I wish I had Sci-Hub as a teenager. Many times I was interested in some algorithm, but got presented with Elsevier's "you shall not pass" page. Very frustrating to know the knowledge exists but being unable to access it with no recourse.
For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field.
But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.
When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely?
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
I would also say that the blooming "bookz" (ebook scanning) community around a decade ago was instrumental in making much knowledge accessible, especially to those in poor or developing countries who wouldn't be able to afford even a single book or access to a library with them.
Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...)
I feel obliged to point out that a 17 year old and/or an interested amateur absolutely has the option of emailing the author, and will find most academics very responsive. I concede though that they may not be aware of the option, or might find it intimidating.
> don't even know they exist
That's the worst part. In truth, the 17-year-old amateur has most of the same options (especially library and asking the author). But it might never occur to them that the library will have it, or that the author will happily email them a copy.
> In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.
And a screenshot of some of the search results on science direct, beautiful. Plus I'm imagining the blog writers grinning with glee when they were provided/discovered this.
Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:
Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects.
This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.
it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.
> We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible!
Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.
The publication infrastructure should be implemented and funded by the governments, preferably, as part of some international agreement to share the costs. The only valuable service that traditional publishers do provide is acting as a trusted authority that verifies publications. The rest (distribution etc) is already provided almost at no cost by the internet. Apparently, when there's such an oligopoly of few for-profit organizations, there's no good for anyone except them. Since a big part of research is paid by the taxpayers' money, they have the right to replace the dysfunctional market with a niche communism and run their own government publication agency.
I have so much that I want to say about this - but beyond all the politics and moneyed/tenured interests holding back change, I can see that Jupyter notebooks are the disruptive innovation that will force publishing to modernize. People I work with are producing notebooks that fuse text, formatted equations, code, and interactive figures in a way that looks and feels like a top-quality paper. Except with this paper, you can reveal the code that produced each figure, probe and alter the analysis methods directly, and download the raw data behind the figures (it's an attribute of the plot object! Imagine that!). This format will win. It's too useful and solves too many problems not to win. The only question is whether academicians have the foresight to build in a decentralized DARE I SAY blockchain/smart-contract-based peer review system to circumvent the rent seeking publishers.
In computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier, but CS has always been more free.
As a non-academic who is interested in reading academic articles (and doing personal research), sci-hub is a blessing for those of us without university affiliation and access.
Sci-Hub is so much more convenient than attempting to find things in my university's library system. There are browser plugins that let you click on DOI links, taking you directly to a pdf of the relevant paper.
For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.
Worked at a university dealing with this some years ago, the publishing companies blocked our IPs on regular basis because they had detected "hacked student accounts"
Then we had to block them and swear they changed password before they unblocked us.
They said that it was Chinese phising emails that tricked students to give up their password.
If you dont know, a couple of years ago almost everyone accessed the publishers sites thought revese proxies at the school, so sci hub collected accounts and proxied you thought them, dont know if its still the case.
We used this software called ezproxy, Think it was pretty common.
Also pretty sure many students gave away their passwords freely, based on that nobody seemed that surprised/worried when we said their accounts was compromised.
I work at a University and frequently need to read papers. I can only access the manuscripts on campus or through a VNP. That is way too much hassle, which is why I love Sci-hub. Sci-hub makes it easier to access the manuscripts than the providers themselves.
Why are the authors of the papers giving rights to Elsevier? If the papers are being peer reviewed for free, why doesn’t SciHub corral the reviewers and allow authors publish directly to SciHub.
Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those published by any named journal.
It's unfortunately detrimental to one's academic career to not publish in the most "prestigious" journal one can. This results in researchers publishing in closed journals either to try and maintain their own careers or due to pressure from their department as a way of looking more attractive in grant applications.
Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing career/department suicide by allowing this to happen.
Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from the trenches until this situation changes.
What is the best way for me to access Sci-hub? Does it cycle through domains? If so, what is the best way for me to access the most up to date URL. Is there a UNIX command line method for doing this?
Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I would say the real danger is third party using other people's research to pocket billions and denying legitimate access of the research to millions and billions of people. That's extremely dangerous.
[+] [-] orlp|7 years ago|reply
For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the author or other people in the field.
But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.
[+] [-] tschwimmer|7 years ago|reply
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
[+] [-] userbinator|7 years ago|reply
Now, LibGen serves a similar purpose (but there's lots of stuff elsewhere that it doesn't have either...)
[+] [-] n4r9|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marvy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
You find a local university library that has those or you write the author of the paper
[+] [-] kgwgk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
Damn, I am impressed!
[+] [-] crtasm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] confounded|7 years ago|reply
Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really nice things about it is that it uses open standards (regular unauthenticated HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:
And instantly get a local copy of the .pdf. It's a hacker's dream![+] [-] komali2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisamiller|7 years ago|reply
This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.
[+] [-] _rpd|7 years ago|reply
Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivan_gammel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DEADBEEFC0FFEE|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miketery|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plaidfuji|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edanm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alejohausner|7 years ago|reply
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
[+] [-] JadeNB|7 years ago|reply
The arXiv (http://arxiv.org) has a good claim on allowing one to extend this "more free"ness to math and many of the physical sciences, too.
[+] [-] ahnick|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dorchadas|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] messe|7 years ago|reply
For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.
[+] [-] elektor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimnotgym|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] votepaunchy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OisinMoran|7 years ago|reply
https://bookmarkify.it/9864
[+] [-] apazgo|7 years ago|reply
Also pretty sure many students gave away their passwords freely, based on that nobody seemed that surprised/worried when we said their accounts was compromised.
[+] [-] Cenk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jostmey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flibble|7 years ago|reply
Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those published by any named journal.
[+] [-] jacoblambda|7 years ago|reply
Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing career/department suicide by allowing this to happen.
Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from the trenches until this situation changes.
[+] [-] Biqh1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psychometry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsomctl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amthewiz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akerro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwise666|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devoply|7 years ago|reply
Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I would say the real danger is third party using other people's research to pocket billions and denying legitimate access of the research to millions and billions of people. That's extremely dangerous.
[+] [-] wolfgke|7 years ago|reply
I see no problem in a profit motive. I see the problem that countries enforce censorship via violence (I am talking about copyright laws).
[+] [-] Pica_soO|7 years ago|reply
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