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Sci-Net
- A_Duck 1y agoWhy must crypto infect everything good? Is the incentive even necessary? It would be worth testing if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act
- tux3 1y agoIt has already been tried without a reward, there are dedicated channels where you can go to request or fulfill requests (e.g. Nexus has these). But it's a bit of an endless chore for a person to do, there are always more requests coming. It helps one person, but it doesn't really feel like efficient use of your time when it's a drop in the ocean. I'm not thrilled with the crypto token thing, but it's good to see new things being tried. The worst that can happen is it doesn't work, there's not much to fear from this particular initiative. The worst they can do if it turns bad is... publish scientific articles.
- A_Duck 1y agoFair enough — didn't realise it had already been tried and it wasn't working without reward. That's not mentioned in the article but does make sense. There's still a good argument for sci-hub to stay fully non-commercial. Let's see where it goes. It's not clear if Sci-Hub themselves stand to make any money from this. If they do, the worst that can happen is that their incentives are distorted from being a highly-regarded community resource to maximising the number of manual uploads.
- Medicineguy 1y agoTbh, I like it! Yes, crypto has a bad taste. But from my pov, the research paper situation is so broken, that anything that improves upon the status quo is highly welcomed. But I'm with you with the penalties. Maybe they can add an option to forfeit the tokens to sci-net instead.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- littlestymaar 1y ago> Is the incentive even necessary? I don't know how “necessary” it is, but I strong doubt that it will be helpful at all, as the monetary incentive is a great way to attract malicious behavior (like spamming with AI-generated papers to farm rewards, or whatever works, really).
- cge 1y ago>I also wonder if this will make the penalties for uploaders more severe since it becomes a commercial act It's not clear whether this is even using a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency arrangement (assuming that would actually be private). What this appears to be presenting is a system where users will be pay, and be paid, to violate copyright, in a way that may well be easily traceable and linkable to real identities, and, for US users, likely even needs to be reported on tax returns even when just paying. The 'cup of coffee' statement entirely misses the point: the nature of the process changes when payments are involved. Added to that are statements saying that they have systems to remove watermarks and protect the identity of users. If they're envisioning this being something researchers and students contribute to, that watermark removal system is likely to fail on many occasions, and people are potentially going to get themselves severely hurt. I often feel like academic publishing and paper availability is somewhat of a cold war between researchers and publishers, where researchers practically need to violate copyright to research effectively, while publishers can't pursue those violations too severely, or they risk researchers ostracizing them, so we end up with unspoken understandings of acceptable violations. But a system like goes entirely outside of acceptable boundaries. If a publisher came to a university and said, hey, this researcher put up the final copy of their own paper on their personal website in violation of copyright, the university might tell the researcher to replace the copy with a manuscript one. If a publisher comes to a university (or the police) and says they can show concrete evidence that one of their students is being paid through a foreign criminal organization to knowingly violate the terms of the university's subscriptions and likely criminally violate copyright, it seems like it could have a very different outcome.
- StableAlkyne 1y ago> publishers can't pursue those violations too severely A decade ago the publishing system harassed a researcher because he was downloading too many papers, going after him for millions in copyright "damages," only stopping proceedings after he ended his own life. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
- cge 1y ago
- setgree 1y agoIf there was every a ready-made use case for crypto, it's this. Alexandra Elbakyan is both a criminal in most places and a hero to many [0]. I want her to keep doing what she's doing, and that means someone probably has to pay her to do it. The whole point of Bitcoin is to make money permisionless, i.e. the right tool for this particular job. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-student-behind-sci-hub https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-s...
- jsheard 1y agoEven if crypto is the only viable way to do this, doing it with their own memecoin instead of something that's already well established is a massive red flag. That means they can easily pre-mine vast amounts of their token for effectively nothing and then cash out by selling them all at once when the price peaks. Textbook shitcoin rug-pull.
