Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science

[smanzer]

Previous HN discussion (article has neat details of how sci-hub works): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074638

[dang]

There was another shortly before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11070192.

We're bending the rules not to treat the current post as a duplicate, but the community interest seems stronger than usual.

[nokya]

I am happy she is doing this. The price that paywalls are charging for accessing research papers is unacceptable: the money does not flow back to the researchers, nor to the institutions. Most of the paywalled research has been sponsored by taxpayer money and hence should be publicly accessible or at a very low "maintenance fee".

[mgr86]

I work at a small academic database as a developer. We charge a pittance compared to what a lot of the larger players in this market do. And I'm conflicted.

We are a registered non profit, and are actively losing money. Developer costs, of which there are only two. Building costs--I also shovel snow!, marketing costs, hosting costs, and much more. We have the workload where we would benefit from a staff 3 times the size. Currently we are at 12. Years ago we had a fully functional publishing operation too.

But here is the thing. These open access places often are pay to publish. This is built into many grants today. Publishing costs. But not so much in the field I'm in. The social sciences. So sure, the result of that work should be open access. I just cannot help thinking this takes away from what you could be paying one more lab or research assistant.

a lot of these pay walled sites are struggling to survive as library budgets dwindle. Maybe there isn't much room left for the little players. Many are bought up or have folded over the last 20 years.

[pervycreeper]

Simply by doing this, she has become one of the greatest single contributors to science as a whole in our era. Heroic.

[mooseburger]

She? Is there someone publicly affiliated with the project?

[travjones]

I've used sci-hub a few times. It's a little buggy and not every article can be accessed, but it works well enough to try when I'm not on campus.

$30 to read a single article is ridiculous anyway and presents a barrier to scientists who don't have, can't afford, or don't want to pay for access. I hope sci-hub stays up and improves for some time.

[Cyph0n]

If you're a student, your university likely has a proxy service that allows you to access journals from anywhere using your credentials.

My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever.

[qft]

Instead of paying the publishers, who contribute nothing to the work at all (remember they also charge us researchers hundreds of dollars just to get our work published), I'd rather donate the same $30 to sci-hub.

[tosseraccount]

Most papers have some to all public funding behind them. Even papers from Stanford and MIT.

Shouldn't the public have free access? We paid for them.

[freshyill]

No doubt $30 is expensive, but many journals do provide free access to their content in developing countries.

[korginator]

Elsevier made more than 3.5 billion dollars in revenue last year. They are trying everything possible to destroy open research. They were behind three bills in the US congress to prevent universities from providing access to pre-publication research. This is research that's been paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Companies with attitudes like Elsevier need to be buried.

[ChuckMcM]

It paints a bulls-eye on her back and its use of the term "piracy" to "free knowledge" doesn't flow well in western sentiments. While I get that the "booty" she is stealing are the fees that the journals would like you to charge, the acts she are creating are more like a librarian letting people check out books without a library card because she has an infinite supply of said books.

I am hoping that the rent-seeking behavior of the science journals can be used as the canonical example of how copyright can harm the common good.

By endorsing and upholding this egregious use of copyright, our elected officials are clearly causing more harm than good, and the perversion of the spirit of copyright, that an author is granted a temporary monopoly so that they might recover some of their investment, portrays this use as indentured servitude at best, and outright theft at its worst.

So while I don't think anyone is really "harmed" because Disney won't release the original Cinderella or employs measures to keep it from being copied. It is very much the case that by creating this barrier to scientific research, a person or group who might change the world in a positive way if they had access, is perhaps even unaware that there is relevant work that they cannot get access to. That is definitely a harm in my opinion.

So I hope that the narrative here, which has been dominated by big media for so long, might get some interjection of a more nuanced understanding of why copyright exists, and how to craft laws that embrace that spirit, rather then the rent-seeking interests of the people who live off the work of others.

[leereeves]

The narrative on copyright has been dominated by big media because every political narrative has been dominated by big media and big money.

Those of us who get information from relatively unfiltered and uncontrolled sources via the Internet have long had a different perspective on copyright than those who don't.

I too hope that big media's control of the conversation is coming to an end - but they won't lose that control without a fight.

[userbinator]

A long time ago (even before Aaron Swartz), when I was still familiar with the active and rapidly growing filesharing community of the time, I vaguely remember reading about an effort by some of the "ebookers" to plant proxies in various universities' networks that would perform much the same function. I wonder what eventually became of it besides the large paper torrents that appeared, but I wouldn't be surprised if SciHub was related to that in some way. Back then, systems were far more open (as opposed to secured), and something like that was easier than it is today.

[kanzure]

> an effort by some of the "ebookers" to plant proxies in various universities' networks that would perform much the same function

Yep they did that, it's called ezproxy.

https://github.com/kanzure/ezproxy-urls/blob/master/urls.txt

scihub uses this AFAIK.

[smanzer]

Good for them. For the last article that I published, the publisher "value added" consisted of highlighting all the all-caps names in my document and asking me to define them as acronyms. Literally the only thing they did, and it wasn't even right.

[tmalsburg2]

Oh, I get so much more out of the publishers: 1.) Long waits during which I worry that I'm going to be scooped. 2.) Lots of typos because Elsevier outsources printing to people who don't speak proper English. 3.) PDFs that do not render correctly in some PDF viewers.

[IshKebab]

Didn't they also hassle people to review it (for free of course). That's the only thing that would be a bit hard to replace by a totally free service.

[bpg_92]

Welp, I used to get books, papers and software from non-legal sources when I was in undegrad, because I just couldn't afford it, now that I make some money I buy most of this stuff. The thing is, without all those resources in the past I couldn't have made it to where I am now. Just my 2 cents.

[tripzilch]

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing here?

Say you need to research some scientific algorithm or other, you paid $40 per paper just to do that? There will be 3-5 papers that are must-read, so $120-$200. Then there's another 5-10 papers that are referenced in the former, you might want to check, just for the few paragraphs that are referenced, which may contain crucial elements of the algorithm you are trying to write (often not explained in full in the original papers).

Even if you have that money to spare, wouldn't your research be hampered by the choice you stand whether that one extra paper at $40 is going to be worth the money?

[coliveira]

Kudos to you, there is little respect these days for personal decisions in the area of information access. Pirating information is wrong, doesn't matter how you twist it. There is big difference between creating and promoting free content (great) and trying to break the law to access content that already exists and is subject to copyright law. After all, requesting payment is a deal between publishers and writers. By pirating copyrighted works you're not just breaking the right of publishers, but also the rights of millions of small content creators.

[yason]

Is there a tarball of the data somewhere that one could download, redistribute and host somewhere (on the darknet, assumedly)?

[cing]

Library Genesis, which also includes scientific articles and provides storage for sci-hub, provides a large series of dataset dumps as torrents, http://libgen.io/repository_torrent/

[cfcef]

There are occasional torrents, AFAIK. Hope you have 10tb of free space handy.

[aldanor]

I don't think that's feasible -- scihub requests articles directly from publishers (using legit accounts). Each requested article is cached by libnet.io, so articles are not re-requested twice

[Fizzadar]

Great to see a massive middle finger to the journal system. It's a disgrace and has to stop. Unfortunately I fear sites like this might entice more stringent protections for future journal published articles. The war continues.

[peterhuston]

In Norway there is free access to NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine and the Lancet (2 month delay). UpToDate, BMJ Best Practice and McMaster Plus is also free. See http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-oss/english for information about all included resources. You need to access these resources from a Norwegian IP to get access. From abroad, this can f.ex. be done through Tor if you define only exit through a Norwegian exit node.

[vixen99]

http://www.freefullpdf.com/#gsc.tab=0 is another useful site if you're a lone researcher who doesn't have taxpayers' money funding your literature search and can't afford (in some cases) $30-$40 to look at a published paper.

[aw3c2]

Surely that's the same corpus?

[slantaclaus]

This is what Aaron Swartz was trying to do, right?

[DennisP]

Allegedly. All we actually know is that he downloaded a large number of articles.

