15 ms·

The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019)

646 points by apsec112 7y ago

pojntfx 7y ago
Anyone who unironically thinks that the obviously positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy is a lunatic.
- azangru 7y ago
  > positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy Could you elaborate on that one? Also, this phrase suggests that you are of the opinion that piracy is unequivocally bad. Why not think about it as a two-sided coin, with a positive and a negative side?
- inertiatic 7y ago
  Piracy also has obviously positive effects, and you'd be a fool to argue otherwise. But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms of consuming art. Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube model. Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix model. Ditto for books, games, what have you. The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale. I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one outweigh the other. But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.
  - rakoo 7y ago
    Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.
foolfoolz 7y ago
if most experiments can’t be replicated how important are these papers on sci hub?
- boldslogan 7y ago
  The knowledge or ability to test which ones are or are not seems pretty good...? Instead of them being locked away?
- majkinetor 7y ago
  Non replication is valuable on its own. You know what other people tried and it didn't work.
- matsemann 7y ago
  If anything, it's better to be able to read the actual paper than someone else's reporting on it. Far too often mainstream news prints "Eat X to cure Y". Having access to the paper one can better see if the claims are even worth considering.
Topolomancer 7y ago
I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'. On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with. Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.
- James-primitive 7y ago
  Yes, minimal interfaces are really really hood thing
- entee 7y ago
  I love the DOI->PDF single search, it's how it should be. I'd prefer a better more responsive format, (PDFs are still hard to read on a phone or less than huge tablet) but nothing is quite as good for, "just give me the damn paper". And editorship is highly variable, even at the highest end. I remember catching an article in Nature where two curves in separate panes were clearly copy-pasted yet claimed to be different conditions in the legend.
  - Topolomancer 7y ago
    Fully agree here; whether PDF is best is really debatable, but I want the 'one click to get a useful format' rather than having to struggle with their badly-implemented readers (which, by the way, are lacking accessibility; I am your quintessential near-sighted nerd and I often have to 'manually zoom' because some dolt thought it might be a good idea to deactivate increasing the font size).
sadmann1 7y ago
We will probably never be able to quantify the effects of scihub on global science and implicitly on the well-being of everyone. Still I wonder how substantial it is, how many budding researchers and truthseekers were helped by it.
entee 7y ago
Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept. I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher (Nature asserts $40k). Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications and two dozen original articles. If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't have answers, but want to get opinions. EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee journals.
- neonate 7y ago
  What is your startup and what research are you relying on? It sounds interesting.
  - entee 7y ago
    We're combining a technology called DNA encoded libraries (DEL) with machine learning. DELs let you make very large numbers of compounds without losing track of each in a large mixture (1 million to 1 billion compounds in one tube). This means you can run a whole lot of experiments in parallel (basically 1e6-1e9 per tube). We believe this is a very promising way to generate large volumes of labelled data, which we know is what ML loves. The trick is to structure both the biochemistry and the ML properly so as to avoid artifacts and generate useful molecules reliably. Happy to talk about it in more detail, give me a shout at ntilmans at anagenex.com!
  - Calloutman 7y ago
Rerarom 7y ago
Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The latter is a way more comprehensive repository.
- givepause 7y ago
  Because (shh) it's a secret. Survival through camouflage.
  - hyfgfh 7y ago
    Yeah, its not like they overcharge for badly written books and also use a scheme with teachers where you have to buy books to pass in tests
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      Did you mean to respond somewhere else?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- auggierose 7y ago
  It's kind of complementary. I use sci-hub for everything with a DOI, and for books I use genesis.
  - hcs 7y ago
    Check out /scimag on your favorite libgen mirror.
- 7y ago
Calloutman 7y ago
I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key holders.
- azangru 7y ago
  > I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?
  - martin_vejmelka 7y ago
    > why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough? Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.
    - improbable22 7y ago
      The norm at least in parts of physics is to update the arxiv version once the paper is accepted, with a note saying "v3: matches version to appear in XXX", with a DOI link. Where "matches" means the content, but not the journal's formatting, spelling & comma preferences, etc. (And ideally this note would also mention any substantial changes, like "new section 4 explaining..." or "derivation in 3.2 re-written, but no change to conclusions", for the benefit of those who already read v2.)
givepause 7y ago
A few people are active trying to modernize the database code for Sci-Hub's sister project. PHP and SQL experts needed, it seems. https://gitlab.com/libgen1 https://gitlab.com/libgen1
hereisdx 7y ago
Libgen is another noble attempt to bypass the unreasonable prices and restrictions that publishers put on Textbooks.
paulcarroty 7y ago
