10 ms·

Sci-Hub is fundraising

518 points by NmAmDa 5y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
How to verify that this site is the actual sci-hub site, and not a mirror/clone that has replaced the Bitcoin address? (FWIW, I see the same Bitcoin address on sci-hub.do/donate and sci-hub.se/donate, so I assume it's legit - the SE domain is listed on Wikipedia and seems to have been for a long time).
ryanlol 5y ago
How come the page is only in Russian?
- f6v 5y ago
  I have an English locale and it's in English for me.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  If sci-hub had popped up within reach of the United States, Alexandra Elbakyan would have already been "taken care of" like Aaron Swartz was. (On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.)
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Exactly right, and that's why this innovation popped up in Kazakhstan and not Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a person who could have easily created SciHub in Boston and because of US judicial philosophies he is dead. I think this is going to become a trend going forwards -- IP (broadly interpreted) is a crippling disadvantage, and it's an asymmetric disadvantage some countries levy on themselves, and some don't. I predict that we're going to be continuously blindsinded by this -- by crazy-useful tech inventions thought up by clever people, not in the USA but in the developing world, in part because of the stifling effects of IP (and in part because genius doesn't follow national borders, and software needs no industrial base).
    - zarriak 5y ago
      One thing about the rejection of IP that I don’t think they have taken far enough is IP theft. Sure some places have cleaned up their act relative to when China was able to steal so much IP but based on the places that have been victims of ransomware, IP theft seems like it still is relatively easy. Especially with the current heat on the ransomware groups, it seems a great time for them to be taken under the wing of the various countries they operate under and used for more economically useful tasks.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      Yep. Licenses, too. Being able to just pirate tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (per seat, per year!) in ECAD, MCAD, cutting edge design and simulation software, and being able to do it in the open, sharing tips and tricks... being effectively exempt from US IP & copyright is a big advantage for small companies in the hardware space. I, too predict a wave of innovation that happens outside the US sphere of influence on account of shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
    - ryanlol 5y ago
      > because of US judicial philosophies he is dead. That person is dead because he killed himself. We do not know why he decided to kill himself, he did not leave a suicide note (this time around)
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    > (On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.) Weird, the page only loads in Russian for me and doesn’t seem to offer any way to change the language.
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  It shows in English for me. Do you have a VPN?
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    No VPN, English locale. I read Russian and my phone has a secondary Russian keyboard layout, but as far as I can tell my browser isn’t leaking this. navigator.language returns en-GB and Accept-Language header seems to be set to en-US
zzleeper 5y ago
Through my employer, I have access to practically all papers I need to download. But doing so is much more inconvenient than using sci-hub than I still prefer the latter. And of course, don't get me started in the usual ramble about us writing papers, typesetting papers, refereeing papers, etc. etc. for free while Elsev** and friends get $bns every year.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  You author your papers for free?
  - netr0ute 5y ago
    Is that a bad thing?
  - SinParadise 5y ago
    In exchange, he get a different piece of paper, possibly framed and maybe a pat on the back for a job well done. Sounds fair to me.
  - beanjuice 5y ago
    In the grand scheme of things, the academia complex is funded by taxpayers to produce academic work. It used to be that journals would at least do good editorial work, help with editing, formatting, and perhaps even graphics. All of this work is now on the author, so the question increasingly becomes, why does a taxpayer not only pay for the lab to produce research, but also the $3,000 to 5,000 or more fee to have something published, depending on the journal. Furthermore, once the research was paid for by the taxpayer, the scientist's time wasted to format the research, and the journal paid for the privilege to publish the paper- these institutions have to pay once again for access to these papers once published. In a way, journals in the 21st century are double or triple dipping on citizens, all so we can share our work.
    - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
      There’s a book from 1970 by Paul Goodman called New Reformation that I recently started reading that’s all about the issues surrounding government funding of science. It’s pretty interesting. Apparently there were walkouts at institutions like MIT, CalTech etc in the 60s protesting government intrusion into the sciences, but it seems to have had little effect: government funds science to get the research it thinks is important, and as you write, taxpayers pay for it many times over.
f6v 5y ago
To play the devil's advocate: you can find many articles as pre-prints, for example on biorxiv. And it stays there for free even after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So you CAN access the article without paying to the publisher.
- bunje 5y ago
  I think in the past journals prohibiting the use of preprint archives was more common.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  100% true for some fields. 100% false for other fields.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    This. The medical field is still struggling to fully adopt pre-prints.
- dmix 5y ago
  There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones. It’s like how every movie, even the rare no longer distributed ones are available on Torrent sites but you can’t find them even if you have access to a good online commercial libraries.
  - vmception 5y ago
    (Sadly there are a bunch from major film festivals that never are screened again, I wish I could torrent some)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gwern 5y ago
    "There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones." Let's not exaggerate here. I hit gaps in SH all the time. And I have to wonder how you haven't noticed that SH halted its 2021 paper uploads entirely because of the Indian court case. That's quite a gap.
generalizations 5y ago
Sci-hub is doing what google once promised: making the world's information accessible to everyone.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)
  - perihelions 5y ago
    In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
    - musicale 5y ago
      > Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
      - perihelions 5y ago
        Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Jerry2 5y ago
I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day. My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about it. In a large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub. Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them. You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Nothing in this world is free. Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns. The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.
  - esalman 5y ago
    Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.
    - gnulinux 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)
elcritch 5y ago
I'm a fan of Sci-Hub, but given multiple "clones" and the ever changing DNS names how does one verify this is the legitimate organization? It gives off a legitimate feel as most frauds don't tend to make new things. The BTC addresses I've seen on HN are different than the one on the page. Does Alexandra have a public key that could be used to provide a sig-validation? P.S. the main sci-hub.do page gives the same BTC as previous commentators list as valid.
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  I wonder what do you mean by sci-hub.do pag3 because the link in this post is referring to https://sci-hub.do/donate https://sci-hub.do/donate page.
  - elcritch 5y ago
    The https://sci-hub.do/ https://sci-hub.do/ main page lists a BTC that matches what previous HN commentators have posted as a valid BTC address. The new "/donate" page has a new BTC which gave me pause. But my original question stands. It appears sci-hub has made a NFT based nft address? https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625 https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625
- cyounkins 5y ago
  The BTC address on the /donate page appears to be semi-random. This is the address I see on the main page of the .do and .st domains: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
  - Kubuxu 5y ago
    It is most likely Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet, where the web server holds only public key and derivation seed. This way the private key doesn't have to reside online and you can generate as many addresses as you want.
    - remram 5y ago
goerz 5y ago
What I seem to be missing from that page is their “future plans” for when/if current (2021) papers will be available through Sci-Hub. In its current state, the site is essentially defunct.
- kragen 5y ago
  Most papers are from before 02021, and in particular most papers that are old enough to be widely cited. A lot of new papers are open access; sci-hub is most crucial for access to research from 15 or more years ago, and its coverage of that research is still fairly comprehensive. So "essentially defunct" is far from the truth from my point of view.
quink 5y ago
> legal status > Access to information and knowledge is a basic human right. Sci-Hub will fight those laws that make free exchange of infomation impossible. The project will eventually be recognized as legal I keep thinking about sensible ways of copyright reform. Ones that allow a balance between rewarding creators fairly and allowing use independent of quantity or subject area. The latest iteration I've arrived on in my head is a land tax at one end and at the other an Elo-like rating system that all the population participates in (but rate limited to some quantity x per year) to determine which works get how much funding, with participation rewarded with a fixed amount from the same pool (and the choices being randomly chosen, possibly with a bias towards interest areas though). This should make things independent of the wealth of the creator, that of the user, spamming works, encourage shipping, built-in review, minimise externalities, tax undesirable behaviour, make it independent of the government, be something that's implementable incrementally (opt-in at first), encourage broad participation in the creative process, have reliable and predictable funding mechanisms for new interesting science, be a simpler system than the current mess, remove how consuming more creative works is more expensive (which I think is a bad thing because it's regressive, and there's no incremental cost to producing copies of creative works these days, but creators need to be rewarded), etc., etc. And this would be applicable to all creative works, including open-source projects.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  At least in the context of academic and scientific research, copyright is nonsense. Especially given that the ones that hold copyright (journal/conference publishers) do ~0 of the actual work behind the research.
gwicks56 5y ago
But people on Hacker News keep telling me Bitcoin has no genuine use cases? I'm confused.
- heckerhut 5y ago
  Pssht
distantsounds 5y ago
if they are going to ask for donations like this should at least detail out how much their expenses are. how much space does a clone of the content consume? what's the hosting situation look like? giving them crypto is pointless if they waste it.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Very happy to see Alexandra's future plans, strongly encourage support. For anyone still unclear of the benefit and value of Sci-Hub and similar literature distribution services: What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...
ilaksh 5y ago
Wish they had an ALGO donation option.
howtofly 5y ago
Is there an alternative way of donation? I want to donate to sci-hub, but DONT want to pay for cryptocurrency miners.
- 70rd 5y ago
  Start buying ETH and donate it once the beacon chain merges with ETH1. Transaction fees will go to validators instead of miners.
- sneak 5y ago
  No, cryptocurrency payments are the only effectively uncensorable payment system in widespread use today. Perhaps cryptocurrency mining has more value than you thought.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wanderingmind 5y ago
To give an alternative viewpoint, imagine an open-source project like React being built in GitHub. The code is built, reviewed and maintained by developers for free. When the project is out of beta, if suddenly GitHub says it needs to be paid for anyone to access it and says the new license also prohibits anyone from sharing it. That's the kind of behaviour that we are tolerating with academic publishers.
helloworld11 5y ago
Those of you on this site who hate on crypto to an emotionally charged, dismissively reactionary degree, take note: How secure do you think SciHub's donations system would be if it depended on Paypal, credit card processing, Venmo or Stripe? You see? Crypto fanboy "to the moon" fanaticism and the criminal activities that bitcoin et al get used for aside, there are positive, defense-worthy use cases for blockchain currencies.