- freeone3000 1y agoIsn’t that… also good? If you want to fund the project, isn’t that a very good way to send someone(the organizers of the shitcoin) money in an efficient and untracable way? The indirect market forces avoid the downfalls of Monero (not accepted) and direct BTC transmissions (traceable), and since it’s a pre-mine, it avoids the “splash damage” of a more common commodity. Doing a sci-hub pump-and-dump is almost ideal as a fundraising vehicle for sci-hub.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> If you want to fund the project, isn’t that a very good way to send someone(the organizers of the shitcoin) money in an efficient and untracable way? The Sci-Hub meme coin does not take privacy and untraceability very seriously, thus potentially putting lots of its user in danger. :-(
- stavros 1y agoYeah but it's kind of like if I'm buying a Sci-Hub gift card, or loading my Sci-Hub wallet with some balance. If you want anonymity, use Monero, it would have solved all the issues here. Sci-hub could even take a cut, which personally I'd have no objections to.
- Mistletoe 1y agoCrypto is money in the future. You may as well have asked why must money infect everything that is good. Money is condensed time, the most valuable commodity in the universe.
- beeflet 1y agoA lot of bitcoiners like to fool themselves into thinking that bitcoin is some form of energy. That's not the case: you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy. In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. The most valuable thing in the world is actual time. Money is just a poor man's substitute.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy Use bitcoin to pay your energy bill (e.g. gas, electricity, ...). > In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time. Partially, you can: - Hire a maid to do household chores instead of having to do them yourself - Hire employees that do various aspects of your daily job - Buy some expensive medical treatments that give you a few more years - Buy healthy stuff, and have a healthy lifestyle; invest money in your wellness - Less of a necessity to work lots of hours a day, i.e. have more free time
- beeflet 1y agoIt's worth discussing. This is true, you can use bitcoin to buy someone else's energy. Energy is largely fungible. But the whole economic system you are describing has a net loss of (free) energy. What is that other guy going to use the bitcoin for? Buy energy from someone else? The bitcoin network uses energy to provide security for transactions. It's a transfer of wealth from the owners and users of bitcoin to the miners in the form of inflation and fees, respectively. Somewhat analogous to fiat currencies in some sense. In order for bitcoin to be worthwhile, the economic activity it enables must outweigh its cost of security. The energy spent on bitcoin isn't valuable itself, it just enables the security of something that is potentially valuable. Similarly, you can use money to buy someone else's time. Unlike energy, time is not fungible, however. It's true that you can outsource parts of your life, but how much can you outsource? I enjoy cooking for myself, I don't know if I would outsource that. Many parents pay a lot for childcare when they would rather spend more time with their children if the conditions allowed. I think it's a common trap to spend your life working at something you dislike so you can pay others to do other things you don't like. There's also an upper bound to the amount of free time we can gain through this exchange. In any case it's important to appreciate the mundane things. Investments in your health at a young age can be incredibly profitable. But there comes a time when those investments produce greatly diminishing returns. I don't consider it a bad thing, I think it's quite beautiful. Time is the great equalizer. We're all gifted with the greatest fortune at birth and it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.
- alphazard 1y agoEconomics always matter. All we have is our time, and if you want people to do things or act in a certain way or otherwise use their time in a way that benefits others or you, then you need to align their incentives. For small/upstart projects, cryptocurrency is the best way to create economic incentives at the present moment. And you can blame regulations and poor financial infrastructure for that.
- logifail 1y ago> if there are enough scientists who are keen to promote information sharing in their field without some minimal reward I have two published papers from way back when, and thanks to the glorious broken incentives of academic publishing, I'm not even allowed to distribute my own work legally. Most (even ex-)academics hate this crazy system with a passion, I know I do. There's no need incentivise people to share academic papers, most people with access are only too ready to do so.
- _bin_ 1y agoI am a major hater of many (most?) crypto applications, which should tell you something since the idea of a decentralized currency outside state control is one that deeply appeals to my principles. But this is one of the better applications I've seen. Running centralized infra for this specific case is extremely difficult and, generally speaking, it makes sense to give people the option to express to willingness to pay for what's essentially a priority request. This isn't pay-for-access, it's "I'll offer some reward for you to get the paper now, after which it is still accessible to everyone." My big quibble is with the implementation: there really doesn't need to be a sci-hub memecoin. Monero is purpose-built for this sort of thing. Use Monero (or zcash, I suppose.) Easy litmus test: if a DNM opened up that only supported transactions in its own "memecoin", how many people would take it seriously? Zero.
