6 ms·

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 thi

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.
  - _Wintermute 6y ago
    You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access. This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      I'm not allowed to distribute anything that I ever published (what is not much), but yes, I think that one rule has more variance.
boogies 6y ago
IIUC the Library Genesis project mirrors SciHub (i.a.), and Libgen is mirrored on IPFS and has torrents for every 1000 files or so.
- TheRealSteel 6y ago
  Thanks. So it's mirrored, and the monolithic mirror is broken into chunks, but we still don't have a fully decentralized way of searching for and obtaining one specific paper?
notriddle 6y ago
> Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them. Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  IPFS would be perfect for distributing this, if it worked well.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Stay tuned. Something’s cooking.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      What is?
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Distribution of SciHub content over IPFS.
        StavrosK 6y ago
        Oh, interesting, here's hoping it works well.
wongarsu 6y ago
Torrents are available here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded. Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
- biggc 6y ago
  > 55 TB ... > smallish What a time to be alive
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
    - generalizations 6y ago
      That much storage would still cost somewhere around $1500-$2000. Impressively low, but still in the range of a very dedicated hobbyist.
      - agumonkey 6y ago
        Clearly .. tons of people spend more than that on gears of way less value (think GPUs for leisure purposes only). Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.
        vbezhenar 6y ago
        I think that kind of donation exposure would open you to some legal risks. Now you're some kind of visible commercial entity, not just some random IP address in the tracker response.

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.
- _Wintermute 6y ago
  You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access. This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    I'm not allowed to distribute anything that I ever published (what is not much), but yes, I think that one rule has more variance.

boogies 6y ago

IIUC the Library Genesis project mirrors SciHub (i.a.), and Libgen is mirrored on IPFS and has torrents for every 1000 files or so.

TheRealSteel 6y ago
Thanks. So it's mirrored, and the monolithic mirror is broken into chunks, but we still don't have a fully decentralized way of searching for and obtaining one specific paper?

notriddle 6y ago

> Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them. Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.

StavrosK 6y ago
IPFS would be perfect for distributing this, if it worked well.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Stay tuned. Something’s cooking.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    What is?
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Distribution of SciHub content over IPFS.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        Oh, interesting, here's hoping it works well.

wongarsu 6y ago

Torrents are available here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded. Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT

biggc 6y ago
> 55 TB ... > smallish What a time to be alive
- wongarsu 6y ago
  55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    That much storage would still cost somewhere around $1500-$2000. Impressively low, but still in the range of a very dedicated hobbyist.
    - agumonkey 6y ago
      Clearly .. tons of people spend more than that on gears of way less value (think GPUs for leisure purposes only). Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.
      - vbezhenar 6y ago
        I think that kind of donation exposure would open you to some legal risks. Now you're some kind of visible commercial entity, not just some random IP address in the tracker response.