2 MB. I'm actually a bit surprised they're that small.
- xorand 8y ago"Sci-Hub started by accident, there was no Big Plan behind it. After a couple of months, users asked to add some option to donate and help the project." These are the signs of a really great project. Much needed.
- apo 8y ago> There a people though, who create mirrors of Sci-Hub articles database. I run a few mirrors and other mirrors are run independently, and Sci-Hub also uses accounts to access library resources provided by others. I haven't found anything about setting up a mirror. Is there a link somewhere explaining how?
- Mikhail_K 8y agoLibrary Genesis provides torrents http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ and usenet http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_nzb/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_nzb/ downloads of their full database. They also give away the source code for their user interface http://libgen.io/libgen/code/ http://libgen.io/libgen/code/ Setting a mirror is trivial if you have a server with sufficient disk space and basic Unix admin skills
- chmaynard 8y agoThis is the ongoing saga of a brilliant female kicking a big dent in the universe -- all by herself! Predictions of the demise of sci-hub are greatly exaggerated. How do we know what steps she has taken to make sure sci-hub is not totally dependent on her? Let's assume the best outcome, instead of the worst.
- gpm 8y agoBetter to assume the worst, so that we can help her and retain access should it come to it. E.g. better that people with the capability assume the worst and make backups now than assume the best and we don't have a copy later.
- confounded 8y agoSeed a torrent!
- ohbleek 8y agoI truly hope she is able to find others she can work with in order to maintain and build Sci-Hub. She is an inspiration and a great example to those of us that believe in the ideals of transparency, freedom, and the pursuit of truth through science.
- ChrisSD 8y agoIt's amazing to think of this as mass civil disobedience across nations. And unlike pirating movies, professionals in the field are tacitly supporting it, if not outright advocating for it.
- arkades 8y agoHow can we not? A new paper in my field recently came out regarding how to reduce patient reliance on a particular med, with possibly better results for the patient. The paper had data to back this up. I couldn’t get it through my institutional subscription. I got it in 5 minutes through sci-hub. Why a tax-paying patient shouldn’t get up to date care from their tax paying physician through data gathered and analyzed via their tax dollars is baffling.
- syedkarim 8y agoI'm surprised it took you five minutes. I usually see papers appear in five seconds. The site is shockingly fast. Just append the DOI of the paper to the domain and presto!
- xvilka 8y agoWell, because journal publishers are parasites, they just burrowed too deep to remove easily. But the removal should be done anyway, no matter SciHub or not. They produce more harm than value these days. And every single researcher or academy should be ashamed for supporting them.
- henryackerman 8y agoAgreed. I'm in favour of laws dictating that research funded with public funds must be published without paywalls. France has such legislation IIRC, other countries should follow.
- gumby 8y agosci-hub has made a meaningful difference to my life. I hope Elbakyan survives her trevails.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sjfbo 8y agoSame, and few days ago my native country blocked the website and mirrors. Hopefully I'm living somewhere else now, but still, it makes me angry.
- steve19 8y agoI wish billionaire do-gooders like Gates or Buffet buy Elsevier etc. set the knowledge free and restructure how they do business. Sadly this would cost a fortune. RELX, the owner of Elsevier has a market cap of $42 billion. Can a 51% owner a company torpedo its business model without being sued by the other 49%?
- qwerty456127 8y agoGates is a billionaire and generally benevolent yet opposing "intellectual property" and giving things away for free for everyone doesn't sound like something about him at all.
- 0815test 8y agoThey would get a lot more done for the price by just contributing to existing Open-Access-focused efforts. Mind you, there is a lot of "IP" (or even just tacit know-how!) floating around, that could be "ransomed" out for cheap from its current holders and then set free, with huge society-wide benefits; but the cheapest is probably held by failing businesses, not ones that are still successful on their own terms.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoI think evaluating Gates as a do-gooder is somewhat inaccurate. His charitable actions all seem to align to increase his stock portfolio. And not only would open-sourcing scientific knowledge not likely help his stock portfolio, but it is antithetical to everything he has ever done in the software world. What really needs to be done is more and more editors and editorial boards of Elsevier-owned journals revolting, as happened with Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa. (Lingua lingers on as a 'zombie journal', filled with articles of very dubious quality. But everyone in the field knows this.)
