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UK police warn students to avoid science website
- bioinformatics 6y agoGuess you can download some non-official science views from Sci-Hub.
- jfengel 6y agoProbably, but that's not the point. Sci-hub contains the official science views, i.e. published and peer-reviewed journal articles. They just don't have the copyright. This isn't about enforcing scientific orthodoxy. It's about making sure that the journals get their inch of green for accessing that orthodoxy. Non-official science views are everywhere. These are the gatekeepers of official science views, maintained by copyright. The people who can't get past those gatekeepers are usually desperate to get them into your hands.
- aritmo 6y agoDoes Sci-Hub work any more? The popular links lead to citationsy dot com, which is not Sci-Hub.
- heinrich5991 6y agoCheck Wikipedia for an up-to-date link.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ajsnigrutin 6y agoAny research funded by any public money (in whole or in part, or done for free on devices funded by public money) should be public. Not scihub pirate-public, but available for download directly, for free on the university/institution webpage, and through national libraries.
- logifail 6y agoMy PhD research was funded by public money. The work was nothing special (that's putting it mildly), and it was a couple of decades ago, but thanks to it I ended up as a co-author on two peer-reviewed papers. It seems beyond crazy that there appears to be no legitimate way for me to share my work with others. The quote from Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer that "Sci-Hub will then use [stolen credentials] to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers" shows some fairly serious misunderstandings of how scientific research is funded, carried out, written up, shared, and published ... and which multinationals get rich from selling access to the very last bit.
- mjfl 6y agoI think you are allowed to distribute pdf copies of your published work on a personal website, even if they appear in a paywalled journal
- logifail 6y ago> pdf copies of your published work Not wishing to sound facetious, but where would I get the PDFs, other than from - say - SciHub? I have the original bound journal for one of them, but you can bet your bottom dollar it would be illegal for me to start making photocopies of my work and handing them out...
- g_p 6y agoA good point actually - from a legal perspective this is tricky. Generally the publisher claims copyright over the arrangement that is "published". Photocopying the printed version would therefore be problematic. With digital formats, the general approach is to export a PDF from LaTeX (or whatever is used to write the paper) as an author pre-print copy (i.e. not in the final form used by the journal), and publish that one. From a technical legal perspective you would likely need to look at what agreement you signed with the publisher at the time (if any), since that may restrict distribution of the text. This raises a good point though for works that were pre-open access, and the risk of them "rotting" behind paywalls out of being in a state of legal limbo. Newer science will be more accessible due to open access rules, but older science may end up effectively "lost" to those without access to these paywalled repositories. There's no real incentive for those publishers to open things up, as they rely on institutions paying large subscriptions to preserve access to the legacy archived content, and that keeps their many thousands of staff employed.
- pmiller2 6y agoTL;DR: It's Sci-Hub FUD.
- hyperbovine 6y agoIs there any basis in fact to what's alleged in the article? Forking over your university login credentials to scihub seems like a very bad idea indeed. OTOH, presumably they must have amassed almost the entire corpus (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/) by some such means...
- bschne 6y agoI think they do use "donated" credentials in the background, but the article makes it sound like people would be phished into handing over their logins, which is not the case at all.
- guerrilla 6y agoI don't know how sci-hub works but there have been private versions of it for decades and that's how they worked, but that always occured in somewhat trusted circles.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThere wasn’t really an equivalent of Sci-Hub and LibGen until the last decade or so. I was a member of previous filesharing communities popular among Eastern Europeans unable to afford academic literature, but there wasn’t all that much available in pirated form, because it required time-consuming scanning or making a request to someone who might download it for you. It was only when people like Aaron Schwartz and the Sci-Hub team managed to mass-download articles from JSTOR and other paywalls, that finally academics got access to most of what they were looking for.
- guerrilla 6y agoThere was, privately, as I said. Private web servers that proxied through other people's credentials that gave direct access to the catalogues. You'd use them exactly the same way as Sci-Hub.