When any platform really makes difference, their rise is only factor of time. Piracy of books/document/magazines is much easier than multimedia, also tons of cheap readers/tablets available(thanks, Amazon). Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I don't see a moral dilemma. The journals don't pay anything for the research that they publish. In fact, they paywall research that is often funded by the public.
roenxi 7y ago
Curiously, even if the quality is lower the open platform would presumably still win. There are a huge number of people in the category "desperately need to know, but don't realise that their need justifies paying to know". The sort of person who is comfortable reading an academic paper and will cheerfully implement something from arxiv, but their employer considers them a boring coder and isn't about to pay for access to a paywalled journal. Such people turn up in every discipline. And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...
fbn79 7y ago
Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers (and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose author/reviewers gratification.
- Tepix 7y ago
  Spotify uses DRM. Scientific papers should not be encumbered by DRM.
- jononor 7y ago
  I think the ability to pay a monthly fee, as an individual, to sponsor research would be great. But if you allow the publishers to continue to be the middleman, they will continue to be in power and will take most of the cut. I would not buy such a product, on principle. The authors and reviewers are the ones that provide the vast majority of the value. So the monetary (and social) reward structure should be centered on them. The platform facilitating this would need funding too, but their cut should be more akin to a payment processor, say 2-5%. So more like Patreon than Spotify.
  - fbn79 7y ago
    I think publishers are important in the review system giving authorities to publications. Without publishers (with the platform being the only publisher) we loose the "authority system". Without publishers we will be in a system more like wikipedia. We can base it on peer reviewer authority, but the platform and scientific comunity will need to fix rules to when recognize a pubblication as "reviewed and accepted". Thinking more about it, we are in the field of blockchains tecnologies. Every university or similar institution can be a node, when more then ...% of nodes acccept the reviewed pubblication (manual work of check the paper and the peer review) it can be considered "officially approved" and added to the blockchain.
    - elcritch 7y ago
      “Publishers” really should be “journal”. In the past many journals were run and published by professional societies. They had to deal with printing costs. The reviewing and editing is largely volunteer work still. Nowadays a professional society could easily handle the costs of a couple of staff editors and provide only digital copies. But it seems many/most professional societies sold out their journals to Elsevier. The idea of a traceable blockchain scoring and journal would be great. Journals and professional societies are largely about informal relationships in a research community for better or worse. Being able to track this in a blockchain could be helpful in bringing scrutiny and transparency in cases like the “Alzheimer’s Plaque Cabal” which is currently hidden from scrutiny.
timonovici 7y ago
There is only one reason for me to use it: as a historical reenactor, I strive to make my equipment as accurately as possible, and I read various articles regarding roman military food, how widespread were certain metal alloys, how they used to do soldered joints, and so on. I wouldn't make an account to JSTOR just for a hobby - I use their search to find DOI's, and get them via Sci-Hub. I do buy books and stuff as part of my documentation, but there are really specific articles, usually a few pages long, that I can't find in both a convenient and legal way.
Gatsky 7y ago
One of the big problems with disrupting journal publishing has been that there is no way to get access to the massive archive of papers that have already been published. Sci-Hub took care of that before the publishers even really understood what was happening. It is now much easier to just bid adieu to Elsevier and the rest. I predict that the preprint servers will take over, killing most of the journals which are barely read anyway, and a few top tier journals will survive because academics need to signal status. I personally find https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/ the most useful place to browse for papers at the moment, and stopped browsing actual journals some time ago. If something important gets published in an actual journal, I'll hear about it on twitter.
goatkarma 7y ago
One thing that is often overlooked is method that Scihub uses to obtain articles, and the impact that method has on the very researchers who use it. Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the phished credentials) . The same credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties, causing harm to the phishing victim. Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through. Of course, this is just a tiny piece of the much larger problem of the rotten unsustainable commercial journal publishing ecosystem..
- cjslep 7y ago
  Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through. If you bothered to read TFA, you'd have realized this statement was already addressed by TFA's point on publishers mistaking Sci-Hub's appeal as "simple to use" like single sign-on. Which makes me question your credibility.
  - goatkarma 7y ago
    Err I read TFA...Just read the top comments on this HN post to see ease of use is absolutely key to why folk use it. My perspective is from the University side of things so can only speak for that rather than from the perspective of users who do not have access to the content at all. I've spoken to users who workflow consists of googling the article title to get the DOI, then putting that DOI into Scihub to get the PDF, without even going near the University's library system. Most of the time the Library actually has an electronic copy, but the process to get them, even with SSO, is laborious and confusing. Just look at the SSO login screens for different publishers sites : some say 'sign in with single sign on', others say 'institutional login', or 'Shibboleth login' etc. How are University users expected to jump through these hoops when the can search for the title or DOI and get the PDF instantly?
qwerty456127 7y ago
I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal. To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use). At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.
- Tenoke 7y ago
  >I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if anything when you pirate their research - those who lose money (elsevier and co) in that case are (rightly) perceived as not deserving anyway.
  - rgj 7y ago
    > Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.
timkam 7y ago
Perhaps my perspective is ignorant, but in my sub-field of computer science, most people put their papers/pre-prints openly accessible on arXiv, ResearchGate, or personal web pages (if the publisher is not open access). I've never used Sci-Hub because I never had to, and when at home or traveling, I rarely have to use my university's VPN, because I cannot read a paper "for free". This is probably a good cultural indicator of my domain.
- Joker_vD 7y ago
  Sometimes you want to read some seminal paper from the 70s (somehow, most of the seminal papers are from the seventies), and half of the time it's re-hosted by someone or some university and is freely available, but another half of the time, all you have is an acm.org or citeseer page without the "Download PDF" link. Now what? This stuff is 40 years old, by all rights it should be public domain by now.
varelaz 7y ago
I understand why people like Sci-Hub, but basically it will not exist without work of journals that they scrape. If it will consist of unvalidated papers that everyone can submit it will be far less usable, it will be bloated with false research and non-science papers. I don't think that this format of work is vitable in a long term. As far as I see it should be converted to format like Apple Music, when new big player will come with some nominal subscription fee, like 10$/month and will open everything it has, or to Wikipedia format, when there is some comunity that can moderate open source articles and publish them.
- veddox 7y ago
  I would love to see Apple Music for papers. I refuse to use Sci-Hub for its blatant piracy, but the basic idea really is what academia needs! We just need to figure out how to make it legal - like the music and movie industries did.
philshem 7y ago
Another use case for Sci-Hub is bulk downloads. This is especially important for machine learning. Building a dataset of academic papers across domains would be a insurmountable task, even with APIs like PubMed and using "interal" university networks with good journal access. Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub, including torrents: https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-download-sci-hub-papers https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-downl... Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data And platforms like https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org try to link open access papers. - And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks: https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/ https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/
cybert00th 7y ago
"He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?" I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see to that. Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream - but not fast enough...
godelmachine 7y ago
Sci-Hub and Library Genesis are indispensable. What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only bitcoins.
- yazan94 7y ago
  I don't understand. There are plenty of trivially easy and user-friendly ways to purchase Bitcoin (Coinbase for example). What is the issue with only accepting Bitcoin?
philpem 7y ago
At least in my case, Sci-Hub was the difference between getting access to research and not -- and I'm based in the UK. I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a paywall. I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay the yearly alumni society membership and access fee). So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.
neiman 7y ago
The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers. Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen. Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self-organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.
- sytelus 7y ago
  Hardly. It's, in fact, booming right now. You know who are the biggest benefactors? Top journals like Nature and all of IEEE. They are paywalled like nobody's business. In fact, they are much worse than Elsevier. But community only hypes about the later while lusting over publishing in Nature and much of the IEEE.
einpoklum 7y ago
> Sci-Hub ... an out and out copyright pirate Arrr! Shiver me timbers. > papers harvested (illegally) illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others. Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually. > in China Sci-Hub is banned (Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.
- burntoutfire 7y ago
  >> in China Sci-Hub is banned > (Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there. Political science papers criticizing China?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > I wonder why it's banned there. Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely stupid. But, well, it's their loss.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    That's a valid point, but it might be the case that it's not actually banned.
- yskchu 7y ago
  I couldn't find any reference to it being blocked except in that article. A test seems to show it's not blocked though: https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=sci-hub.tw https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=sci-hub.tw Closest mention outside of original article is this The Verge article (2018), saying that they blocked China and Iran for a while because of too many requests from users; but this is sci-hub blocking not China banning https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakya...
beowulfey 7y ago