[yetanotheracc]

Speaking of moral courage, how does one contribute institutional login credentials to sci-hub?

[aargh_aargh]

Only guessing here - you don't provide login credentials, you provide a proxy host within the university IP range as IP-based authentication is still the most commonly used method for licensed databases.

[tim333]

May it continue. Perhaps science can go the way music has where in practice you can see most stuff for free.

[collyw]

At least some of the time that does happen (not nearly as much as it should IMHO). I moved from one scientific institute to another, and would often get requests from friends in the first place asking if I was able to download a paper for them.

[Eudyptula_minor]

As a student who is studying to become a Theoretical Mathematician, I hope Sci-hub stays open for many years ahead. In Finland, we have pretty good access but only if one is a student. Mathematics is so interconnected, that removing paywalls and any obstacles could help uncover breakthroughs by combining ideas from other fellow Mathematicians. I hope UN exercises Article 27 of Human Rights and aligns itself on the right side of history in order to better Science and to encourage curiosity in today's minds and definitely tomorrow's! Pardon my English. Thank you.

[drethemadrapper]

There is another service in the pipeline. I came across it very recently; it is in a public-beta phase. It appears to focus on providing access to all digital libraries and specifically serving the third-world or developing countries, mostly in Africa. It has got a different (business) model and uses some advanced technologies for provisions of the articles. Given that they intend subscribing to the publishers, there is no doubt that they will remain in business for as long as the publishers themselves exist.

The projects like sci-hub.io, library.no and libgen are highly commendable. It is no news that the third-world countries are destabilized by war, economic sanctions, e.t.c. perpetuated by the world powers thereby making them re-prioritize (access to) their resources. And it is not surprising that webrtc/p2p related services are often times blocked in the first world institutions with access to articles from those digital libraries. Such technologies/protocols/tools are defined/shaped (at standardization meetings - IETF, W3C, e.t.c.) by big corporations in order to preserve their own product offerings.

[dineshp2]

Sometimes we have no option but to break the law until what is considered illegal is made legal.

Storing research papers behind paywalls is absolutely ridiculous. The law literally prevents the development of science.

Having personally seen people benefit directly(for purposes of research) from this initiative solidifies my whole hearted support for sci-hub.

[max_]

How is this diffrent(better) from http://arxiv.org ?

[gavazzy]

Arxiv is by its nature open access; Arxiv does not charge for access.

On the other hand, the articles that this site hosts require payment to access. The journals typically charge $30 / article, or roughly $2,000 / year subscription.

Note that for both the open access or paid journals, researchers do NOT receive any compensation when users download articles. That is, despite the research being mostly paid by taxpayers, a PRIVATE company receives compensation for the work done by the researchers. Not only that, but the researchers have to PAY a publication fee, and that fee is higher if they want to allow open-access.

[cfcef]

Arxiv is a voluntary service where authors upload their own papers. It covers a few hundred thousand papers, probably, since authors have to know about it, want to use it, and have copyright service; it covers only a few areas of science where Arxiv use is in vogue, and only from the past decade or two.

Whereas, SH/Libgen acquire copies of tens of millions of papers from everyone everywhere everywhen.

It's the difference between a local library and the Library of Congress.

[andrepd]

Arxiv is a place to host scientific articles for free. Journals are institutions that scientists submit articles to, get them reviewed, published, and then charge a fee to access them. Sci hub takes the papers in the closed access journals and distributes them online for free.

Hope that made it clear.

[aldanor]

Arxiv doesn't let you access paid articles from Springer, Elsevier and the like

[srean]

Hope widespread knowledge about its existence does not kill it.

[oxplot]

http://libgen.io/ which archives the sci-hub's newly accessed papers distributes the copies through BitTorrent. Libgen itself is also mirrored in multiple locations. Even if Sci-hub is taken down, it shouldn't take long for another to pop up.

[germanier]

It's already at the receiving end of a lawsuit by Elsevier in New York. I doubt that more attention would change anything.

[calibraxis]

Partly depends on whether people organize to support it, I guess.