- bschne 6y agoThis article is giving me a major case of Gell-Mann Amnesia. The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen. Was this even touched by a human?
- londons_explore 6y agoThis has been BBC News style for a while. Very short paragraphs in a semi-random order, together with a smattering of out of place headings. I assume they must have some internal style document, because it applies to a good chunk of their stories on diverse topics. "The occasional quote which is unsourced, and doesn't have an end quotation mark. Questions have been asked Not unlike this comment really.
- blueboo 6y agodisagree. The first sentence is the lede. Next, a primary source backs it up with a specific quote. Then context is given for the decision. Sci-hub's perspective follows. Then you get several sentences on the police's view, and several on Sci-hub's. It's mechanically straightforward, like most news.
- albertgoeswoof 6y agoIt's a press release from the UK government, it's not actual reporting. The BBC tend to release these kind of things a couple of days before a policy announcement. Here's an example: Mar 14 "Ageing equipment puts Army at risk, MPs warn British army armoured vehicle. The British army is likely to find itself "outgunned" in any conflict with Russian forces" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56386446 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56386446 Then 3 days later a new UK foreign policy increasing military spending https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56391994 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56391994. The fact check here from the BBC is interesting: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56417924 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/56417924 What happens here is that voters see the first article, it sits in their mind a bit and they think "well maybe we should increase military spending, we need a good armed forces" then lo and behold their wish comes true a few days later. We're just living in an real world Yes Minister episode.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> The City of London's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat to their personal information and data". > The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online. Police (and politicians in general) should be careful about the fire they're playing with. There are some valid reasons to be concerned about hacking based out of Russia, but if every time they want to try to cast aspersions on things they don't like by highlighting connections to Russian they run he risk of people just totally discounting that warning in all cases.
- filoleg 6y agoYeah, this reminds me way too much of the infamous Californian prop 65 warning labels. If people see a "WARNING: This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm" label on every other product they buy, they tend to completely ignore that label. And the reasoning behind it is very simple too, because if almost everything causes cancer, then what is there to do about it and why even worry.
- Silhouette 6y ago"If you're tricked into revealing your log-in credentials, whether it's through the use of fake emails or malware, we know that Sci-Hub will then use those details to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers," [Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer] said. That's the first I've heard about this, and it would represent a very different perspective on Sci-Hub to the traditional anti-copyright Robin Hood styling. That said, even though CoLP is a rather strange police force within system here, it would be surprising for it to make a definitive public statement like that without being reasonably confident that it was correct. Is there any truth to that allegation?
- yellowapple 6y agoNote that the police statement makes it clear that said credentials are allegedly being used to "steal papers", which to me sounds like Sci-Hub's actually just using said credentials to do, you know, exactly what it's advertised to do: download any and all paywalled research papers it can find, to be shared with the general public.
- Silhouette 6y agoIf SH is actually crawling independently, the police might have at least part of a point here. Academics who gave it unauthorised access using their credentials could then end up on the wrong end of a very nasty legal action if they were subsequently identified, not just about the copyright infringement aspect but potentially criminal charges related to the unauthorised access itself too.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoWhich is why, when asked by their university / police, such academics would likely claim they were hacked or otherwise had their credentials stolen.
- tpmx 6y agoAfter the UK doing better at acquiring vaccines than the EU, this is what we need, finally something to point fingers and laugh at. ;)
- nikkwong 6y agoWoah, this is a big deal. On a weekly basis I find myself trying to dig deep into research and data on a health abnormality that I'm experiencing and often am greeted by a paywall. It's just not practical for me to pay for access to each article when 95% of them don't end up including the specific information I'm looking for anyways. I think I remember the Indian government proposing something similar to this current sci-hub initiative. Obviously I don't know if sci-hub is the right way to go about these things, and I wonder how this would change the incentivization behind research. From my understanding though the main gatekeepers here like elsevier act as more of a financial leech on the system rather than providing any real value; since they aren't the ones funding the research to begin with. Would be interested to hear other's take on this.
