Hi all, I made this. I just received a notice from Zeit that they blocked it:
> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment: whereisscihub.now.sh
> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.
> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.
I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden attention.
While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit are not too happy about it.
The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].
Edit: I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once, and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access) journals: https://plaudit.pub/
Linking to "illegal" content is also illegal in some EU country's. Guides or software to get around their censorship is also "illegal" and linking to "illegal" content is ofter attacked under this rule.
You think they would realise how absurd the whole thing is when then have to resort to censorship of censorship.
What you did is not illegal at all, but the law doesn't really matter anymore, so I guess you have fallen into the "pissing off powerful interests" category, which is just as bad as doing illegal stuff. You should consider putting this up as an onion at the least, is quite helpful for some of us. Kudos:)
Hey Vinnl, would it be alright if I dm you? I think there’s a way to create your service using Handshake.org such that it can’t be shutdown.
For context, Handshake is a new project aiming to create a distributed certificate authority and naming system. Domain names on Handshake are very difficult to shut down, so you could have a sci hub domain on Handshake that continuously tracks the sci hub servers. Users would be able to always access sci hub from the same domain in this case.
I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. Research papers through sci-hub only helps to make knowledge easily accessible. Humanity's progress depends on people who shared their knowledge, not by people who use it as a tool to rule and hold on to power.
It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.
Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and anonymous.
Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.
They used to have a .onion address, which I assumed would continue to be the most reliable way in, but it's been down for a long time. I'm surprised, it seems like Tor would be the best way to remain up and accessible.
Sci-Hub is such a marvelous resource. I like to read research papers for fun sometimes but I'm, let's put it gently, no scientist. So it'd be a huge waste of money for me to pay the steep prices of scientific journal subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per month where I understand at most 75% of it.
However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that I could contribute to?
Scientists don’t get paid anything regardless of whether or not you pay a subscription/article fee to the science journals. The best thing to do to benefit scientists (usually) is to spread awareness of their work, as that is the main currency in academia that determines career advancement and future fundraising. Ideally you’re promoting it to other academics (so that they generate trackable citations), but general publicity also helps.
Those teams receive nothing from publishing either, other than CV credit and occasionally, a copy of the journal. Many of them put their pre-prints on academia.edu and often will email it to you if you ask.
It's complicated, but places like Wiley and Elsevier take much more than they give.
It’s not an answer to your question, but when you pay JSTOR or whomever, none of that goes back to the scientists. It’s not like royalties for an author.
Yes, don't feel bad, we'd never see it anyway. I agree with the proposals of the others, rather write an email to the corresponding author or a blog post about it.
Do not feel bad. You are the benefit. More precisely, your education is. We should try to maximize people's potential and share knowledge with everyone, who wants to learn, instead of hiding it behind paywalls.
Off-topic: I think it would be awesome to have a browser extension that collected HTTP codes as achievements, and you get a pretty little badge every time you run into a new code.
executing `curl -v https://whereisscihub.now.sh` shows an x-now-id header, which means that the request has reached Zeit Now servers and it's Zeit Inc who blocked it.
The sooner academic publishers die the better—not a very original thought, I'm aware.
There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community, and I think it comes down to two factors:
1. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.
2. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.
I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access, perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic publishing in months.
Just an arXiv with peer-review is not enough. There is a lot of room for innovation and improvement. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. Check out the last[4] article in that series. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[5] and MIT's PubPub[6] (it is the open source[7]). See also GitXiv[8]. See also the Publishing Reform[9] project. Moreover, there is quite an interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[10].
At least in astrophysics, the standard is to let your paper go through peer review first, then post the paper once accepted. In the arXiv comments, you then put "Accepted by <journal>". Besides offering the papers for free, the arXiv is the main "news feed" that astronomers use (much more convenient than having to check all the different journals). Imo this system works quite well. There's indeed papers posted that are not yet peer-reviewed, but these you read with a more skeptical view.
The large number of submissions is indeed a problem for other fields (I think mostly computer science?). I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. A voting system (where you see a mix of new and popular submissions), together with some content filtering, can help the reader. However, this would probably lead to some important papers getting burried.
I'm not convinced they are fully useless. Eg even an anti-vax person will understand that academic publishing has some solidness, even if they think it's'the establishment'. Explaining to a layman what arxiv does and how solid or not solid science on the site is is a lot more difficult.
In libgen, you can search for stuff and find books/docs that match the query, but unfortunately that appears to not be possible on sci-hub, which is inconvenient.
That said, both are incredible resources for academics, researchers, students or even folks just wanting to read up on a subject in more depth than Wikipedia has.
PSA for those looking for access to research papers. If it's hard to find via scihub/libgen, you can also email the authors. No researchers want their work to be inaccessible, they just need to publish in journals for visibility/prestige.
Source: have research publications, always happy when someone reaches out
> Dear customer,
Due to a warning in accordance with Section 81 (1a) UrhG / preliminary injunction / court decision, access to this website had to be blocked.
