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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 t

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).
terminaljunkid 7y ago
Better, I am almost always able to download the paper by prepending sci-hub [dot] tw [slash] to publisher's URL. It sometime asks captchas but not at all a problem.
maeln 7y ago
When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans. I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws. Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels. Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.
tgvaughan 7y ago
I too am part of a well funded university, arguably one of the richest in Europe, and we were recently informed that it's possible we won't have a Nature subscription this year. Of course the reasons are complex, and there'll no doubt be a workaround arranged, but it goes to show that even the most fortunate of us aren't necessarily immune to needing sci-hub to get work done.
- roter 7y ago
  Scihub would have been a godsend when I was doing my PhD. I would have to request via inter-library-loan all the low-exposure journal articles for which my library had no subscription. When the paper finally came in, via fax or scan, I may have already gone a different route. Or went to play ultimate frisbee.
this_was_posted 7y ago
even better, add this as a bookmark and you're only one click away from a PDF: javascript:window.location='https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location
- neekburm 7y ago
  Thanks for this, it's really useful.
JadeNB 7y ago
> I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. I don't know how well funded your university is—some are so much so as to make the caveat I'm about to mention a bit silly—but, for many reasonably funded universities, a statement like yours has to be qualified with "I have access for now …". Publishers can, and do, up their prices unreasonably at any time, and, at my university, I always have to assume that the access I've got today might disappear with a greedy price grab by the publisher tomorrow.
- Topolomancer 7y ago
  Absolutely true! I just wanted to add this caveat because I am fully aware that Sci-Hub solves a _different_ problem for me than it solves for other people. The idea of being at the mercy of a publisher is quite problematic, though. One can but hope that the lawyers of our unis are negotiating with a severability clause to ensure that the access to _existing_ articles will not be impeded by future negotiations. (I can sort of see the idea of making a price grab and then not having access to future articles, but having _no_ access even to past articles is a horror scenario)
SamBam 7y ago
> Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity. I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."
- graeme 7y ago
  Just for your reference: compliments Complement means when two things go well together.
  - mwest217 7y ago
    OP used “complement” correctly - as in, ease of use complements (goes well with) scihub being free.
    - graeme 7y ago
      OP was replying to someone who said they disagreed with the article, and argued that scihub was easy to use. OP said the article praised scihub’s ease of use, meaning complimented it.
- thegranderson 7y ago
  I think the disagreement is with this claim from the article (2nd to last paragraph): Sci-Hub, more so than RG, therefore seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub’s success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away. The author is arguing that seamlessness is not Sci-Hub's only advantage versus traditional channels, but that "Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is therefore ideological", "publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science" and that "Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure"
  - SamBam 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fluffything 7y ago
The only feature I miss in sci-hub is going from a doi to a BibTex file for the citation.
- ska 7y ago
  sci-hub + zotero
- emarsden 7y ago
  To obtain a medium-quality BibTeX entry for your DOI: curl -LH "Accept: application/x-bibtex" https://doi.org/<doi>
mavhc 7y ago
I'm disappointed that the pinnacle of your search ended in a pdf, probably formatted in 2 columns to make it even worse to read on a screen. For everyone else one of the worst things they can get at the end of their search is a pdf.
- mirimir 7y ago
  What would you prefer to a PDF? HTML?
  - mavhc 7y ago
    Yes, something that will reformat to the display I'm using, and is easy to copy and paste from/edit

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).

terminaljunkid 7y ago

Better, I am almost always able to download the paper by prepending sci-hub [dot] tw [slash] to publisher's URL. It sometime asks captchas but not at all a problem.

maeln 7y ago

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).

qwerty456127 7y ago
That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans. I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws. Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels. Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.

tgvaughan 7y ago

I too am part of a well funded university, arguably one of the richest in Europe, and we were recently informed that it's possible we won't have a Nature subscription this year. Of course the reasons are complex, and there'll no doubt be a workaround arranged, but it goes to show that even the most fortunate of us aren't necessarily immune to needing sci-hub to get work done.

roter 7y ago
Scihub would have been a godsend when I was doing my PhD. I would have to request via inter-library-loan all the low-exposure journal articles for which my library had no subscription. When the paper finally came in, via fax or scan, I may have already gone a different route. Or went to play ultimate frisbee.

this_was_posted 7y ago

even better, add this as a bookmark and you're only one click away from a PDF: javascript:window.location='https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location https://sci-hub.tw/'+window.location

neekburm 7y ago
Thanks for this, it's really useful.

JadeNB 7y ago

> I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub. I don't know how well funded your university is—some are so much so as to make the caveat I'm about to mention a bit silly—but, for many reasonably funded universities, a statement like yours has to be qualified with "I have access for now …". Publishers can, and do, up their prices unreasonably at any time, and, at my university, I always have to assume that the access I've got today might disappear with a greedy price grab by the publisher tomorrow.

Topolomancer 7y ago
Absolutely true! I just wanted to add this caveat because I am fully aware that Sci-Hub solves a _different_ problem for me than it solves for other people. The idea of being at the mercy of a publisher is quite problematic, though. One can but hope that the lawyers of our unis are negotiating with a severability clause to ensure that the access to _existing_ articles will not be impeded by future negotiations. (I can sort of see the idea of making a price grab and then not having access to future articles, but having _no_ access even to past articles is a horror scenario)

SamBam 7y ago

> Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity. I'm trying to understand what you disagree with in the article. If anything, it complements sci-hub's "alleged seamlessness."

graeme 7y ago
Just for your reference: compliments Complement means when two things go well together.
- mwest217 7y ago
  OP used “complement” correctly - as in, ease of use complements (goes well with) scihub being free.
  - graeme 7y ago
    OP was replying to someone who said they disagreed with the article, and argued that scihub was easy to use. OP said the article praised scihub’s ease of use, meaning complimented it.
thegranderson 7y ago
I think the disagreement is with this claim from the article (2nd to last paragraph): Sci-Hub, more so than RG, therefore seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub’s success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away. The author is arguing that seamlessness is not Sci-Hub's only advantage versus traditional channels, but that "Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is therefore ideological", "publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science" and that "Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure"
- SamBam 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fluffything 7y ago

The only feature I miss in sci-hub is going from a doi to a BibTex file for the citation.

ska 7y ago
sci-hub + zotero
emarsden 7y ago
To obtain a medium-quality BibTeX entry for your DOI: curl -LH "Accept: application/x-bibtex" https://doi.org/<doi>

mavhc 7y ago

I'm disappointed that the pinnacle of your search ended in a pdf, probably formatted in 2 columns to make it even worse to read on a screen. For everyone else one of the worst things they can get at the end of their search is a pdf.

mirimir 7y ago
What would you prefer to a PDF? HTML?
- mavhc 7y ago
  Yes, something that will reformat to the display I'm using, and is easy to copy and paste from/edit