One way publishers could get me, a Millennial, back into their good graces is to actually put some effort into their publishing. As in, if you're not even going to publish a paper copy of this article, but still going to charge >$1000 for "open access" rights, then at least go the extra mile and start making eReader versions of them. I would LOVE to use my kindle to read journal papers. Many books have well formatted text with figures interspersed. It would benefit the scientific community so much to be able to use them regularly. (Note that PMC does this, and while I wish the figures were placed correctly rather than at the end, it's a great start!)
xorand 7y ago
>Sci-Hub does not have the opportunity to sell its platform, there is no advertising, or ‘social networking’ to obtain vital user data that it can monetise; it is a pure and unashamed ‘pirate’. Black is white and white is black. They are not pirates and they have no connection with the 'pirates' political movement AFAIK. Feel free to contradict me, I'll learn something new.
hereme888 7y ago
Taxpayers pay for lots of research, and lots of other research is legally free in other websites, so why get ripped off by profiteering 3rd parties?
sct202 7y ago
Alexandra Elbakyan is very brave especially considering all the US based lawsuits that are thrown at her. Aaron Swartz was trying to do something similar at around the same time, and he got the book thrown at him and he didn't even launch anything.
- tsomctl 7y ago
  Brave, or smart. She lives in Kazakhstan, which doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US. All she has to do is stay there, which is harder that it sounds. We've nabbed a number of people from former USSR countries when they've gone on vacation someplace warm.
- davalapar 7y ago
  I've just read the wikipedia page about her, that's halfway awesome and fucking crazy.
jchallis 7y ago
For all the tech wizards out there who want to meaningfully science from the comfort of your own laptop - help Sci-Hub scale. Your experience with helping build massively extensible web systems is completely and wonderfully needed in the existential fight for researchers to get information. From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!
oli5679 7y ago
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
cousin_it 7y ago
Since the valuable service provided by publishers is, more or less, predicting future citations of a research work for funding purposes, what do people think of using a PageRank-like system for that instead? That way, instead of trying to publish in a high-impact journal, people will just put their papers online and try to get them approved by high-impact researchers. I think that could be just as reliable signal of quality as the current system, while costing less money, because high-impact researchers would find it in their interest to approve only the best work sent to them.
Jun8 7y ago
Note that the article bends over backwards to underline the fact that Sci-Hub operates illegally. Although copyright infringement does occur, this is not true for all cases, i.e. Sci-Hub is not comparable to the Napster of old or lib-gen. This is because some of the research (actually I would wager that at least >half, but don't have any figures to back this claim), is supported by public funds and hence should, by definition, not be copyrightable
3JPLW 7y ago
If I were a foreign government looking to get insight into classified research, Sci-Hub plus a targeted PDF exploit on a small set of domain-specific papers would definitely be high on my list of targets. Cycling through so many different domain names and TLDs makes it easy to spin up a clone that _largely_ forwards to the real one but gives you the ability to return some compromised papers. I love sci-hub and have often used it, but the above idea has always been rattling around in my head and gives me pause.
djohnston 7y ago
i consider scihub to be the greatest democratization of information since the www. it will open up hitherto closed paths for people with nontraditional educational circumstances, and should generally accelerate the rate of progress.
Herodotus38 7y ago
I use sci-hub regularly to look up medical papers in my work as a hospitalist. My community (US) hospital can’t afford to pay for subscriptions. Often, I need a case report or small journal article to better diagnose or treat a patient. Sci-hub has directly benefitted those people and I love it for its simple interface and ability to get you directly to the pdf with one click.
kerkeslager 7y ago
It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc. It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.
- DrJaws 7y ago
  not only that, most of those studies are paid using public funding just to see private companies profit from them. That's totally unacceptable and unethical
rafiki6 7y ago
I've never understood why a wikipedia or github style publishing platform doesn't exist for research papers yet. Why do we ascribe reputation to the journals themselves? Is it the journals or is it the academics who participate in the journal who matter? Also why does reputation even matter really? Wouldn't an open source model make more sense where anyone can offer feedback and comments would be public? Wouldn't it make more sense to have all academics and even non-academics from around the world offer review? Generally speaking there's a right answer, whether it's a hard science where equations are likely involved and can be validated, or a soft science where you can mostly focus on validating the process and analysis. Even in the arts where it might be a bit more subjective. If anything given the reproducibility crisis in modern science, I would say the current model as failed and deserves no reputation at all. This reminds me of this: https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-academic-research.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-ac... If anything such a platform would be incredibly valuable in that academics can also create profiles on them and have an additional CV of their activity in contributing back to their field. This can be used as a real additional metric towards providing someone tenure or getting lab positions.
john4534243 7y ago
Does it has C++ ISO standard pdf's.