As academics, your institution is paying publishers to get access to journal (and you may loose access to electronic versions if the institution stops paying contrary to paper versions), you write papers for free, you review papers for free, you are part of the editorial board of the journal for free (or some crumbs for travelling to a conference), as an editor you spend most of your life managing people for a really small stipend compared to the time spent. People still do it because they believe it is useful. But current openaccess solutions that cost sometimes $5,000 are not a solution either. In both options the publishers is making the money and the researchers or their institution have to pay... There are legitimate concerns about scihub from some librarians as it doesn't allow a correct attribution of funds to ressources that are needed by researchers and there are some concerns of researchers credentials being stolen and shared (willingly and not) by scihub but also less reputable actors. University libraries are struggling with credentials reuse as they are the ones that get punished by the publishers with ban of ips or full institutions and harder contracts negotiations. Talking about those negotiations, they are all confidential, despite often using state or federal funds there is no way to know how much, what and how these secret deals are negotiated. So we still don't have a good solution. Preprints are useful, but we had already too many publications to skim through and the fact that anybody can publish anything with no filters makes finding meaningful information much harder....
Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required to access it.
As we can see by the fact the above URL is currently not working, there's a high risk associated with the centralized nature of sci-hub. It's already been the target of a major court case in the US and the only reason it's still running is because the site and it's founder (Alexandra Elbakyan) are outside of the court's jurisdiction. But there's still a chance it could disappear one day, and what sort of impact would that have on the productivity of researchers, many of which will be unable to access the articles they need?
The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.
For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those.
If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have.
As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...
As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.
Which comes from the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, wherein society goes awry to the point of publicly funding the destruction of valuable information. It's also the temperature paper (books) burns at.
Nobody actually uses this status code, despite it being an official spec. I'd like to think the dev or dev ops person who configured this server used the status code as a minor protest. The spec authors would be proud.
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment: whereisscihub.now.sh
> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.
> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.
I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden attention.
While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit are not too happy about it.
The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].
Edit: I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once, and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access) journals: https://plaudit.pub/
[0] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/
[1] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/issues/9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
[3] https://sci-hub.now.sh/ (though also hosted by Zeit)
[+] [-] Cenk|6 years ago|reply
I ended up removing the links because I didn’t want get into more legal trouble with Elsevier. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606362
[+] [-] dangerface|6 years ago|reply
You think they would realise how absurd the whole thing is when then have to resort to censorship of censorship.
[+] [-] pirate_dev|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sabas_ge|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troquerre|6 years ago|reply
For context, Handshake is a new project aiming to create a distributed certificate authority and naming system. Domain names on Handshake are very difficult to shut down, so you could have a sci hub domain on Handshake that continuously tracks the sci hub servers. Users would be able to always access sci hub from the same domain in this case.
[+] [-] dragonsh|6 years ago|reply
It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.
Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and anonymous.
Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|6 years ago|reply
They used to have a .onion address, which I assumed would continue to be the most reliable way in, but it's been down for a long time. I'm surprised, it seems like Tor would be the best way to remain up and accessible.
[+] [-] mstaoru|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shpx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WilTimSon|6 years ago|reply
However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that I could contribute to?
[+] [-] suchire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boldlybold|6 years ago|reply
Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.
[+] [-] ebiester|6 years ago|reply
It's complicated, but places like Wiley and Elsevier take much more than they give.
[+] [-] praptak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|6 years ago|reply
I don’t know if that makes you feel any better?
[+] [-] kaybe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelphirkalt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] palijer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrethegiant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arlk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gitgud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vinnl|6 years ago|reply
Zeit did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412405
[+] [-] p0llard|6 years ago|reply
There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community, and I think it comes down to two factors:
1. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.
2. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.
I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access, perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic publishing in months.
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...
[2] https://www.overleaf.com/
[3] https://arxiv.org/
[4] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-...
[5] https://authorea.com/
[6] https://www.pubpub.org/
[7] https://github.com/pubpub
[8] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer...
[9] https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion
[10] https://polyplexus.com/
[+] [-] wdobbels|6 years ago|reply
The large number of submissions is indeed a problem for other fields (I think mostly computer science?). I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. A voting system (where you see a mix of new and popular submissions), together with some content filtering, can help the reader. However, this would probably lead to some important papers getting burried.
[+] [-] pergadad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahuldottech|6 years ago|reply
That said, both are incredible resources for academics, researchers, students or even folks just wanting to read up on a subject in more depth than Wikipedia has.
[+] [-] boshomi|6 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20200225000142/https://whereissci...
[+] [-] eyegor|6 years ago|reply
Source: have research publications, always happy when someone reaches out
[+] [-] ufo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsb|6 years ago|reply
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whereisscihub.now.sh
Sending HugOps to everyone at Zeit trying to keep 99.99% uptime for now.sh at a time like this
[+] [-] Rauchg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bithavoc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glenneroo|6 years ago|reply
> Dear customer, Due to a warning in accordance with Section 81 (1a) UrhG / preliminary injunction / court decision, access to this website had to be blocked.
[+] [-] adtac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexanderchr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjonnh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] why_only_15|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judge2020|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adtac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required to access it.
[+] [-] covertlibrarian|6 years ago|reply
If you have the disk space and bandwidth, I would strongly encourage you to participate in this torrent seeding effort: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...
The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.
For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those.
If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have.
As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...
As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.
[+] [-] processing|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MacsHeadroom|6 years ago|reply
Nobody actually uses this status code, despite it being an official spec. I'd like to think the dev or dev ops person who configured this server used the status code as a minor protest. The spec authors would be proud.
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
I wonder if they had hobbyists in mind when they built that site.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply