For those who support sci-hub's mission and would like to help ensure it can never be taken away, you may be interested in the following project to lay the groundwork necessary for a widely-replicated, decentralized version of the repository:
All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library genesis project and made available as torrents. Currently there are just over 80 million articles included in these torrents. The total size of the archive is around 70TB. The link above also refers to the library genesis books collection, which is 33TB.
This effort has seen tremendous interest in recent weeks; the books collection (libgen) is now widely replicated, but around a third of the scimag articles collection (i.e. those from sci-hub) has only 1-2 reliable seeders and needs more before it can be considered safely backed up. If you have the resources available, I would encourage you to consider assisting. Previous discussion of this project is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222
Looking forward, the next step is to find a suitable way of providing accessible, truly decentralized access, without relying on a single point of failure (i.e. a web interface). Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism, but there are many ways this could be done. This is a challenging but important problem to solve; with the data available, there is now an opportunity for developers to address the access issues. There may come a day when the sci-hub website goes offline, and it would be good if a fallback is already in place at that point.
Aaron Swartz may no longer be with us, but his spirit lives on. It's now up to us to carry on the fight for which he paid so dearly.
It's still extremely raw, but I've done some work on decentralized access to sci-hub. Given an index of scihub ID <> DOI which can be generated from the DB dump made available by libgen https://github.com/frrad/scimag it's possible to selectively download only the parts of the torrent required to get the article you are looking for.
Except everything after "Looking forward," is still an open research problem.
> Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism
IPFS has no anonymity, so individual nodes could be attacked the way individual torrenters got sued back in the day.
> but there are many ways this could be done
There are currently no scalable ways this could be done. If there were you wouldn't have a single bold researcher providing a single point of failure search engine that hops to some other location each time authorities shut it down.
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked).
Publishers don't prey on individual users, they prey on universities. They try to get them to pay for journal access. Non-academic clients? Not profitable enough for us, go away. Scihub threatens this business model, because universities may decide to stop paying that money because Scihub exists. It's much more convenient than bothering a random person to provide you a paper or inter-library loan which makes this an actual risk to them.
The current business model of publishers is predatory and harms science more than it helps, but I see self publishing and private open source initiatives as equally problematic. The definitive long-term solution, in my view, is a centralized public repository, like the Library of Congress. Call it the Federal Scientific Repository or the National Research Papers Database. It would be funded by Congress, or the LoC, and peer review would still occur. But the process of publishing papers in journals with editors and letters to the editor, as well as the environmental and financial expense of printing thousands of paper copies of these publications and shipping them to universities around the country, will cease. The hundreds (if not thousands) of thick volumes on the shelves of university libraries are never consulted by anybody - researchers use the Internet - and take up too much valuable space. It's time the research world catches up.
>Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans.
This may sound tinfoil hattish, but ever since I was in school i've believed it's to keep knowledge out of the hands of the poor. Accessing journals is basically out of the question for ordinary people, unless they go to a university library, or spend money they're not going to spend, almost all reporting on science is complete and utter garbage that at best, gets most of the facts wrong, at worst misrepresents or distorts the article being reported on completely.
I don't like making blanket statements, but i've noticed, many people lack even basic knowledge of scientific methodology and almost see it as a black voodoo magic or something. Average people have no real way to verify scientific claims made by media even if they wanted to.
I have to be honest too, going through school, this attitude was prevalent among my teachers, that scientific knowlege was best left to scientists to interpret for average people. Everything around science has a 'it's our special club' thing going on designed to trickle only what information scientists and authorities deem necessary.
Hell, the data from my own project was locked away by the government behind a paywall, despite it being funded by tax money under the stipulation in our grant that our results and data would all be made publically accessible and we were only studying small mammals.
Science, especially publically funded science, should be available for everyone. I've never agreed with the idea of hidden knowledge. Human progress comes from humans learning and sharing knowledge with eachother. Keeping knowledge locked up for a special elite cripples the progress of humanity.
Journals cost the general public access to science while having an even more questionable value than most copyright holders who at least bother to do things like remaster their old properties or develop new drugs. May they burn in hell.
Sci-hub means I can read the latest science about my disability without $40 paywalls on top of a mediocre paper which give eye-poppingly low margins to the actual authors. Papers which ironically often discuss how society makes disability a problem by throwing unnessecary barriers in front of the disabled. That yarn on about how the disabled lack autonomy over their own healthcare.
Zero margins. Scientific authors get exactly zero money from academic publishers. In fact, sometimes it's negative money (the journal charges you to publish, i.e. if it's open access). Zero or negative. They get exactly zero dollars of that $40-per-article fee. Which is why authors will often GLADLY give you the article for free if you email them.