518 points by NmAmDa 5y ago

How to verify that this site is the actual sci-hub site, and not a mirror/clone that has replaced the Bitcoin address? (FWIW, I see the same Bitcoin address on sci-hub.do/donate and sci-hub.se/donate, so I assume it's legit - the SE domain is listed on Wikipedia and seems to have been for a long time).

ryanlol 5y ago

How come the page is only in Russian?

f6v 5y ago
I have an English locale and it's in English for me.
jjoonathan 5y ago
If sci-hub had popped up within reach of the United States, Alexandra Elbakyan would have already been "taken care of" like Aaron Swartz was. (On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.)
- perihelions 5y ago
  Exactly right, and that's why this innovation popped up in Kazakhstan and not Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a person who could have easily created SciHub in Boston and because of US judicial philosophies he is dead. I think this is going to become a trend going forwards -- IP (broadly interpreted) is a crippling disadvantage, and it's an asymmetric disadvantage some countries levy on themselves, and some don't. I predict that we're going to be continuously blindsinded by this -- by crazy-useful tech inventions thought up by clever people, not in the USA but in the developing world, in part because of the stifling effects of IP (and in part because genius doesn't follow national borders, and software needs no industrial base).
  - zarriak 5y ago
    One thing about the rejection of IP that I don’t think they have taken far enough is IP theft. Sure some places have cleaned up their act relative to when China was able to steal so much IP but based on the places that have been victims of ransomware, IP theft seems like it still is relatively easy. Especially with the current heat on the ransomware groups, it seems a great time for them to be taken under the wing of the various countries they operate under and used for more economically useful tasks.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Yep. Licenses, too. Being able to just pirate tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars (per seat, per year!) in ECAD, MCAD, cutting edge design and simulation software, and being able to do it in the open, sharing tips and tricks... being effectively exempt from US IP & copyright is a big advantage for small companies in the hardware space. I, too predict a wave of innovation that happens outside the US sphere of influence on account of shooting ourselves in the foot like this.
  - ryanlol 5y ago
    > because of US judicial philosophies he is dead. That person is dead because he killed himself. We do not know why he decided to kill himself, he did not leave a suicide note (this time around)
- ryanlol 5y ago
  > (On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.) Weird, the page only loads in Russian for me and doesn’t seem to offer any way to change the language.
NmAmDa 5y ago
It shows in English for me. Do you have a VPN?
- ryanlol 5y ago
  No VPN, English locale. I read Russian and my phone has a secondary Russian keyboard layout, but as far as I can tell my browser isn’t leaking this. navigator.language returns en-GB and Accept-Language header seems to be set to en-US