- syshum 8y agoWhat really needs to be done is the government needs to require all research that is funded at all with tax payer money (which is the vast majority of research) must be open access to all
- lambdadmitry 8y agoThere is another difference with Aaron Swartz: I'm not sure if Aaron would block access for a whole country over petty squabbles. [1] TL;DR: a few grateful scientists named a newly discovered bug in her honour, she took offence and banned Russian IP's as a form of collective punishment. I find the whole story deeply fascinating, because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible) does unequivocal good to the society. It's so easy to fall into the trap of black-and-white hero narrative, but sometimes reality is just more gray and weird. [1]: https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-russia-by-its-founder-citing-bulling-by-liberal-81feca464863 https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-rus...
- syshum 8y ago>>>because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible) What behaviour? Blocking Russian IP's or releasing data to all? I find the blocking of Russian IP's to be petty, which I believe she backed down from but then had the ISP in Russia start banning the site. I dont think it raised to "reprehensible" Now if you mean ignoring Copyright law, and releasing copyrighted works to the world, I do not find that in anyway reprehensible, I am universally anti-copyright and do not believe it should exist at all
- vixen99 8y agoNot a tenable position unless you qualify it. It amounts to saying here should be no protection for those whose work output just happens to consist of copyable material?
- ridgeguy 8y agoAccess to medical research articles through Sci-Hub has saved the lives of at least two people whom I know. Well done, Ms. Elbakyan.
- radus 8y agoCould you elaborate?
- smadsen 8y agoI would love to hear specifics if you can share them. Personally, I've used articles obtained through Sci-Hub to guide my approach to managing my own rare health condition. I wouldn't say it saved my life, but I've found the information very useful in figuring out the relative merits of new treatment options. In particular, there is one specialty journal that's only available by institutional subscription at a cost of more than $2,000 per year. The publisher was particularly unhelpful in trying to find a way to enable access for patients. So despite trying to do the right thing, I just go to Sci-Hub to get this info.
- pessimizer 8y agoShe saved me from an unnecessary surgery. It's an amazing resource and is the commons we should have always had. None of these journals are funding any of this research.
- iamcreasy 8y agoPlease elaborate. I'd love to hear the full story.
- ridgeguy 8y agore inquiries as to specifics: both cases involved treatment-resistant depression with acute suicidal crises. One is a family member, the other a friend-of-friend. Many of you are aware that Ketamine has been used off-label for rapid treatment of depression and that one of its enantiomers, S-ketamine, has been (I think) approved for clinical treatment of depression. In these two cases, it was not possible to quickly access either a ketamine formulation or a physician who was familiar with its use. Google search showed that dextromorphan (yes, the OTC cough suppressant) has similarities to ketamine in its receptor targeting and is being tried in cases of treatment resistant depression. Combined with quinidine (as Neudexta, I think), it is used to treat a condition called pseudo bulbar affect. All the papers on use of dextromethorphan for depression were paywalled. Thanks to Sci-Hub, I was able to access and annotate 23 papers that together gave enough information (side effects, med interactions, etc.) for the two treating physicians to try dextro with their patients. Results are N=2, so obviously anecdotal, but both patients experienced recession of suicidal impulses within 48 hours and both continue to show decreasing depressive symptoms. I believe that neither of them would be with us now but for Ms. Elbakyan's work. I'm deeply grateful for what she's done.
- voldacar 8y agoWhere does sci-hub actually get the papers from in the first place?
- Liber-Abaci 8y agoIt's a proxy service that uses university credentials for access direct from the publisher(s) https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/some-facts-on-sci-hub-that-wikipedia-gets-wrong/ https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/some-facts-on-s... I would assume graduate students around the world pass them to her to use and she just starts up a VPN to imitate the location of the university. That said it's not like these publishers are losing money, universities are still paying for the access like they always were. Plebs such as myself could always get a free copy of some paper by requesting a printout from the campus library just now I do it from my phone instead.
