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I'm a programmer – how can I help SciHub?
- sprash 5y agoSciHub needs to be decentralized. Zeronet seems to be a good blueprint on how to do it.
- andai 5y agoCouldn't we just use something like LimeWire? (Does anything like that exist now?)
- jazzyjackson 5y agoSee lib gen and r/datahoarders, there are torrents available split into chunks, I think it was 77 terabytes last I checked An interesting question I think, is what value add does Sci-Hub provide, because obviously it wasn’t happening before Alexandra made it happen, does it outgrow her or is she holding it together?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoHow about creating SciPubCoin, a blockchain where you get one coin from each published paper you submit!
- beckman466 5y ago> SciPubCoin, a blockchain where you get one coin from each published paper you submit! Probably better to create a system that includes a reputation currency, since you can't 'spend' your reputation: https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/reputation-is-orthogonal-to-exchange-f113a51dab6c https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/reputation-is-orthog...
- 6510 5y agoFirst the interface problem needs to be solved, after that we get a good picture of adoption. That there are gigantic torrents available is almost useless. A popcorn time type of GUI client is needed that allows search, can dl the right chunks reasonably fast, seeds the rare chunks, has tit for tad implemented for a group of torrents. Could even do full text search by downloading all possible candidates after applying some bloomfilter.
- sva_ 5y agoI think it's sorta decentralized. You can download the SQL files (couple GB) from the libgen site and search in it for the IPFS hashes you want, then download p2p from IPFS. A more decentralized way of searching those databases for the hashes would be trickier.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI am afraid the basic problems are still not solved with regards to proof of authorship and file integrity - how do I know the pdf I’m downloading is what was published? I’m just in a “be careful what you wish for” state of mind, if there was no one in charge of sci-hub, the publishers could go on attack and fill the database with noise, copies of papers with numbers and methods altered.
- bnj 5y agoSounds like it would be a good idea for authors to start providing checksums for their papers
- jazzyjackson 5y agoRight it’s not insurmountable, authors can publish public keys and sign the files - it’s a UI/UX problem like everything else in crypto. Keybase makes it fairly easy, but people still have to learn what it means and why it’s trustworthy - my bet is things don’t change, there is a small percentage of people who understand how to verify the source, and the general population who either believes anything or nothing. In the context of scientists and professionals tho maybe it is achievable to do some outreach and get people on eg keybase, something user friendly
- ithkuil 5y agoMost people I've been advocating Keybase to, just assumed it's yet another place where you create an account and hence you must trust them (now owned by zoom, boo-hoo). I found it well explained etc, but it's hard to reach everybody.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoLets say Zoom wanted to sell Keybase. Lets say they wanted to sell it to someone like myself, who would run it in a non profit like a utility, similar to Let's Encrypt. Lets say I'd then integrate it with Stripe Identity and gov IDP providers (US: login.gov, UK: gov.uk verify). This would then allow you to publicly sign damn near everything with an identity you could choose to (but not be required to!) connect to your IRL identity. That sounds what's needed, an extension of your IRL identity with top notch tooling to manage signatures (what PGP/GPG should've been) instead of docusign and similar that are charging an arm and a leg to "sign" PDFs with generated initials and signatures. We could go further; the signature is human readable in the rendered PDF (or whatever), and the Internet Archive takes a snapshot as an oracle notary when published, similar to Certificate Transparency for certs, but for all sorts of digital artifacts (the Internet Archive's snapshots have been used by a court of law for evidence authentication, so it's a trusted system [1]). It ain't hard, it's just work. [1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit/ https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/04/wayback_machine_legit...
- captn3m0 5y agoA DOI to IPFS directory would be cool. Is it still a copyright violation if you write a hash, but don’t put a IPFS link?
- cassonmars 5y agoIf the argument holds that a hash is equivalent to holding/sharing the file, there’s some big problems for PhotoDNA given strict liability laws.
- logifail 5y ago> A DOI to IPFS directory would be cool Q: How open is the DOI system itself?
- remram 5y agoIt's mostly freely readable. It's closed to publishing (gotta pay CrossRef or other licensees) and otherwise a pain to interface with.
- generalizations 5y agoAll you really need is a searchable database that points you to the torrent containing the paper you want. Then just download the part of the torrent that you need. Long as the seeders stick around, this is decentralized, simple, and very hard to block. Pretty sure this already exists, too, though it's extremely unpolished.
- bluedays 5y agoI think utilizing Chia coin would actually be a better idea. Incentivize people to donate their hardware space with real money.
- c-cube 5y agoChia is proof of waste, it doesn't store anything useful.
- 533474 5y agoAuthors, publish your papers in your personal webpage. Do not promote paywalls. To all others, donate and support decentralization efforts. To those that are particularly wealthy, please think about supporting financially too
- lalaland1125 5y agoThere is no need for publishing papers on personal websites when arxiv exists and is better.
- 6510 5y agoDo both.
- kensai 5y agoArxiv is preprint. Not peer-reviewed. Most times reviewed articles have critical changes before they reach their final, journal version.
