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Sci-Hub statistics and database
- pxtail 5y agoIt's kind of ironic twist of fate and disgrace that something like SciHub needs to be hosted/served from Russia in order to avoid getting squished and destroyed by rent seekers greedy hands.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gdy 5y agoIf anything is a disgrace it's your russophobic comment. Alexandra Elbakyan, who created SciHub, was born is Kazakhstan (exUSSR) and later studied in Russia where she lives now. I'm proud that Russia is one of the few countries on the planet where American exterritorial law doesn't apply.
- trasz 5y agoI'm not sure the preceding comment was actually rusophobic. To me it seems you're mostly in agreement in that this content needs to be hosted somewhere safe from the US. It's just that you are proud - because it's hosted in your country - and the previous person is annoyed, because it cannot be hosted in theirs.
- gdy 5y agoBut 'disgrace'?
- p1esk 5y agoInteresting. Medical field dominates research in terms of publications. Chemistry produces double the papers compared to physics, and humanities are smaller than biology but larger than physics. I wonder where machine learning papers fit in - CS or Math or both?
- sgillen 5y agoI would imagine it depends on the particular paper, the more experimental ones in CS, the more theory ones in math. Do note though that most math and ML practitioners use arxiv over sci-hub.
- remuskaos 5y agoIt is note worthy that most of physics (at least high energy physics) ist published on arxiv.org and open access. I don't know if sci hub bothers with publications that are available freely from an official source.
- p1esk 5y agoGood point. If so, this data is a lot less interesting :(
- philipkglass 5y agoSci-hub will grab and serve anything with a DOI (or at least used to; I don't know if they have started ingesting papers again after turning it off a while ago). I have found open access papers there before. It's simpler to just paste the DOI into sci-hub than to check to see if it's one of the few open access articles in a mostly paywalled journal.
- anon_123g987 5y ago> published on arxiv.org and open access Don't use the term "open access" like this. A paper published on arXiv is free to read, and was freely published. "Open access" is a scam by the big publishers, where they don't take money from the readers, but make the authors pay. Or, putting it another way, anyone can pay their way in those journals and publish (sometimes sub par) papers.
- nicoburns 5y agoNo, "open access" means that the paper is available to readers for free. Making the authors pay is typically termed "gold open access".
- mmettler 5y agoAlexandra should get the Nobel prize.
- allisdust 5y agoWith the rent seeking companies being from Europe? Not a chance. Nobel is a political tool that's mostly there to make a point (especially that peace prize).
- anon_123g987 5y agoHe said "should", not "will". Both of you are right.
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- The_rationalist 5y agoHow come we don't have extensive software for helping doctor decision making by making use e.g of bayesian inference while feeding on the available superintelligence that enable those 24 millions paper? Expert systems long passed the hype curve and it's time for them to cycle up again!
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- nefitty 5y agoI think Watson does something like this.
- roywiggins 5y agoIt didn't seem to actually work though. https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failure-artificial-intelligence.html https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/ibm-watson-health-failu...
- monkeybutton 5y agoI wonder how many years that sets back the field. Who will want to invest in something that could end up being Watson 2.0?
- dagw 5y agoDid Watson fail because they where bad at their job or because the problem is much harder than people assumed?
- nefitty 5y agoI think the marketing got ahead of the tech. I would classify that as a business failure.
- pmoriarty 5y agoIt's interesting how sci-hub's papers on medicine dwarf those in many other fields like comp-sci, math, and physics. I wonder if that reflects the number of papers in those fields, or if sci-hub just has a non-representative sample. If the latter, why?
- p1esk 5y agoIt does appear to be the latter. I just searched for several famous ML papers (attention is all you need, lottery ticket hypothesis, capsules, etc) and they are not there. I think if someone counted all papers that have been ever published anywhere, the picture would be a lot different.
- pmoriarty 5y agoSo does that mean that vastly more people in medicine use sci-hub than do people from other fields? Or is there some other reason for the discrepancy?
- p1esk 5y agoCould be. I've been an ML researcher for 8 years and I haven't used sci-hub until today. Ironically one of my (very obscure) papers is available there.
- Qem 5y agoI guess today is much easier to find new noteworthy, publishable facts in medicine than physics. New diseases are discovered every year, and old diseases are poorly understood (e.g Alzheimer disease), and the treatments for many of them are still sub-optimal, or even inexistent. Every patient is different, individual cases are research-worth. We only got antibiotics in the 1940s. On the other hand, most big breakthroughs of physics happened between the 17th century and the first decades of the 20th century. After the general case is cracked in physics, individual cases have very little publishing value.
- lucb1e 5y ago
- ok123456 5y agoWhat's the most popular paper on all of scihub? By field?
