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At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix laws so that it becomes either lega

At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix laws so that it becomes either legal or useless. That's no easy task, but it's much better than having scientists from all over the world rely on it while simultaneously pretending they are dangerous criminals.

Chris2048 6y ago
SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect. Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all. Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!). SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has. SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
  - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    ArXiv and a long list of other free repositories are way better than SciHub for legally sharing free-gratis access to scientific papers. Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
    - TheTrotters 6y ago
      Why are they better than one place that has everything? (Asking in good faith)
      - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership. We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
        semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough. My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20. > But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives? Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances). And to extend my thought from prior comment: > Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
- specialp 6y ago
  Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges. Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    >Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
      That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something
      - owenversteeg 6y ago
        This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin. My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  How about we target the laws that enable this obnoxious gatekeeping in the first place? We should simply get rid of copyright.
- ballenf 6y ago
  If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here. And also Netflix.
  - RenThraysk 6y ago
    You mean like public libraries?
- Ankaios 6y ago
  Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi.... The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.
leephillips 6y ago
SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    I understand that. But isn’t it useful to know about other avenues, in case SciHub is unavailable to you, or you just don’t want to use it?
    - LockAndLol 6y ago
      I see. Indeed, it is useful.
  - hirako2000 6y ago
    And having to pay double digit for a paper just to make one citation.
    - blt 6y ago
      I think they meant that people with institutional access to journals still use sci-hub because it is more straightforward than dealing with all the institutional logins, which are especially annyoing when not on the institution's network.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Very true. There were many open access initiative but you get to jump through hoops and links until you may get a functioning embeded pdf viewer (may require registration, data input, waiting time..) sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.
TheRealSteel 6y ago
Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar? Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols? This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand the situation. I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed -- not for an academic research problem or business operation, but to simply understand a health condition I personally suffer from.
- eganist 6y ago
  Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a paper with their consent. And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
  - mixedmath 6y ago
    I give out every paper I've published for free. Well, actually every paper I've published is also available in essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary middleman. But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    > Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? Yes. Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.
throww223232423 6y ago
Twitter tries to cancel the Library of Alexandra. We should discuss a bit about Twitter as well, I think. In other comments I saw the resonable demand to express support for Elbakyan. Recall that we discuss about the biggest free library of research works. I tried this here: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-knowledge-twitter-suspends-sci-hub-account/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-...
- stevespang 6y ago
  We need an better alternative to Twitter - - DUMP TWITTER !
ergocoder 6y ago
Twitter is a private business and can ban whoever they want at their disposal. I have been told repeatedly when asking why we don't have due process for this, especially when banning a high profile account.
mncharity 6y ago
> scientists Not only scientists need sci-hub. Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public. When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub. And "I'd really like to see paper X" is not my common case. Though it does occur when double checking that I've finally understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search, and I surf, and I find a paper that might have one helpful sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40! And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it's not just greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining something. It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with Elsevier to make research literature less accessible to the public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry education content, using words like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.
- hobofan 6y ago
  > Students. A science-literate public. It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it. This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.
  - esperent 6y ago
    In my university my student library account gave me access to journals so even though scihub didn't exist then I don't recall ever not being able to access a paper. I assumed all universities do this, is that not the case?
    - Sabinus 6y ago
cowpig 6y ago
An anecdote in support of this: My fiancee is a doctor in charge of a covid ward at our hospital, and at one point this year I heard about some studies re:vitamin D on radiolab and told her about it. She found it interesting, but told me she didn't have access to one of the studies she wanted to read. I introduced her to sci-hub and she was blown away. She uses it fairly frequently now. The idea that government-funded health studies are inaccessible to doctors during a pandemic is patently absurd. Sci-hub does a lot of good.