Scihub is in a legal grey area (not really legal, so I can't technically advocate for its use in my position), but in a way it's automating the normal process of asking researchers for a copy of the paper, thus saving the researchers' time. (Researchgate is a more legal version of this, but with much less access to papers.)
,,I do not, however, contribute anything to the system; I free-ride off their criminality''
The writer has to constatly remind me that running the proxy is a crime, but using it - even if she knows that it's not the legitimate way to get the information- is not.
This may be true, still I don't like the tone, as clearly sci-hub is providing the huge value to people, not her.
I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used in practice faster because of sci-hub.
To be frank when people using "..., and that’s OK" they pretty much lost me. It implies the person thinks their value judgement on the matter is somehow universal - which it just is not.
I use sci-hub - others can decide for themselves to use it - but I'm not going to say others should think it is okay or not okay if I use it - the value judgements of most other people regarding my actions is not something that I care about a lot.
> I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used in practice faster because of sci-hub.
Seems like it'd be difficult to precisely estimate the effect of open literature on advancing education, research, and development efforts.
Back when I was a student, we had access to a lot of journals -- but not all of them. And to use them, we had to connect through a laggy VPN to the university, as we often traveled; sometimes it was down. And then when we worked with industrial partners, we couldn't just email them relevant papers as that'd have been illegal. And we couldn't even just email each other papers, as I think the terms-of-use required us to independently download articles.
And, again, that was with university subscriptions! Rising students and professionals who go into industry typically can't access articles at all. Sure, if they really need a specific paper they can try to find a way, but that's a horribly inefficient way to do research; to be effective, a researcher really needs to be able to browse through the literature freely, reading lots of papers without being distracted by technical barriers.
Given that the current system slows down everyone, it's hurting all of us. All of science, technology, engineering, medicine, whatever -- it's all less than what it could've been because we're being held back.
But how do we quantify the on-going harm? How can we guess what sorts of inventions weren't made because researchers didn't have access or were fighting with a buggy VPN? How do we guess at how much education's being held back by students not knowing how to access the literature before college? What about all the damage from working professionals not being able to browse the literature related to their field?
Anyway, yeah, the article's constant references to Sci-Hub, as though it's somehow criminal, were definitely jarring. Sci-Hub feels like it should be legal based on the same sorts of arguments that make self-defense or providing emergency assistance legal.
I don't use sci-hub, but the framing "Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads" presumes something: it presumes that without sci-hub, ASA journals would have thousands of more downloads.
This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist.
As I don't use it I can't say if this might be accurate, though.
Sci-Hub helped me identify the appropriate life-saving drug for my disabling illness. I could barely sit up and now I'm walking around. It's going through FDA approval very slowly, so I just buy it from a manufacturer from China.
might be worth looking in to split tunneling if you can do it. my other solution for this at a previous job with an annoying multi-network setup was to have a vm run the vpn and then squid proxy anything i need out to the main host.
It’s not enforced by police but if you’re doing science or engineering then the biggest employer in your field might be the government (DoD etc.) It’s not all that rare for people to get denied security clearances because of excessive piracy and that would make it way harder for you to be employed.
This is a huge part of the problem with having laws on the books that just aren’t always enforced.
For context, the author is an American sociology professor who serves on the American Sociological Association's committee on publications.
He recently came out in opposition to the ASA's official stance rejecting a proposed federal mandate to make all publicly funded research available open access. The ASA joined other scholarly associations in opposition such a mandate.
Good, fuck the journal aggregators. Speaking as someone who has published papers, I'd happily (and do, via ResearchGate) give them away for free. I made the noob mistake of putting them up on my own website before being shouted at by an editor for giving away the 'product' for free.
I'm all for journals, I appreciate there's a cost to keep them going but large publishing aggregators who take your work for free and have the cheek to make you jump through hoops for the privilege deserve to collapse. The paradigm is old and broken.
> Article 25fa of the Copyright Act (Taverne Amendment) allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles & book chapters), regardless of any restrictive publishers' guidelines.
> The maker of a short scientific work, the research for which has been paid for in whole or in part by Dutch public funds, shall be entitled to make that work available to the public for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.
Consider also the value of SciHub that you have received already: It has made the authoring of Review papers much easier, and probably improved their quality since you can parse hundreds of papers faster. No longer do I have to worry if the publisher's site is accessible from home, if their website is not down, if i'm gonna have to click 10 links to get the pdf etc etc. A click of a bookmark and PDF is downloaded. Literature reviews are already hard as it is (with articles being pdf and unhyperlinkable), paywalls just made it double as hard.
Normally you get access automatically when you're on any machine connected to the campus network. Most schools also have a proxy server or VPN you can use off-campus. The Zotero browser plugin does a good job for me of automatically detecting resources that can be proxied and redirected so things work pretty seamless for me off-campus as well.