- albertgoeswoof 6y agoHere's the full press release from the Police force: https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/2021/march/police-warn-students-and-universities-of-accessing-an-illegal-website-to-download-published-scientific-papers/ https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/... > Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia. Fantastic! > Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers. A) Is this true? B) If so, is it a bad thing?
- haram_masala 6y agoThis would be news to me, but it would explain a lot. It always seemed unlikely that Sci-Hub’s archive was entirely contributed by concerned citizens. Phishing, though, crosses the line. Once you start tricking people and removing their agency, you’re the bad guy.
- monocasa 6y agoI feel like it's more likely someone got caught by their org noticing their credentials being used to dl ridiculous amounts of papers, and fell back on the "wow, that's so weird; I must have been hacked" excuse.
- Vinnl 6y ago> It always seemed unlikely that Sci-Hub’s archive was entirely contributed by concerned citizens. Note that Sci-Hub's model wasn't concerned citizens uploading articles, but academics (allegedly, at least) sharing their credentials and Sci-Hub using those to download requested articles if they didn't have it in their own caches yet. With that method, it seems a lot less unlikely to me that a relatively small number of academics could have "contributed" many articles.
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- lol768 6y agoThe BBC is notorious for its poor reporting of tech matters and yet again they've failed to write a balanced, informed article. Is there even any substance to these allegations of phishing and risk to data?
- sofixa 6y agoMaybe we read a different article, but the one i did only represented the facts - City of London police warns students to avoid it due to "direct quotes from City of London police". The article is merely about the statement. The BBC could have asked Sci-Hub and students for comment to add more sides of the story.
- lol768 6y agoIt doesn't matter to me if the Police or the Queen is the one "warning students" about Sci-Hub - if it's unsubstantiated and not backed up with forensic evidence it shouldn't be reported.
- leephillips 6y agoQuite the FUD parade about Sci-Hub. But if you can’t get access to it, there are other ways to get your hands on research papers: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
- leoh 6y agoI've often been paranoid that Scihub papers might contain zero day PDF vulnerabilities.
- brailsafe 6y agoThat's not unwarranted, but you'd have to have at least a cursory sense of what pdfs are capable of to know why. Like arbitrary javascript and file embedded files. I don't get the feeling that the police involved here necessarily do lol
- DanBC 6y agoA couple of points: There isn't a single police force that operates across England. For London there are the Metropolitan Police who cover actual London, and the City of London Police who cover the "square mile", the tiny City of London area. Compare https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/police-forces/city-of-london-police/areas/city-of-london/about-us/about-us/ https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/police-forces/city-of-lon... https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/areas/about-us/about-the-met/ https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/... And it's weird that the police are advising people not to use Sci-Hub. In England copyright violation is a civil matter, not a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of business or you're doing so much of it you're distorting trade. It's simply not a police matter.
- timthorn 6y agoThe City of London Police are the national lead force for economic and cyber crime, like the Met is the lead for terrorism.
- solarkraft 6y agoThis is one of the best examples for why "don't editorialize titles" doesn't always work. People here know SciHub and the title is devoid of useful information (basically "UK police warns about website").
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoIsn't it about time that Sci-Hub -or something like it- got legalized? It seems clear that Sci-Hub is a great boon to the promotion of the arts and sciences. It wouldn't even be unprecedented to have laws that "encourage" contributions. Think of the old library of Alexandria, or even the modern library of Congress.
- ballenf 6y agoProbably make it worse as it would get bought by some large company and then commercialized.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoPossibly some Sci-Hub like library then, explicitly government backed? Seems like it might be a plausible EU project.
- cybert00th 6y agoOh that's clever, looks like the UK government's Nudge Committee has been busy, again! Until we actually understand what's being done to us, we're all just blowing in the wind.