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agoi asked this question here and at many places before. why do people "rely" on an organization that sifts through hundreds of thousands of papers and then charge exorbitant prices for providing this service? if we use the amazon analogy, is amazon with millions of products worse than a boutique cat food seller that specializes in a specific cat food for a specific cat breed? maybe. but what about the "rest" of products? why are our scientists made to rely on elsevier et al to sift through the junk and find for them the perfect paper instead of doing it themselves? is science now such a cutthroat quick competition that it requires you to give a company the priviledge to work for you so that you dont have to do your own due diligence? in india, we have a lot of local research that is done on open databases like shodh ganga and many more. but if you have to access foreign research material, better luck your university has an agreement with elsevier and others to pay them millions for a login. the alternative, go to scihub and find what you need. i understand the whole quality/delivery debate but doesnt the average user already know who the big players in the specific domain are and who are trusted? or you want discoverability at the hands of a "trusted third party" without doing the legwork yourself. then at the other end you have non-academics like me. I might have heard of a research paper in some article and i cannot read it without paying an arm and a leg. why? if we use the whole ebook/book argument that compensation is commensurate to the sales so more popular book means more money to the author but here authors arent compensated but elsevier so why should i pay elsevier? because they filtered through 1000 papers to provide 10 and for that privilege, they require unlimited royalty for ever? why?
- slater 5y agoThere's some truth to "publish or perish". Scientists are expected to publish in prestigious journals.
- Qem 5y agoNot only expected, but actually forced. In many places, a streak of a few years with no publications in prestigious journals can unrecoverably sink a researcher career.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
- nefitty 5y agoHere's a notebook that fetches Sci-Hub mirrors from Wikidata and tests them. I also included an iOS Shortcut to add to your Share screen. When you're on a site that Sci-Hub recognizes and you use the shortcut it will try to fetch the paper. https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub
- belter 5y agoIt looks like the torrents have all subjects. Anybody aware if there are torrents only for Math or Comp.sci ?
- modeless 5y agoDid Sci-Hub start working again? Last time I checked it wasn't adding new papers because of some legal thing going on in India.
- phoe-krk 5y agoYes - see https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1492419986291408898 https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1492419986291408898
- Ansil849 5y agoThe site is working in the sense of you can download old papers, but I don't believe any new papers from the last year are accessible.
- DoItToMe81 5y agoI accessed a paper from late last year not so long ago. I think it's working fine.
- Ansil849 5y ago> I accessed a paper from late last year not so long ago. I think it's working fine. It is not. A large batch of new papers was added manually, but the old service of typing in a DOI and having a paper be retrieved automatically is not working. Pick 10 random DOIs from 2022 and see how many Scihub will return.
- lamontcg 5y agoAFAIK its not really working again? I think there was an upload of a bunch of papers in a batch recently, but not ones that I was hoping for. I'm sort of worried about the past-tense language in this page suggesting that it isn't starting back up again.
- aurizon 5y agoIf only the Nobel Committee would say:- The Nobel Committee will only consider research published under an Open Source Access repository in reviewing published papers for consideration for the Nobel Prize after ~~ June 30, 2022. This would unleash a horde of hungry cats among those fat pigeons that are the paywalled journals. There would be a crying and wailing - ending with piles of feathers,(and purring cats), and researchers all over the world, and especially in the many 'third world' Universities whose minds are currently held hostage to budgets and local politics. The world would gain immeasurably by this simple act!
- Ansil849 5y agoIs there any word about when sci hub is going to start adding new articles again? It's currently only useful as an archive of old research articles. New papers from the last year are not available. I never understood the rationale for stopping new content, though I believe it had some relation to some court case in India...but I don't understand why that was a reason to stop adding articles, and why it hasn't been restarted yet.
- joshuaissac 5y agoThey had resumed adding articles after receiving legal advice that the Delhi High Court injunction only applied for a few months. https://mobile.twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1434356217208623106 https://mobile.twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/143435621720862...
- Ansil849 5y agoI saw that tweet, but it doesn't change the material reality: try plugging in some DOIs from recent article from the last year, and they will not be there. Scihub used to be a great resource, now it's only a resource for old research. Still useful for background material, but not for current work. I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian. There doesn't seem to be any actual reason to stop adding new articles, other than some idiotic halfbaked point that only hurts the people who need the articles, like when Project Gutenberg banned anyone from a German IP, except this is much worse since there is no way around it for people who need new papers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joshuaissac 5y ago> I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian. Because Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning the case. The court in question has previously backed a very broad definition of what constitutes fair dealing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rame...
- gw67 5y agoHow they are able to store data without being seized?
- gumby 5y ago100 TB is pretty small. I wonder if she will start torrenting it so people can back it up and share the load.
- logifail 5y ago> 100 TB is pretty small. I wonder if she will start torrenting it so people can back it up and share the load This has been ongoing for a while now: Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: We are the library 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_...
- gumby 5y agoExcellent, thanks!
- beambot 5y agoIPFS or ARWeave...?