646 points by apsec112 7y ago

Anyone who unironically thinks that the obviously positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy is a lunatic.

azangru 7y ago
> positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy Could you elaborate on that one? Also, this phrase suggests that you are of the opinion that piracy is unequivocally bad. Why not think about it as a two-sided coin, with a positive and a negative side?
inertiatic 7y ago
Piracy also has obviously positive effects, and you'd be a fool to argue otherwise. But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms of consuming art. Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube model. Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix model. Ditto for books, games, what have you. The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale. I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one outweigh the other. But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.
- rakoo 7y ago
  Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.

foolfoolz 7y ago

if most experiments can’t be replicated how important are these papers on sci hub?

boldslogan 7y ago
The knowledge or ability to test which ones are or are not seems pretty good...? Instead of them being locked away?
majkinetor 7y ago
Non replication is valuable on its own. You know what other people tried and it didn't work.
matsemann 7y ago
If anything, it's better to be able to read the actual paper than someone else's reporting on it. Far too often mainstream news prints "Eat X to cure Y". Having access to the paper one can better see if the claims are even worth considering.

Topolomancer 7y ago

I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'. On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with. Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.

James-primitive 7y ago
Yes, minimal interfaces are really really hood thing
entee 7y ago
I love the DOI->PDF single search, it's how it should be. I'd prefer a better more responsive format, (PDFs are still hard to read on a phone or less than huge tablet) but nothing is quite as good for, "just give me the damn paper". And editorship is highly variable, even at the highest end. I remember catching an article in Nature where two curves in separate panes were clearly copy-pasted yet claimed to be different conditions in the legend.
- Topolomancer 7y ago
  Fully agree here; whether PDF is best is really debatable, but I want the 'one click to get a useful format' rather than having to struggle with their badly-implemented readers (which, by the way, are lacking accessibility; I am your quintessential near-sighted nerd and I often have to 'manually zoom' because some dolt thought it might be a good idea to deactivate increasing the font size).

sadmann1 7y ago

We will probably never be able to quantify the effects of scihub on global science and implicitly on the well-being of everyone. Still I wonder how substantial it is, how many budding researchers and truthseekers were helped by it.

entee 7y ago

Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept. I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher (Nature asserts $40k). Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications and two dozen original articles. If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't have answers, but want to get opinions. EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee journals.

neonate 7y ago
What is your startup and what research are you relying on? It sounds interesting.
- entee 7y ago
  We're combining a technology called DNA encoded libraries (DEL) with machine learning. DELs let you make very large numbers of compounds without losing track of each in a large mixture (1 million to 1 billion compounds in one tube). This means you can run a whole lot of experiments in parallel (basically 1e6-1e9 per tube). We believe this is a very promising way to generate large volumes of labelled data, which we know is what ML loves. The trick is to structure both the biochemistry and the ML properly so as to avoid artifacts and generate useful molecules reliably. Happy to talk about it in more detail, give me a shout at ntilmans at anagenex.com!
- Calloutman 7y ago

Rerarom 7y ago

Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The latter is a way more comprehensive repository.

givepause 7y ago
Because (shh) it's a secret. Survival through camouflage.
- hyfgfh 7y ago
  Yeah, its not like they overcharge for badly written books and also use a scheme with teachers where you have to buy books to pass in tests
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Did you mean to respond somewhere else?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
auggierose 7y ago
It's kind of complementary. I use sci-hub for everything with a DOI, and for books I use genesis.
- hcs 7y ago
  Check out /scimag on your favorite libgen mirror.
7y ago

Calloutman 7y ago

I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key holders.

azangru 7y ago
> I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?
- martin_vejmelka 7y ago
  > why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough? Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.
  - improbable22 7y ago
    The norm at least in parts of physics is to update the arxiv version once the paper is accepted, with a note saying "v3: matches version to appear in XXX", with a DOI link. Where "matches" means the content, but not the journal's formatting, spelling & comma preferences, etc. (And ideally this note would also mention any substantial changes, like "new section 4 explaining..." or "derivation in 3.2 re-written, but no change to conclusions", for the benefit of those who already read v2.)

givepause 7y ago

A few people are active trying to modernize the database code for Sci-Hub's sister project. PHP and SQL experts needed, it seems. https://gitlab.com/libgen1 https://gitlab.com/libgen1

hereisdx 7y ago

Libgen is another noble attempt to bypass the unreasonable prices and restrictions that publishers put on Textbooks.