- Chinjut 1y agoAre these papers returned back into sci-hub? I don't quite follow why it seems like there's now two different repositories of papers.
- amarcheschi 1y agoif i understood, it becomes part of sci hub but i'm not sure
- kome 1y agoyes, it's written
- jarbus 1y agoWhy not just use Anna's archive at this point?
- yreg 1y agoIt's better to have redundancy with these things. I would rather see both Anna's archive and SciHub stay operational.
- mdrzn 1y ago"On Sci-Net, you're using tokens directly to reward uploaders. Payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform." I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
- Medicineguy 1y agoI think you right. But researchers can upload their own papers. Seem to require a paying requester and the researcher has to notice the request.
- volemo 1y agoWhile I agree this is phrased in somewhat misleading way, I think by "fellow researchers" they ment "researchers like you, user, who believe and participate in liberation of science", not "the researchers, who authored the paper you're trying to pirate".
- kome 1y agothe point is not to pay researchers (lol), but to encourage uploaders with karma points, while paying for sci-hub infrastructure...
- karaterobot 1y agoThey make it very clear they aren't taking a cut. The quote in the linked page is "payments go to fellow researchers, not to the platform."
- dns_snek 1y agoThey don't need to take a cut of the transaction because they'll effectively own a significant part of the token supply. They make their "cut" whenever someone buys their tokens.
- 1y ago
- tokai 1y agoWhy even use sci-hub anymore? With the lack of updates, instability over petty stuff like naming a wasp after the founder, etc. I don't see why anyone would use sci-hub over Anna's Archive.
- krastanov 1y agoYou should have started, not ended, your post with "Anna's Archive" ;D I did not know of it, which is why I used scihub.
- Maxion 1y agoBecause I didn't know of anything better.
- yreg 1y agoIn case Anna's archive goes down, plenty of people will be glad that SciHub exists. And vice versa, of course.
- xk_id 1y agoAnna’s archive is a mirror, hosting the original Sci-hub collection (i.e papers published up to a few years ago). There would be no Aa without sci-hub.
- spiderfarmer 1y agoAre there any successful crypto adjacent projects that do well outside the crypto-sphere? As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo. But maybe I'm biased.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Luc 1y agoNumerai? Though I'm not so sure - their coin seems to have lost a lot of dollar value since I last checked. https://numer.ai/ https://numer.ai/
- antognini 1y agoEven so, the AUM of the underlying hedge fund has been going up. They've stopped publishing the fund's performance, though, so it's a little unclear if the increase is due to good performance or if they've just attracted more investors.
- dns_snek 1y agoSaying that most crypto projects end up failing is about as interesting as saying that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The vast majority of projects fail in general.
- acureau 1y agoYet it's obvious why it's stupid to say that everyone who lives in the mountains ends up dying. The majority of projects fail, but we see successful projects all around us. I don't see any related to cryptocurrency. In fact, I've only ever seen them adopted as speculative investments.
- dns_snek 1y agoThat's really beside the point here, from GP: > As soon as I notice the word crypto, I think the project will go the way of the dodo. Their belief is that a project is more likely to fail because it's associated with cryptocurrency. You can challenge that belief by asking yourself whether Sci-Net would be more or less likely to fail if it tried to accept cards or Paypal instead.
- Probiotic6081 1y agoAlmost unrelated, but this is one of the domains that just show up as "Server Not Found" by default to users in Germany. It's getting blocked by ISPs on the domain level after a "voluntary agreement" with copyright holders: https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-reinforces-paywall-with-sci-hub-blockade-in-germany-240403/ https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-reinforces-paywall-with-s...