Chris2048 6y ago

SciHub doesn't have value so much as Elsevier has "anti-value". Scihub is a space without the negative effect of Elsevier gatekeeping, thus seeming to have a net positive effect. Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all. Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I don't get it, if there wasn't a SciHub where would a person get free-gratis access to all scientific papers in one place (without being tracked AFAIAA, nor advertised to!). SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has. SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  ArXiv and a long list of other free repositories are way better than SciHub for legally sharing free-gratis access to scientific papers. Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
  - TheTrotters 6y ago
    Why are they better than one place that has everything? (Asking in good faith)
    - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
      Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership. We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
        semi-extrinsic 6y ago
        You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough. My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20. > But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives? Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances). And to extend my thought from prior comment: > Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box? Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
specialp 6y ago
Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. If we had a world where there were a large number of people dealing with peer-review referee selection, managing correspondence for free, and copyediting for free we could easily not have any publishers at all, and no subscriptions or article processing charges. Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >Journals do have a value, but not the value that Elsevier extracts out of them to the tune of billions of dollars a year in profits. Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    That’s a lot smaller than I expected, means they’re spending a lot of money on something
    - owenversteeg 6y ago
      This isn't intended as personal criticism of your comment, but I've noticed that people with minimal experience in business often overestimate margins and don't entirely understand what they mean. A 37% margin is crazy high and truly exceptional; there are only a handful of businesses that profitable at scale. When you hear a 30%+ margin, think of businesses like Mastercard, that collect a percentage of most transactions that its 1B+ members conduct. Apple also has notoriously high margins for what they do, and theirs are at 18%. Most of the businesses people interact with in their daily life have low or even negative profit margins: Walmart 3%, restaurants ~2%, Uber -35%. All the storefronts are owned by commercial real estate groups (margins usually ~4%), gas stations are ~2%, travel, car dealerships, airlines etc are all very low margin. My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
How about we target the laws that enable this obnoxious gatekeeping in the first place? We should simply get rid of copyright.
ballenf 6y ago
If collecting, organizing huge data sets and creating good (or at least functional) UI for convenient access has zero value... that will be news to a bunch of people here. And also Netflix.
- RenThraysk 6y ago
  You mean like public libraries?
Ankaios 6y ago
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi.... The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.

leephillips 6y ago

SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

LockAndLol 6y ago
Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
- leephillips 6y ago
  I understand that. But isn’t it useful to know about other avenues, in case SciHub is unavailable to you, or you just don’t want to use it?
  - LockAndLol 6y ago
    I see. Indeed, it is useful.
- hirako2000 6y ago
  And having to pay double digit for a paper just to make one citation.
  - blt 6y ago
    I think they meant that people with institutional access to journals still use sci-hub because it is more straightforward than dealing with all the institutional logins, which are especially annyoing when not on the institution's network.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Very true. There were many open access initiative but you get to jump through hoops and links until you may get a functioning embeded pdf viewer (may require registration, data input, waiting time..) sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.

TheRealSteel 6y ago

Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar? Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols? This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand the situation. I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed -- not for an academic research problem or business operation, but to simply understand a health condition I personally suffer from.

eganist 6y ago
Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a paper with their consent. And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
- mixedmath 6y ago
  I give out every paper I've published for free. Well, actually every paper I've published is also available in essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary middleman. But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? Yes. Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.

throww223232423 6y ago

Twitter tries to cancel the Library of Alexandra. We should discuss a bit about Twitter as well, I think. In other comments I saw the resonable demand to express support for Elbakyan. Recall that we discuss about the biggest free library of research works. I tried this here: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-knowledge-twitter-suspends-sci-hub-account/ https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-...

stevespang 6y ago
We need an better alternative to Twitter - - DUMP TWITTER !

ergocoder 6y ago

Twitter is a private business and can ban whoever they want at their disposal. I have been told repeatedly when asking why we don't have due process for this, especially when banning a high profile account.

mncharity 6y ago

> scientists Not only scientists need sci-hub. Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public. When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub. And "I'd really like to see paper X" is not my common case. Though it does occur when double checking that I've finally understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search, and I surf, and I find a paper that might have one helpful sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40! And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it's not just greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining something. It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with Elsevier to make research literature less accessible to the public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry education content, using words like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.

hobofan 6y ago
> Students. A science-literate public. It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it. This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.
- esperent 6y ago
  In my university my student library account gave me access to journals so even though scihub didn't exist then I don't recall ever not being able to access a paper. I assumed all universities do this, is that not the case?
  - Sabinus 6y ago

cowpig 6y ago

An anecdote in support of this: My fiancee is a doctor in charge of a covid ward at our hospital, and at one point this year I heard about some studies re:vitamin D on radiolab and told her about it. She found it interesting, but told me she didn't have access to one of the studies she wanted to read. I introduced her to sci-hub and she was blown away. She uses it fairly frequently now. The idea that government-funded health studies are inaccessible to doctors during a pandemic is patently absurd. Sci-hub does a lot of good.