paulcarroty 7y ago

When any platform really makes difference, their rise is only factor of time. Piracy of books/document/magazines is much easier than multimedia, also tons of cheap readers/tablets available(thanks, Amazon). Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.

jplayer01 7y ago
I don't see a moral dilemma. The journals don't pay anything for the research that they publish. In fact, they paywall research that is often funded by the public.

roenxi 7y ago

Curiously, even if the quality is lower the open platform would presumably still win. There are a huge number of people in the category "desperately need to know, but don't realise that their need justifies paying to know". The sort of person who is comfortable reading an academic paper and will cheerfully implement something from arxiv, but their employer considers them a boring coder and isn't about to pay for access to a paywalled journal. Such people turn up in every discipline. And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...

fbn79 7y ago

Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers (and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose author/reviewers gratification.

Tepix 7y ago
Spotify uses DRM. Scientific papers should not be encumbered by DRM.
jononor 7y ago
I think the ability to pay a monthly fee, as an individual, to sponsor research would be great. But if you allow the publishers to continue to be the middleman, they will continue to be in power and will take most of the cut. I would not buy such a product, on principle. The authors and reviewers are the ones that provide the vast majority of the value. So the monetary (and social) reward structure should be centered on them. The platform facilitating this would need funding too, but their cut should be more akin to a payment processor, say 2-5%. So more like Patreon than Spotify.
- fbn79 7y ago
  I think publishers are important in the review system giving authorities to publications. Without publishers (with the platform being the only publisher) we loose the "authority system". Without publishers we will be in a system more like wikipedia. We can base it on peer reviewer authority, but the platform and scientific comunity will need to fix rules to when recognize a pubblication as "reviewed and accepted". Thinking more about it, we are in the field of blockchains tecnologies. Every university or similar institution can be a node, when more then ...% of nodes acccept the reviewed pubblication (manual work of check the paper and the peer review) it can be considered "officially approved" and added to the blockchain.
  - elcritch 7y ago
    “Publishers” really should be “journal”. In the past many journals were run and published by professional societies. They had to deal with printing costs. The reviewing and editing is largely volunteer work still. Nowadays a professional society could easily handle the costs of a couple of staff editors and provide only digital copies. But it seems many/most professional societies sold out their journals to Elsevier. The idea of a traceable blockchain scoring and journal would be great. Journals and professional societies are largely about informal relationships in a research community for better or worse. Being able to track this in a blockchain could be helpful in bringing scrutiny and transparency in cases like the “Alzheimer’s Plaque Cabal” which is currently hidden from scrutiny.

timonovici 7y ago

There is only one reason for me to use it: as a historical reenactor, I strive to make my equipment as accurately as possible, and I read various articles regarding roman military food, how widespread were certain metal alloys, how they used to do soldered joints, and so on. I wouldn't make an account to JSTOR just for a hobby - I use their search to find DOI's, and get them via Sci-Hub. I do buy books and stuff as part of my documentation, but there are really specific articles, usually a few pages long, that I can't find in both a convenient and legal way.

Gatsky 7y ago

One of the big problems with disrupting journal publishing has been that there is no way to get access to the massive archive of papers that have already been published. Sci-Hub took care of that before the publishers even really understood what was happening. It is now much easier to just bid adieu to Elsevier and the rest. I predict that the preprint servers will take over, killing most of the journals which are barely read anyway, and a few top tier journals will survive because academics need to signal status. I personally find https://www.biorxiv.org/ https://www.biorxiv.org/ the most useful place to browse for papers at the moment, and stopped browsing actual journals some time ago. If something important gets published in an actual journal, I'll hear about it on twitter.

goatkarma 7y ago

One thing that is often overlooked is method that Scihub uses to obtain articles, and the impact that method has on the very researchers who use it. Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the phished credentials) . The same credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties, causing harm to the phishing victim. Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through. Of course, this is just a tiny piece of the much larger problem of the rotten unsustainable commercial journal publishing ecosystem..

cjslep 7y ago
Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through. If you bothered to read TFA, you'd have realized this statement was already addressed by TFA's point on publishers mistaking Sci-Hub's appeal as "simple to use" like single sign-on. Which makes me question your credibility.
- goatkarma 7y ago
  Err I read TFA...Just read the top comments on this HN post to see ease of use is absolutely key to why folk use it. My perspective is from the University side of things so can only speak for that rather than from the perspective of users who do not have access to the content at all. I've spoken to users who workflow consists of googling the article title to get the DOI, then putting that DOI into Scihub to get the PDF, without even going near the University's library system. Most of the time the Library actually has an electronic copy, but the process to get them, even with SSO, is laborious and confusing. Just look at the SSO login screens for different publishers sites : some say 'sign in with single sign on', others say 'institutional login', or 'Shibboleth login' etc. How are University users expected to jump through these hoops when the can search for the title or DOI and get the PDF instantly?

qwerty456127 7y ago

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal. To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use). At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.