- raziel2701 5y agoAlexandra Elbakyan is a titan and a saint. I couldn't have been able to finish my research without access to papers my institution wasn't subscribed to.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- OmicronCeti 5y agoI snuck her into my own dissertation acknowledgements: https://imgur.com/bDgtBAE https://imgur.com/bDgtBAE
- silvercove 5y ago
- jdrc 5y agoNow i feel foolish for not acknowledging her, especially in elsevier papers.
- OmicronCeti 5y agoPretty sure journals wouldn't allow it, but who's going to read my dissertation anyway (:
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ahmed_ds 5y agoIsn't it fantastic that we are alive and seeing the resurrection of the great library of Alexandria right before our eyes? She has done more than any other organization or individual in the history of mankind when helping people in second and third world country pursue advance research since the advent of internet. Well she and the people who pirate and distribute MS Office. Faculties around the world recommend scihub as the main and only source of research and journals.
- intunderflow 5y agoRemember to donate to sci-hub to keep it going! Even a small donation helps and is way more than the extortionate prices we'd all have to pay without it :D
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- derbOac 5y agoI have to be honest and say this is the one time crypto has made a lot of sense to me.
- KyleLewis 5y agoI hope more disciplines can shift the publishing culture towards the norm found in physics, where arxiv is the go to. I'm not sure why that is the case but it's pretty great.
- silvercove 5y ago
- aurizon 5y agoThe publishers now encode their papers with individual identifiers, that generationP calls UUIDs on all pdf's. That means they can trace it back to the institution(and perhaps the actual prof?) They have then sent nastygrams to threaten them with fees or loss of access to the institution - potentially serious punishment. What is needed is a way to run the papers through an OCR recognition program to create renewed text and to further process to randomly vary a large number of adjacent letter spacings. (this is called 'micro kerning' and it allowed a second order of unique document recognition where the document is scanned by the journal to look for these fractional kerning gaps in the letter spacing which can lead back to the institution). I suppose a program flow could be made to OCR + random micro kerning changes - it would take time, but once set up it would be a rapid computer based document flow process. Photos/charts could be sanitised as well, but legends etc on them would also need OCR and micro kerning adjustments. With 25 words of text, each with 6 letters, micro kerning can easily create 10,000 unique ID's, easily enough to cope with all subscribed institutions - and that is on one chart/photo. I suspect the subscribing institutions have acted with firm words to their profs and grad students to block this. This can easily be told to us if a few people in assorted institutions let us know if they have been read firm words about this? I am not sure how Sci-hub can get past this, unless they get a good Indian court ruling and can use Indian friends to scan printed copies of journals - if they exist in this online age?
- robwwilliams 5y agoNo “firm words” that I heard in my neck of the USA woods. I was struck by very low number of German downloads. Did I miss something?
- aurizon 5y agoNo idea about Germany, but they may well be more law abiding?
- medstrom 5y agoNo, that's absurd. More likely a different factor. Some googling and lo and behold: starting with Germany, the universities of several European countries cancelled their agreements with Elsevier, pressuring Elsevier to give them better deals, including open access by default. I imagine it lessens the need for Sci-Hub.
- sockaddr 5y agoAnyone notice the logo update? The key loop has been exchanged for a hammer and sickle.
- lucb1e 5y agoI did not, that's somewhat interesting (not hard to explain if you read the about pages, though). It's also well within the domain of politics and that seems to be something HN generally avoids.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dankle 5y agoGetting 403 Forbidden. Did my isp block it, or it this an error on their end?
- periheli0n 5y agoSci-hub is sometimes the last resort to obtain a resource that is otherwise unobtainable. But what has become of the old way of obtaining unaccessible papers: Ask the authors for a copy? Sites like ResearchGate make this very easy. And often a simple email does the job, too. Advantages: * It is legal * The author gets feedback that someone out there reads their research * Making direct contact to your peers is a good thing.
- abcc8 5y agoIt's too time consuming and has an undefined likelihood of success. People will naturally flock to alternative methods, such as sci-hub, that are faster and until recently were near guaranteed to have the desired content.
- periheli0n 5y agoAgreed, sci-hub is so much more convenient. But when the publishers finally shut it down for good, we'll have to find another solution. A community of scientists sharing their papers would be a good thing already now. I personally know active scientists who don't even try anymore to look up the paper, but rather go directly to sci-hub for any doi they need. I can understand why, but I also think that this doesn't lead to a sustainable publishing culture.
- nottorp 5y ago> It is legal Are you sure that the usual suspects don't make authors assign copyright or at least distribution rights? I wouldn't put it past them...
- periheli0n 5y agoI have signed quite a few of those copyright transfer forms, and there are always a clause that would allow sharing on a personal basis.
- yellowcake0 5y agoExcept a researcher could easily need to skim 30+ papers in a day, this is not a solution.
- machiaweliczny 5y agoIt's shame that US or EU don't run open DB for journals that every university should be able to publish as back-up. Also they could create some tools to make research more productive that's free to use. That we have to rely on single person effort that's risking their freedom to do so is fucking insane.