You don't, though if they were, it's very unlikely they would be doing it in bulk for every file, since someone would notice at some point, either by inspecting the file or notice that a file when downloaded to a canary system misbehaves.
Targeted attacks might be possible based on the file contents or using a side-channel to ID the downloader; meaning only specific targeted users would get the malicious files.
Either way, being able to hold Sci-Hub accountable as this source would be important.
> Why would it matter? If you're using it, you already don't care where you're getting the paper from, only that you're getting it.
How can you exclude that case that Alice does care where she gets the paper from, but she simply cannot afford it from the original source?
Or how can you exclude the possibility that Alice wants a version of the paper that does not embed a watermark that makes her or at least the setting (e.g. university, IP address) that she downloaded the paper from identifiable. I can witness myself that Elsevier embeds such information into paper downloads.
This is not the solution to our problems with scientific publishing. Academics need to stop complaining about Elsevier et al. and submitting to their journals at the same time. Institutions need to stop awarding funding and giving jobs to the people who publish in the most glamorous journals. We all need to stop obsessing about silly publication metrics.
Free distribution of existing research is part of the solution.
You're right that academia is full of perverse incentives that need to change, but it's not clear how we get from where we are now to the end of "publish-or-perish". There's a need for large-scale coordination and construction of alternatives with the support of funding agencies. Suggestions beyond "individuals will sacrifice their own career standing for the greater good" are what we need to gain the strength of those individuals who are not in the most idealistic portion of the research community.
Agreed. It needs to start with the funding agencies, NIH, Wellcome Trust, HHMI, etc. Like the Gates Foundation recently did, they need to make it a requirement that you must publish in immediate open-access journals. I'd further like to see the journal not getting as onerous copyright claim but baby steps.
The people with the money need to put their money where the public interest's mouth is. Certainly not where Elsevier's mouth is.
I've read somewhere that the funding agencies fear that less scientists will use their funding money if they have such requirements. No idea what the source was, but could this be one of the reasons they are reluctant?
You would think this. But actually institutes can be quite selective about what grants they take. (Usually the individual researcher would take whatever they can get)
The biggest example has to do with the NIH "indirect rate". The system, incredibly, is set up so that the larger a proportion of an institute's funding comes from NIH, the more money per grant goes to the institution. "Indirect" refers to the fact that each grant comes with "direct costs" that go to the scientist and "indirect costs" that goes to the institute, and the "indirect rate" determines the amount, expressed as a percentage of grant direct costs, that goes to the institute. This dumb system results in institutes discouraging their own investigators from applying for non-NIH grants.
At my institute if you take a non-NIH grant you have to actually "pay back the difference" in lost funding for the institute that is caused by non-NIH grants lowering the institute's indirect rate.
I specifically referred to NIH as one the funding agencies that needs to take a leadership role for publishing policy. So this comment isn't super relevant to my original comment.
This won't work. The only way is the hiring committees don't judge the candidates' work on which journal published. But at as dire as the current job market nobody will have the time to go through this tedious task.
Nope. The chicken and the egg starts where the money starts. If all the candidates' papers are in immediate open access journals (like the Gates Foundation is mandating soon and hopefully NIH will follow), then hiring committees won't have vanity journals as the signal.
No one suggested that we stop publishing. Instead we have to publish in open access journals, even if these don't give us as much prestige as the established science tabloids (as Andrew Gelman calls them). Either that or we stop whining about the evil publishers. They are only as evil as we allow them to be.
Basically, if part of the scientists (you don't expect everyone to do that, do you?) will stop to publish in prestige journals, and the other part will, who do you think will have more research opportunities, grants, collaborations, etc.?
I mean are you ready to decrease an impact of your discovery and opportunities for future work, just to make a statement?
What the academic publishing world calls "theft", the rest of us call "research". Why Sci-Hub is so popular.
Because it works. It delivers information and knowledge to those who need it.
Because information and knowledge are public goods. As CUNY/GC says, an "increasingly unpopular idea",1,2 but an absolutely correct one.
Because it democratises information.
Because much the world cannot afford to pay US/EU/JP/AU prices for content. Including many of those in the US/EU/JP/AU. And most certainly virtually all outside. Billions and billions of people.
Because the research is (often) publicly funded, conducted in public institutions, and meant for the public.
Because information and markets simply don't work. Deadweight losses from restricted access and perverse incentives for publication both taint the system.
Because much the content, EVERYTHING published before 1962, would have been public domain under the copyright law in force at the time, and much up through 1976 and the retrospective extensions of copyright it, and multiple subsequent copyright acts, have created.
Because 30% profit margins are excessive by any measure. Greed, in this case, is not good.
Because the interfaces to existing systems, a patchwork fragment of poorly administered, poorly designed, limited-access, and all partial systems are frankly far more tedious to navigate than Sci-Hub: Submit DOI or URL, get paper.
Because unaffiliated independent research is a thing.
Because the old regime is absolutely unsustainable. It will die. It is dying as we write this.
Because the roles of financing research and publication need not parallel the activity of accessing content. Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (1937, ), a paper which should be public domain today under the law in which it was created and published, and should have been by 1991 at the latest, but isn't, tells us why: transactions themselves have costs.