zzleeper 5y ago

Through my employer, I have access to practically all papers I need to download. But doing so is much more inconvenient than using sci-hub than I still prefer the latter. And of course, don't get me started in the usual ramble about us writing papers, typesetting papers, refereeing papers, etc. etc. for free while Elsev** and friends get $bns every year.

wolverine876 5y ago
You author your papers for free?
- netr0ute 5y ago
  Is that a bad thing?
- SinParadise 5y ago
  In exchange, he get a different piece of paper, possibly framed and maybe a pat on the back for a job well done. Sounds fair to me.
- beanjuice 5y ago
  In the grand scheme of things, the academia complex is funded by taxpayers to produce academic work. It used to be that journals would at least do good editorial work, help with editing, formatting, and perhaps even graphics. All of this work is now on the author, so the question increasingly becomes, why does a taxpayer not only pay for the lab to produce research, but also the $3,000 to 5,000 or more fee to have something published, depending on the journal. Furthermore, once the research was paid for by the taxpayer, the scientist's time wasted to format the research, and the journal paid for the privilege to publish the paper- these institutions have to pay once again for access to these papers once published. In a way, journals in the 21st century are double or triple dipping on citizens, all so we can share our work.
  - dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
    There’s a book from 1970 by Paul Goodman called New Reformation that I recently started reading that’s all about the issues surrounding government funding of science. It’s pretty interesting. Apparently there were walkouts at institutions like MIT, CalTech etc in the 60s protesting government intrusion into the sciences, but it seems to have had little effect: government funds science to get the research it thinks is important, and as you write, taxpayers pay for it many times over.

f6v 5y ago

To play the devil's advocate: you can find many articles as pre-prints, for example on biorxiv. And it stays there for free even after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So you CAN access the article without paying to the publisher.

bunje 5y ago
I think in the past journals prohibiting the use of preprint archives was more common.
jjoonathan 5y ago
100% true for some fields. 100% false for other fields.
- Fomite 5y ago
  This. The medical field is still struggling to fully adopt pre-prints.
dmix 5y ago
There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones. It’s like how every movie, even the rare no longer distributed ones are available on Torrent sites but you can’t find them even if you have access to a good online commercial libraries.
- vmception 5y ago
  (Sadly there are a bunch from major film festivals that never are screened again, I wish I could torrent some)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gwern 5y ago
  "There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones." Let's not exaggerate here. I hit gaps in SH all the time. And I have to wonder how you haven't noticed that SH halted its 2021 paper uploads entirely because of the Indian court case. That's quite a gap.

generalizations 5y ago

Sci-hub is doing what google once promised: making the world's information accessible to everyone.

judge2020 5y ago
Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)
- perihelions 5y ago
  In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
    - perihelions 5y ago
      Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Jerry2 5y ago

I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day. My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about it. In a large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub. Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them. You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Nothing in this world is free. Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns. The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.
- esalman 5y ago
  Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.
  - gnulinux 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)

elcritch 5y ago

I'm a fan of Sci-Hub, but given multiple "clones" and the ever changing DNS names how does one verify this is the legitimate organization? It gives off a legitimate feel as most frauds don't tend to make new things. The BTC addresses I've seen on HN are different than the one on the page. Does Alexandra have a public key that could be used to provide a sig-validation? P.S. the main sci-hub.do page gives the same BTC as previous commentators list as valid.