- bibelo 1y agosame in France it seems
- aleph_minus_one 1y agoLearn to setup your own DNS resolving infrastructure (or, if you need an ad-hoc solution immediately, learn how to use a different DNS resolver).
- Probiotic6081 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- perihelions 1y agoHold up, doesn't this turn SciHub into a vehicle for transferring currency to its Russian ownership, and therefore to the Russian state? Is that not a feature of this cryptocoin? Obligatory "I love SciHub and what it's accomplished for millions of people". But whatever Elbakyan's person character, she is still a citizen of a country that's at war. edit: I'm not accusing Elbakyan's character or ideals in any way. Modern Russia is a state that functions like a mafia, that shakes down and extorts anyone with a whiff of money on them. Elbakyan lives in Russia—is subject to immense criminal pressure. It's a neutral observation that any windfall profits from a major coin-minting end up not funding servers, but funding the Russian army. Only a naïf could dispute that.
- leelou2 1y ago[dead]
- RankingMember 1y ago> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting. Nah, that will ensure a huge swath of users can't/won't access, as they don't have the time/inclination to figure out the crypto aspect. Some will rebut this with "but they're getting it for free!", but a huge part of the value proposition of sci-hub.se is the ease of use- even people with legitimate access to an article used sci-hub because it's simply a smoother interface. This kills that.
- kotaKat 1y agoThis. I went looking for a paper for the first time in forever and thought to go to Sci-Hub and was encumbered with whatever this crypto system is, confusingly. This process isn’t “interesting”, it’s hot bullshit confusion.
- troyvit 1y agoI think that also works in the favor of Sci-hub though. > I regularly receive requests from Sci-Hub users to help them download some paper that cannot be opened through Sci-Hub. The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused. The opposite also happens: users ask whether they can upload to Sci-Hub some paper that they have bought or downloaded via university subscription. Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. Papers that they can automatically scrape will still be there as always, this is just to handle those special requests that need a human. If the user can't or won't set up a coin then they don't want the paper badly enough. I mean heck they can always go buy it from the journal.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources. The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database: > https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-sci-hub-stop-uploading-papers https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-... This is actually the reason for the huge increase of the number of requests as the article explicitly admits: > "The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused." > https://sci-hub.se/sci-net https://sci-hub.se/sci-net
- karaterobot 1y agoIt seems like this coin mechanic is just for people who want to request specific articles that aren't already on Sci-hub, and those who upload requested papers. So, for everyone who doesn't want to engage with that system, there's no change, right? I hope so, because it sounds dumb.
- bhy 1y agoIt require token payment for invitation codes, however the current implementation is frustrating. It generate a QR code for mobile wallet, but there's no way to pay from a browser wallet, which I suppose is more commonly used in web3.
- beeflet 1y agoThis is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it. > The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting. "Interesting" https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif
- Retr0id 1y ago> designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator Isn't benefiting the creator an explicit purpose/benefit of this system? (i.e. to fund the continued operation of sci-hub)
- eimrine 1y agoBenefiting the system is way more imporltant.
- beeflet 1y agoYes, but that should be done in a way more transparent way (donations, fees, etc.) than manipulating the tokenomics of the coin out from under you.
- Retr0id 1y agoI thought the taxation vs inflation point you made in an earlier edit of this comment was a good one, did something make you change your mind to remove it?
- beeflet 1y agoNo, I just thought it was too long and distracted from my initial point. I can't edit it back, but for anyone else interested it was like this: "In the same way it's better to fund public services by taxing things directly than by inflating the currency because it's easier to manipulate the metrics for inflation than to manipulate direct taxation, and the taxpayer ultimately needs to make sense of what they're paying for in a democracy."
- frainfreeze 1y agoIt's nexus and telegram bots these days. Don't fall for sci net.
- dns_snek 1y agoI've never been able to get anything provided by Nexus bots (or Lib STC which I believe is the same project?). I'm sure it works for some people but I probably tried on 5 or 10 different occasions at this point and it never worked :( Anna's archive is my go-to these days.
- Mathewnaquin80 1y ago[flagged]