Journals and papers should be obsolete. New results should be entered into an AI system containing the existing body of knowledge on the subject and which can rapidly evaluate whether the new result is consistent with, contradicts or extends existing knowledge. It would also evaluate plausibility, reproduceability, methods and materials, plagiarism, etc.
Haha if that existed the AI could just emulate infinite monkeys on typewriters to create papers it could then filter for the plausible, reproducible ones to publish. Hm, maybe it would have to adversarially train the emulated monkeys into monkey researchers to get better throughput.
Seriously though our beloved AI doesn't have reliable object permanence yet. It can't read now and it certainly won't be reading research papers for a while. Be nice, give it some time to grow.
[+] [-] covertlibrarian|6 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...
All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library genesis project and made available as torrents. Currently there are just over 80 million articles included in these torrents. The total size of the archive is around 70TB. The link above also refers to the library genesis books collection, which is 33TB.
This effort has seen tremendous interest in recent weeks; the books collection (libgen) is now widely replicated, but around a third of the scimag articles collection (i.e. those from sci-hub) has only 1-2 reliable seeders and needs more before it can be considered safely backed up. If you have the resources available, I would encourage you to consider assisting. Previous discussion of this project is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222
Looking forward, the next step is to find a suitable way of providing accessible, truly decentralized access, without relying on a single point of failure (i.e. a web interface). Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism, but there are many ways this could be done. This is a challenging but important problem to solve; with the data available, there is now an opportunity for developers to address the access issues. There may come a day when the sci-hub website goes offline, and it would be good if a fallback is already in place at that point.
Aaron Swartz may no longer be with us, but his spirit lives on. It's now up to us to carry on the fight for which he paid so dearly.
[+] [-] frrad|6 years ago|reply
Check it out, contributions welcome. https://github.com/frrad/skyhub
[+] [-] jancsika|6 years ago|reply
> Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism
IPFS has no anonymity, so individual nodes could be attacked the way individual torrenters got sued back in the day.
> but there are many ways this could be done
There are currently no scalable ways this could be done. If there were you wouldn't have a single bold researcher providing a single point of failure search engine that hops to some other location each time authorities shut it down.
[+] [-] m-p-3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply
I'd love to seed. I even have the space for quite a lot but seeding illegal content in Germany is a big nono.
[+] [-] selfishgene|6 years ago|reply
Has anyone proposed naming an "information making free" service after him yet?
[+] [-] rodarmor|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GlitchMr|6 years ago|reply
Publishers don't prey on individual users, they prey on universities. They try to get them to pay for journal access. Non-academic clients? Not profitable enough for us, go away. Scihub threatens this business model, because universities may decide to stop paying that money because Scihub exists. It's much more convenient than bothering a random person to provide you a paper or inter-library loan which makes this an actual risk to them.
[+] [-] _fizz_buzz_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryKissinger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
This may sound tinfoil hattish, but ever since I was in school i've believed it's to keep knowledge out of the hands of the poor. Accessing journals is basically out of the question for ordinary people, unless they go to a university library, or spend money they're not going to spend, almost all reporting on science is complete and utter garbage that at best, gets most of the facts wrong, at worst misrepresents or distorts the article being reported on completely.
I don't like making blanket statements, but i've noticed, many people lack even basic knowledge of scientific methodology and almost see it as a black voodoo magic or something. Average people have no real way to verify scientific claims made by media even if they wanted to.
I have to be honest too, going through school, this attitude was prevalent among my teachers, that scientific knowlege was best left to scientists to interpret for average people. Everything around science has a 'it's our special club' thing going on designed to trickle only what information scientists and authorities deem necessary.
Hell, the data from my own project was locked away by the government behind a paywall, despite it being funded by tax money under the stipulation in our grant that our results and data would all be made publically accessible and we were only studying small mammals.
Science, especially publically funded science, should be available for everyone. I've never agreed with the idea of hidden knowledge. Human progress comes from humans learning and sharing knowledge with eachother. Keeping knowledge locked up for a special elite cripples the progress of humanity.
[+] [-] TheOperator|6 years ago|reply
Sci-hub means I can read the latest science about my disability without $40 paywalls on top of a mediocre paper which give eye-poppingly low margins to the actual authors. Papers which ironically often discuss how society makes disability a problem by throwing unnessecary barriers in front of the disabled. That yarn on about how the disabled lack autonomy over their own healthcare.
[+] [-] Robotbeat|6 years ago|reply
Scihub is in a legal grey area (not really legal, so I can't technically advocate for its use in my position), but in a way it's automating the normal process of asking researchers for a copy of the paper, thus saving the researchers' time. (Researchgate is a more legal version of this, but with much less access to papers.)