NmAmDa 5y ago
I wonder what do you mean by sci-hub.do pag3 because the link in this post is referring to https://sci-hub.do/donate https://sci-hub.do/donate page.
- elcritch 5y ago
  The https://sci-hub.do/ https://sci-hub.do/ main page lists a BTC that matches what previous HN commentators have posted as a valid BTC address. The new "/donate" page has a new BTC which gave me pause. But my original question stands. It appears sci-hub has made a NFT based nft address? https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625 https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625
cyounkins 5y ago
The BTC address on the /donate page appears to be semi-random. This is the address I see on the main page of the .do and .st domains: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
- Kubuxu 5y ago
  It is most likely Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet, where the web server holds only public key and derivation seed. This way the private key doesn't have to reside online and you can generate as many addresses as you want.
  - remram 5y ago

goerz 5y ago

What I seem to be missing from that page is their “future plans” for when/if current (2021) papers will be available through Sci-Hub. In its current state, the site is essentially defunct.

kragen 5y ago
Most papers are from before 02021, and in particular most papers that are old enough to be widely cited. A lot of new papers are open access; sci-hub is most crucial for access to research from 15 or more years ago, and its coverage of that research is still fairly comprehensive. So "essentially defunct" is far from the truth from my point of view.

quink 5y ago

> legal status > Access to information and knowledge is a basic human right. Sci-Hub will fight those laws that make free exchange of infomation impossible. The project will eventually be recognized as legal I keep thinking about sensible ways of copyright reform. Ones that allow a balance between rewarding creators fairly and allowing use independent of quantity or subject area. The latest iteration I've arrived on in my head is a land tax at one end and at the other an Elo-like rating system that all the population participates in (but rate limited to some quantity x per year) to determine which works get how much funding, with participation rewarded with a fixed amount from the same pool (and the choices being randomly chosen, possibly with a bias towards interest areas though). This should make things independent of the wealth of the creator, that of the user, spamming works, encourage shipping, built-in review, minimise externalities, tax undesirable behaviour, make it independent of the government, be something that's implementable incrementally (opt-in at first), encourage broad participation in the creative process, have reliable and predictable funding mechanisms for new interesting science, be a simpler system than the current mess, remove how consuming more creative works is more expensive (which I think is a bad thing because it's regressive, and there's no incremental cost to producing copies of creative works these days, but creators need to be rewarded), etc., etc. And this would be applicable to all creative works, including open-source projects.

Ar-Curunir 5y ago
At least in the context of academic and scientific research, copyright is nonsense. Especially given that the ones that hold copyright (journal/conference publishers) do ~0 of the actual work behind the research.

gwicks56 5y ago

But people on Hacker News keep telling me Bitcoin has no genuine use cases? I'm confused.

heckerhut 5y ago
Pssht

distantsounds 5y ago

if they are going to ask for donations like this should at least detail out how much their expenses are. how much space does a clone of the content consume? what's the hosting situation look like? giving them crypto is pointless if they waste it.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Very happy to see Alexandra's future plans, strongly encourage support. For anyone still unclear of the benefit and value of Sci-Hub and similar literature distribution services: What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...

ilaksh 5y ago

Wish they had an ALGO donation option.

howtofly 5y ago

Is there an alternative way of donation? I want to donate to sci-hub, but DONT want to pay for cryptocurrency miners.

70rd 5y ago
Start buying ETH and donate it once the beacon chain merges with ETH1. Transaction fees will go to validators instead of miners.
sneak 5y ago
No, cryptocurrency payments are the only effectively uncensorable payment system in widespread use today. Perhaps cryptocurrency mining has more value than you thought.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wanderingmind 5y ago

To give an alternative viewpoint, imagine an open-source project like React being built in GitHub. The code is built, reviewed and maintained by developers for free. When the project is out of beta, if suddenly GitHub says it needs to be paid for anyone to access it and says the new license also prohibits anyone from sharing it. That's the kind of behaviour that we are tolerating with academic publishers.

helloworld11 5y ago

Those of you on this site who hate on crypto to an emotionally charged, dismissively reactionary degree, take note: How secure do you think SciHub's donations system would be if it depended on Paypal, credit card processing, Venmo or Stripe? You see? Crypto fanboy "to the moon" fanaticism and the criminal activities that bitcoin et al get used for aside, there are positive, defense-worthy use cases for blockchain currencies.