Tenoke 7y ago
>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if anything when you pirate their research - those who lose money (elsevier and co) in that case are (rightly) perceived as not deserving anyway.
- rgj 7y ago
  > Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.

timkam 7y ago

Perhaps my perspective is ignorant, but in my sub-field of computer science, most people put their papers/pre-prints openly accessible on arXiv, ResearchGate, or personal web pages (if the publisher is not open access). I've never used Sci-Hub because I never had to, and when at home or traveling, I rarely have to use my university's VPN, because I cannot read a paper "for free". This is probably a good cultural indicator of my domain.

Joker_vD 7y ago
Sometimes you want to read some seminal paper from the 70s (somehow, most of the seminal papers are from the seventies), and half of the time it's re-hosted by someone or some university and is freely available, but another half of the time, all you have is an acm.org or citeseer page without the "Download PDF" link. Now what? This stuff is 40 years old, by all rights it should be public domain by now.

varelaz 7y ago

I understand why people like Sci-Hub, but basically it will not exist without work of journals that they scrape. If it will consist of unvalidated papers that everyone can submit it will be far less usable, it will be bloated with false research and non-science papers. I don't think that this format of work is vitable in a long term. As far as I see it should be converted to format like Apple Music, when new big player will come with some nominal subscription fee, like 10$/month and will open everything it has, or to Wikipedia format, when there is some comunity that can moderate open source articles and publish them.

veddox 7y ago
I would love to see Apple Music for papers. I refuse to use Sci-Hub for its blatant piracy, but the basic idea really is what academia needs! We just need to figure out how to make it legal - like the music and movie industries did.

philshem 7y ago

Another use case for Sci-Hub is bulk downloads. This is especially important for machine learning. Building a dataset of academic papers across domains would be a insurmountable task, even with APIs like PubMed and using "interal" university networks with good journal access. Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub, including torrents: https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-download-sci-hub-papers https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-downl... Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org: https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data And platforms like https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org try to link open access papers. - And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks: https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/ https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/

cybert00th 7y ago

"He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?" I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see to that. Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream - but not fast enough...

godelmachine 7y ago

Sci-Hub and Library Genesis are indispensable. What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only bitcoins.

yazan94 7y ago
I don't understand. There are plenty of trivially easy and user-friendly ways to purchase Bitcoin (Coinbase for example). What is the issue with only accepting Bitcoin?

philpem 7y ago

At least in my case, Sci-Hub was the difference between getting access to research and not -- and I'm based in the UK. I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a paywall. I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay the yearly alumni society membership and access fee). So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.

neiman 7y ago

The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers. Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen. Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self-organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.

sytelus 7y ago
Hardly. It's, in fact, booming right now. You know who are the biggest benefactors? Top journals like Nature and all of IEEE. They are paywalled like nobody's business. In fact, they are much worse than Elsevier. But community only hypes about the later while lusting over publishing in Nature and much of the IEEE.

einpoklum 7y ago

> Sci-Hub ... an out and out copyright pirate Arrr! Shiver me timbers. > papers harvested (illegally) illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others. Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually. > in China Sci-Hub is banned (Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.

burntoutfire 7y ago
>> in China Sci-Hub is banned > (Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there. Political science papers criticizing China?
marcosdumay 7y ago
> I wonder why it's banned there. Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely stupid. But, well, it's their loss.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  That's a valid point, but it might be the case that it's not actually banned.
yskchu 7y ago
I couldn't find any reference to it being blocked except in that article. A test seems to show it's not blocked though: https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=sci-hub.tw https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=sci-hub.tw Closest mention outside of original article is this The Verge article (2018), saying that they blocked China and Iran for a while because of too many requests from users; but this is sci-hub blocking not China banning https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakya...

beowulfey 7y ago

One way publishers could get me, a Millennial, back into their good graces is to actually put some effort into their publishing. As in, if you're not even going to publish a paper copy of this article, but still going to charge >$1000 for "open access" rights, then at least go the extra mile and start making eReader versions of them. I would LOVE to use my kindle to read journal papers. Many books have well formatted text with figures interspersed. It would benefit the scientific community so much to be able to use them regularly. (Note that PMC does this, and while I wish the figures were placed correctly rather than at the end, it's a great start!)