- petschge 5y agoMost if not all journals in my field allow you to upload the final accepted PDF that you have typeset in latex yourself to arxiv. We even put "accepted in $journal" and the DOI in the comment field. This includes all the changes you have made in response to referee comments. What you can not upload is the finial language-edited and nicely layouted version that the journal has build from your submission.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- remram 5y agoarXiv is not only for pre-printed. Whatever paper you legally put on your website can and should go there (or Zenodo, Figshare, OSF, etc).
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- sega_sai 5y agoI don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories if you want your papers to count for the Research Excellent Framework exercise (which basically compares Universities every 5 years). I know many grants now have openaccess requirements. Plus in the field like physics, basically everyone posts the papers to arxiv anyway.
- threatofrain 5y agoBut then SciHub can be the makeshift bridge between now and the open access future.
- amelius 5y agoYou are forgetting that a significant chunk of science is still locked up behind paywalls.
- logifail 5y ago> I know that in the UK you basically have to post your accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories (..) How does that _actually_ work, though? Can anyone download the final, published PDF from "publicly accessible repositories"? (Full disclosure: ex scientist with published papers, still no idea how I can legally share _my_ work with anyone who might be interested...)
- crimsoneer 5y agoHave a look at this http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/ http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/
- sega_sai 5y agoIt's not final-final published PDF, because the copy-edited version is owned by the journal, but the accepted versions are available at places like this https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ (on top of arxiv )
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- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- akvadrako 5y agoYou should checkout libgen-seedtools https://github.com/subdavis/libgen-seedtools https://github.com/subdavis/libgen-seedtools The sci-hub archive is partly supported by libgen.rs. To ensure that their content remains accessible, they have thousands of very large torrents, many of which are not well seeded. If you have a few TB of disk space and bandwidth to spare, it's a good way to help out.
- jszymborski 5y agoIt's worth disclaiming that you may or may not be incurring legal risk depending on your jurisdiction.
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoFor all the cryptocurrency, distributed, anti-censorship, anonymous filestorage projects from the past few years, where the hell are they all? Cryptocoin community: hosting SciHub should be your platform's Litmus Test. If you can't do this one thing, your anonymous, decentralised, anti-censorship platform is a scam, so GTFO.
- lesquivemeau 5y agoIt exists, it's named torrent. All of sci-hub content is avaliable as a magnet link for you to download and seed. If you want more recent projects, libgen content is on the IPFS
- Igelau 5y ago> torrent This is the kind of thing where getting a scuzzy blockchain involved would be ludicrous step backwards. Torrent isn't new tech but everyone seems to have forgotten it exists.
- crasch4 5y agoYour IP address is revealed when you use a torrent, which opens you up to criminal prosecution. Running Bittorrent over Tor is also slow, and tends to overwhelm the volunteer run network. And someone also has to pay for the bandwidth, hardware, and sysadmin time to scan, upload, host. Incentivized onion routing networks like the Oxen network or Nym offer the potential for fast, anonymous filesharing, while decentralized storage networks like Sia or Filecoin could act as censorship resistant repositories.
- cblconfederate 5y agobecause it "just works"
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoHaven't the movie studios seeded their own torrents and then taken the people on the other end of the connection to court? I'm sure a lot of the DMCA letters etc directed at ISPs were specifically for torrent users.
- lvs 5y agoIs there any effort to transition scihub to ipfs? It seems like the rare sort of thing for which ipfs would actually be uniquely useful.
- andyxor 5y agohttp://freeread.org/ipfs/ http://freeread.org/ipfs/
- fragileone 5y agoThis is for LibGen, not SciHub.
- andyxor 5y agolibgen scimag collection contains all 85M papers collected by SciHub (77TB compressed and distributed via 850 torrents) https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_scihub_and_open_science_we_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
- raxi 5y agoImplement full-text search maybe?
- andyxor 5y agothat would be cool, the only problem is size of data, about half a petabyte of pdfs uncompressed (77TB compressed). OCR and indexing at this scale would be pretty costly.
- raxi 5y agoComputing power might be donated by volunteers. If there are volunteer software engineers, there must be volunteers to run a container.
- fho 5y agoAlso papers do not follow any formatting standard, as a human that does not bother us too much, but OCR will have a hard time making sense of multiple columns with random text above and below, figure captions that are separated by the main text with only a little bit of vertical space, etc... There are some projects that try to automate that, but so far all I have used needed some manual intervention.
- balsam 5y agoHow about building anonymous cheap low power low key esp32 paper downloaders a la aaron schwartz. How about starting pirate clubs in universities all over the world.
- xtracto 5y agoWe need a Firefox/Chrome extension that prominently points you to the arXiv PDF of an article when you visit a publication page with a research paywall, and upload it if it hasn't been uploaded . There's already a place to and process to legally upload papers(as preprints in Arxiv) it is just a matter for making it heavily public and accessible.
- NotSwift 5y agoOne thing that I would like to see is a clone of SciHub that allowed new submissions. SciHub is not accepting submissions because the founder is waiting for the results of a process in India. This could take many years. Of course, the persons who make a clone will have to be brave, because they will face the same problems that Alexandra Elbakyan has faced.
- Anunayj 5y agoyeah, we do need a clones of SciHub, because Alexandra someday can't be there to save the day.