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Not to take away from Sci-Hub, but even without institutional access, there are often alternatives: - more and more research institutes have a public repositor

by Beldin 5y ago

Not to take away from Sci-Hub, but even without institutional access, there are often alternatives: - more and more research institutes have a public repository of articles. - plenty of authors put their own (preprints of) papers on their personal website, a preprint server like arxiv, or researchgate. - lastly, you can mail an author and request a preprint. Not all will reply, but plenty will be happy that someone noticed their work and send a copy.

rzzzt 5y ago
CiteSeerˣ is a great resource for CS papers: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Imagine if every citation contained a URL: "Email author to request a preprint". Authors often include email addresses in papers or at least an affiliated instution. Their contact information is usually public. Aside from people who have been graduate students not many doing research are going to understand that this is possible. Never have I seen a citations service that makes users aware of it. There must be reasons they dont.
selfhoster11 5y ago
Those take effort and time (hours or days) to make them work. Sci-Hub type solutions are the only way to make this work at scale.
- Beldin 5y ago
  Oh definitely it takes more effort than Sci-Hub. Should've mentioned that in the post. For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess. That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience. Mailing works as a last resort option. Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    > That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience. That's a fraction of the citations on most interesting papers. I'm not a practicing scientist (now or ever) so my access patterns are different but every time I explore a topic in academic journals that process becomes prohibitively expensive almost immediately. Even when I had institutional access it was a pain in the ass - without SciHub every doi is a game of subscription roulette.
throwaway-x123 5y ago
I do not know, I use scholar.google.com and most of the publications not accessible for free. It is impossible to ignore a publication if you do not have access to it, it is highly demotivating, like doing something that is already done. Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.
ekianjo 5y ago
All of your solutions require extra manual work, and are therefore inferior.
- anfogoat 5y ago
  And most importantly, only work some % of the time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cortesoft 5y ago
So if you have access to all the papers anyway, why make it harder than it has to be? What is the point of shutting down sci-hub?
agumonkey 5y ago
Maybe scihub was a protoevent quickly dying but spreading the way to do on other official places.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Many of the papers I'm interested in are published long ago and the authors dead. For some reason, they're also slow to respond to emails. For any papers published before 1965, even with maximal renewals available at the time of publication, the works would now be in the public domain under copyright law at the time of publication. Otherwise, many works published prior to 1976 which were either only renewed once or never registered would similarly have lapsed to public domain, or always been so. That's a huge effectively-lost trove of knowledge.
throwawayboise 5y ago
If you have a public university nearby, you can access most popular journals in the libraries. Since they are state funded, generally any resident of the state has a right to use their libraries.

by Beldin 5y ago

rzzzt 5y ago

CiteSeerˣ is a great resource for CS papers: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Imagine if every citation contained a URL: "Email author to request a preprint". Authors often include email addresses in papers or at least an affiliated instution. Their contact information is usually public. Aside from people who have been graduate students not many doing research are going to understand that this is possible. Never have I seen a citations service that makes users aware of it. There must be reasons they dont.

selfhoster11 5y ago

Those take effort and time (hours or days) to make them work. Sci-Hub type solutions are the only way to make this work at scale.

Beldin 5y ago
Oh definitely it takes more effort than Sci-Hub. Should've mentioned that in the post. For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess. That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience. Mailing works as a last resort option. Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.
- akiselev 5y ago
  > That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience. That's a fraction of the citations on most interesting papers. I'm not a practicing scientist (now or ever) so my access patterns are different but every time I explore a topic in academic journals that process becomes prohibitively expensive almost immediately. Even when I had institutional access it was a pain in the ass - without SciHub every doi is a game of subscription roulette.

throwaway-x123 5y ago

I do not know, I use scholar.google.com and most of the publications not accessible for free. It is impossible to ignore a publication if you do not have access to it, it is highly demotivating, like doing something that is already done. Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.

ekianjo 5y ago

All of your solutions require extra manual work, and are therefore inferior.

anfogoat 5y ago
And most importantly, only work some % of the time.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cortesoft 5y ago

So if you have access to all the papers anyway, why make it harder than it has to be? What is the point of shutting down sci-hub?

agumonkey 5y ago

Maybe scihub was a protoevent quickly dying but spreading the way to do on other official places.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Many of the papers I'm interested in are published long ago and the authors dead. For some reason, they're also slow to respond to emails. For any papers published before 1965, even with maximal renewals available at the time of publication, the works would now be in the public domain under copyright law at the time of publication. Otherwise, many works published prior to 1976 which were either only renewed once or never registered would similarly have lapsed to public domain, or always been so. That's a huge effectively-lost trove of knowledge.

throwawayboise 5y ago

If you have a public university nearby, you can access most popular journals in the libraries. Since they are state funded, generally any resident of the state has a right to use their libraries.