[+] [-] joelthelion|6 years ago|reply
You mean exactly 0? Authors are almost never paid to publish in a journal.
[+] [-] xiphias2|6 years ago|reply
The writer has to constatly remind me that running the proxy is a crime, but using it - even if she knows that it's not the legitimate way to get the information- is not.
This may be true, still I don't like the tone, as clearly sci-hub is providing the huge value to people, not her.
I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used in practice faster because of sci-hub.
[+] [-] ailideex|6 years ago|reply
I use sci-hub - others can decide for themselves to use it - but I'm not going to say others should think it is okay or not okay if I use it - the value judgements of most other people regarding my actions is not something that I care about a lot.
[+] [-] _Nat_|6 years ago|reply
Seems like it'd be difficult to precisely estimate the effect of open literature on advancing education, research, and development efforts.
Back when I was a student, we had access to a lot of journals -- but not all of them. And to use them, we had to connect through a laggy VPN to the university, as we often traveled; sometimes it was down. And then when we worked with industrial partners, we couldn't just email them relevant papers as that'd have been illegal. And we couldn't even just email each other papers, as I think the terms-of-use required us to independently download articles.
And, again, that was with university subscriptions! Rising students and professionals who go into industry typically can't access articles at all. Sure, if they really need a specific paper they can try to find a way, but that's a horribly inefficient way to do research; to be effective, a researcher really needs to be able to browse through the literature freely, reading lots of papers without being distracted by technical barriers.
Given that the current system slows down everyone, it's hurting all of us. All of science, technology, engineering, medicine, whatever -- it's all less than what it could've been because we're being held back.
But how do we quantify the on-going harm? How can we guess what sorts of inventions weren't made because researchers didn't have access or were fighting with a buggy VPN? How do we guess at how much education's being held back by students not knowing how to access the literature before college? What about all the damage from working professionals not being able to browse the literature related to their field?
Anyway, yeah, the article's constant references to Sci-Hub, as though it's somehow criminal, were definitely jarring. Sci-Hub feels like it should be legal based on the same sorts of arguments that make self-defense or providing emergency assistance legal.
[+] [-] logicallee|6 years ago|reply
This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist.
As I don't use it I can't say if this might be accurate, though.
[+] [-] wavepruner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type-2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ailideex|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilakar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m1gu3l|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|6 years ago|reply
Is there seriously anyone not employed by the giants (Elsevier, Bertelsmann et al) who opposes sci-hub?
[+] [-] danmg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
It’s not enforced by police but if you’re doing science or engineering then the biggest employer in your field might be the government (DoD etc.) It’s not all that rare for people to get denied security clearances because of excessive piracy and that would make it way harder for you to be employed.
This is a huge part of the problem with having laws on the books that just aren’t always enforced.
[+] [-] jboynyc|6 years ago|reply
He recently came out in opposition to the ASA's official stance rejecting a proposed federal mandate to make all publicly funded research available open access. The ASA joined other scholarly associations in opposition such a mandate.
The author recently discussed his stance on The Annex podcast: http://sociocast.org/podcast/the-paywall-and-the-asa/
[+] [-] mr_gibbins|6 years ago|reply
I'm all for journals, I appreciate there's a cost to keep them going but large publishing aggregators who take your work for free and have the cheek to make you jump through hoops for the privilege deserve to collapse. The paradigm is old and broken.
[+] [-] throwaway41968|6 years ago|reply
Sarcasm aside, that title is waaaay loaded. It sort of insinuates sci-hub users are the burden and not the journals.
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|6 years ago|reply
With all the people using Sci-Hub, I wonder if it is becoming possible to make legislation to either or both
* Declare Sci-Hub and its practices legal outright, and make it the new normal.
* Carve out extra protections for open access to science in general.
[+] [-] throwaway41968|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
It's not exactly what you mention, but most Dutch researchers are legally allowed to freely share their work six months after publication: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/you-share-we...
> Article 25fa of the Copyright Act (Taverne Amendment) allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles & book chapters), regardless of any restrictive publishers' guidelines.
> The maker of a short scientific work, the research for which has been paid for in whole or in part by Dutch public funds, shall be entitled to make that work available to the public for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.
[+] [-] TheOperator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rectang|6 years ago|reply
I'm not sure to what extent this helps, but it's at least possible to hyperlink to an individual page in a PDF.
https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf#page=2
[+] [-] gexla|6 years ago|reply
I have never used these services at a University. Do they even require a login? Or do you get automatic access just from using a terminal on campus?
[+] [-] michaelmior|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Merrill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolc|6 years ago|reply
Seriously though our beloved AI doesn't have reliable object permanence yet. It can't read now and it certainly won't be reading research papers for a while. Be nice, give it some time to grow.