xorand 7y ago

>Sci-Hub does not have the opportunity to sell its platform, there is no advertising, or ‘social networking’ to obtain vital user data that it can monetise; it is a pure and unashamed ‘pirate’. Black is white and white is black. They are not pirates and they have no connection with the 'pirates' political movement AFAIK. Feel free to contradict me, I'll learn something new.

hereme888 7y ago

Taxpayers pay for lots of research, and lots of other research is legally free in other websites, so why get ripped off by profiteering 3rd parties?

sct202 7y ago

Alexandra Elbakyan is very brave especially considering all the US based lawsuits that are thrown at her. Aaron Swartz was trying to do something similar at around the same time, and he got the book thrown at him and he didn't even launch anything.

tsomctl 7y ago
Brave, or smart. She lives in Kazakhstan, which doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US. All she has to do is stay there, which is harder that it sounds. We've nabbed a number of people from former USSR countries when they've gone on vacation someplace warm.
davalapar 7y ago
I've just read the wikipedia page about her, that's halfway awesome and fucking crazy.

jchallis 7y ago

For all the tech wizards out there who want to meaningfully science from the comfort of your own laptop - help Sci-Hub scale. Your experience with helping build massively extensible web systems is completely and wonderfully needed in the existential fight for researchers to get information. From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!

oli5679 7y ago

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

cousin_it 7y ago

Since the valuable service provided by publishers is, more or less, predicting future citations of a research work for funding purposes, what do people think of using a PageRank-like system for that instead? That way, instead of trying to publish in a high-impact journal, people will just put their papers online and try to get them approved by high-impact researchers. I think that could be just as reliable signal of quality as the current system, while costing less money, because high-impact researchers would find it in their interest to approve only the best work sent to them.

Jun8 7y ago

Note that the article bends over backwards to underline the fact that Sci-Hub operates illegally. Although copyright infringement does occur, this is not true for all cases, i.e. Sci-Hub is not comparable to the Napster of old or lib-gen. This is because some of the research (actually I would wager that at least >half, but don't have any figures to back this claim), is supported by public funds and hence should, by definition, not be copyrightable

3JPLW 7y ago

If I were a foreign government looking to get insight into classified research, Sci-Hub plus a targeted PDF exploit on a small set of domain-specific papers would definitely be high on my list of targets. Cycling through so many different domain names and TLDs makes it easy to spin up a clone that _largely_ forwards to the real one but gives you the ability to return some compromised papers. I love sci-hub and have often used it, but the above idea has always been rattling around in my head and gives me pause.

djohnston 7y ago

i consider scihub to be the greatest democratization of information since the www. it will open up hitherto closed paths for people with nontraditional educational circumstances, and should generally accelerate the rate of progress.

Herodotus38 7y ago

I use sci-hub regularly to look up medical papers in my work as a hospitalist. My community (US) hospital can’t afford to pay for subscriptions. Often, I need a case report or small journal article to better diagnose or treat a patient. Sci-hub has directly benefitted those people and I love it for its simple interface and ability to get you directly to the pdf with one click.

kerkeslager 7y ago

It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc. It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.

DrJaws 7y ago
not only that, most of those studies are paid using public funding just to see private companies profit from them. That's totally unacceptable and unethical

rafiki6 7y ago

I've never understood why a wikipedia or github style publishing platform doesn't exist for research papers yet. Why do we ascribe reputation to the journals themselves? Is it the journals or is it the academics who participate in the journal who matter? Also why does reputation even matter really? Wouldn't an open source model make more sense where anyone can offer feedback and comments would be public? Wouldn't it make more sense to have all academics and even non-academics from around the world offer review? Generally speaking there's a right answer, whether it's a hard science where equations are likely involved and can be validated, or a soft science where you can mostly focus on validating the process and analysis. Even in the arts where it might be a bit more subjective. If anything given the reproducibility crisis in modern science, I would say the current model as failed and deserves no reputation at all. This reminds me of this: https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-academic-research.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-ac... If anything such a platform would be incredibly valuable in that academics can also create profiles on them and have an additional CV of their activity in contributing back to their field. This can be used as a real additional metric towards providing someone tenure or getting lab positions.

john4534243 7y ago

Does it has C++ ISO standard pdf's.