- user764743 8y agoI think one of the best way to shield her against threats would be to host thousands of sci-hub mirrors. How hard can this be done considering the size of the whole site?
- godelmachine 8y agoI regard Alexandra as one of the prolific geniuses of our time and a hero that world needs right now. Have benefitted immensely from Sci-Hub. I wanna contribute to their cause but currently they only accept bitcoins. I am from India. Does anyone know how else can I contribute? Online bank transfer is my preferred route. Also, I don’t have an account on PayPal.
- lucb1e 8y agoHow is bitcoin not an option for you? You can buy it with virtually every possible payment method online that I know of, and if you prefer offline, you can buy it in the streets as well. If you can find a way to get some euros on my bank or PayPal, I'd be happy to send you coins.
- godelmachine 8y agoWhen bitcoin was a thing last year, there was crackdown by financial regulators in India on many bitcoin users. I admit I don’t understand the full technicalities but it’s better to err on the side of caution and stay away from it. Hence, direct bank online transfer.
- lucb1e 8y agoWhy though? If they see BTC as goods then it's the same as buying a piano; if it's currency then it's the same as buying euros. Is either of those things illegal in India? Also I assume this would be a small amount, not something that would have a tax impact regardless of whether it's a good or currency.
- godelmachine 8y agoAs valid as your arguments are, I wouldn't like to mess with India's version of Internal Revenue Service, no sir :) They have already outlawed bitcoin publicly. That's their official stand.
- 8y ago
- kqr 8y agoAnother thing Sci-Hub gets right is UX: I have online access to many papers through my uni, but it takes like 7 clicks, 4 redirects, and a minute of my time to get there -- when the system works at its best! Through Sci-Hub, it reliably takes one click and 5 seconds. Of course that's what I'm going to use.
- durability 8y agoHaha yeah. I’m also a researcher at a big uni and I do have legit access to every relevant journal for me. If I need a new paper I do a google scholar search first, and if it doesn’t say “pdf” but instead wants me to jump through hoops to log in and download then I just hit my bookmarklet to get it from scihub.
- iamcreasy 8y agoSame here. I even use SciHub to get my own papers. It's way easier to get them through SciHub then browsing through old file/folders.
- jonathanstrange 8y agoSame here, I usually get it from Sci-Hub instead of the legit link, because it's faster and easier.
- agumonkey 8y agovery often ~piracy-like websites aim at efficiency .. maybe the lack of inertia
- chaosbutters 8y agomy work is the same, I have to spend 2-3 minutes just getting to the portal to download
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tfehd 8y agohttps://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/why-sci-hub-is-illegal-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/ https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/why-sci-hub-is-... When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed. Nothing of that happened. Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’
- londons_explore 8y ago> I was interested in politics and always supported communism. I wonder if this simple statement will change people's views on the project.
- sireat 8y agoMaybe for some but this explains her motivation. Communism as a pure ideology is just as appealing to some as pure Libertarianism is to some others. Arguably this is better motivation than that of one Kim Dotcom and on par with Aaron Schwartz. As long as she is not actively involved in politics she is worthy of support.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago> As long as she is not actively involved in politics she is worthy of support. One of the most effective ways of changing the broken system would be for her to get involved in politics. Yes, she's a communist, the current political spectrum around the world is almost wholly dominated by capitalists, (yes, even in China). Having a few high-profile communists would certainly do no harm.
- prfnv 8y agoHere is Alexandra's bio in her own words. https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra https://sci-hub.tw/alexandra tl;tr/ cannot read Russian The west treated Alexandra badly. Russia will never give up Alexandra. Alexandra is a true hero. Alexandra, alone, has done more for opening up the science more than all Open Access activists combined.
- valgor 8y ago>Alexandra, alone, has done more for opening up the science more than all Open Access activists combined. This is the difference between reformist and revolutionaries.
- Fins 8y agoIt is quite interesting in Russian, actually. She started writing programs for (literally) stealing people's money, and never saw any reason to stop. A true hero, indeed.
- rdl 8y agoThank you Kazakh government for causing Sci-Hub to exist. All we need to do is get anonymous ecash added and we'll have a perfect information market.