Because journals no longer serve a primary role as publishers of academic material, but as gatekeepers over academic professional advancement. This perpetrates multiple pathologies: papers don't advance knowledge, academics are blackmailed into the system, and access to knowledge is curtailed
Because what the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research".
I use Sci-Hub extensively, it's one of a few of my go-to sources for information, which I'm using in large amounts (1000s of articles and books) for an area of large and broad scope.
Others includie BookZZ / Book4You and LibGen, both also democratising information in opposition to the copyright cartel.
The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and a number of largely special-purpose archives also serve my needs, but the simple truth is that a large and comprehensive archive is itself useful on account of reducing search and access frictions. As the US Library of Congress discovered when it became the largest book collection in the United States in the early 20th century, and hence a magnet for scholars. It might not have everything, but odds were good that it had any particular thing. Shoe-leather costs being somewhat higher for trekking between Cambridge, MA and DC in those days than navigating through websites is today.
What's truly pathetic is that oftentimes its the indices themselves which aren't online. I've been stymied repeatedly in trying to access old periodicals because there are no generally available indexes that don't require academic affiliation or on-site access.
The frustration de jour is in trying to find access to several works published between 1920 and the 2...
At least for publicly funded research, there is no need for anyone to pay. Normally, the theory of copyright is that a creative person has to put food on the table, so they need to be paid. I acknowledge this is a tough problem in the case of actual full-time authors and musicians. But researchers are ALREADY paid by grants, certainly not (lol) by sales of their manuscripts. Want to know why academic publishing has high margins? Because they get their product for free, including even editing and reviewing services.
However, academics do sometimes sell books. It is actually much closer to theft to download an academic book than an article because the money does go to the author.
I don't know about details, but if you enter a book URL (e.g. at Springer Link) into Sci-Hub, it sometimes also brings you to the corresponding page at LibGen. So I would assume that there is at least some collaboration between these two sites.
I can't find a better source, but sci-hub's wikipedia page [1] says that new articles are accessed through educational institution proxies and then stored in libgen for future access.
It's funny that the reason that most scientific journals quote for charging for papers is because they spend time and effort reviewing the research -- but we all know how big of a problem unreproducible research is.
I've never heard that excuse. They don't spend time reviewing the research for most journals. At least in my field, the time and effort reviewing research is spent by faculty peers for free.
The editors of the journal are the ones selecting the reviewers. It is a small community, if you are a good reviewer, the chance that your own papers get accepted is getting up because of course, the editor will find the right reviewers for your papers...
Source: I review papers (pretty irregularly) on Elsevier journals and my supervisor was/is editor of such journal.
I sometimes wish researchers were organized enough to "strike" and stop reviewing papers for a period of time.
Since the papers not being reviewed would include our own papers, that'll never work. Plus Prisoner's dilemma (or whatever theory I'm thinking of). Plus, they could be criticized for effectively "blocking cancer research" etc.
Uhm, people like me review the research, i.e., unpaid anonymous peer reviewers from the academic middle field. Not even the editor in chief is paid for this very time consuming job, at least not the ones I know who are editors in chief and area editors for major Springer journals.
Most journals nowadays do not even do basic linguistic editing but instead let the authors choose highly expensive services for it. They expect you to deliver a camera-ready copy based on their LaTeX or Word templates and then send it to final copy editing to India. (Source: My own experience with very nice and professional Indian copy-editors, and I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with sending articles to India for copy-editing, of course.)
Just a heads-up that the self-installed plugin uses an extension update_url that points to an http endpoint and the extension is unsigned (hence developer mode) - so it would be easy to hijack the update process
You're probably better off installing the alternative in the Chrome web store (search sci-hub)[0]
I found this domain a week ago or so when the sci-hub.cc url redirected to moscow.sci-hub.ac (which had a 403 error, yet prompted checking the root url). Glad to see the .cc domain is working again, though.
I was like “wow, how'd they get on that TLD reserved for academia?”, but then I realised that .ac is most likely a country code, unlike .ac.uk which is GB's .edu
Yes it's Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha top level domain. Interesting fact: If it's a two-letter top-level domain it belongs to a country. Generic top-level domains have 3 or more characters.
You've contradicted yourself, .AC is an overseas British possession, not its own country. There are a number of geographic locations that have two letter country codes (.io, etc) which are not members of the UN and are possessions of some other, much more powerful nation, usually as a result of the last 400 years of colonial activity.
No, no research should ever be hidden from public, as opposed to artistic works published on TPB or elsewhere.
All academic knowledge and research has to be free, in this open and connected world even more so.
We all profit from it, and not just some shady biz like Elsevier or Springer.
The thoughts are free, u know?
One can also argue similarly for works of art. I for one would not expect our cultural and artistic landscape to be any poorer if there were no copyright. It would certainly look different (there would probably be less big-budget movies, for example, but probably more remix art on the other hand).
73 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadFor some reason, domains and TLDs seem to get shot out from under Sci-Hub periodically. I cannot possibly begin to imagine why.
The same reason why we encrypt traffic using TLS, even if it's "mundane" traffic like tweets.
Targeted attacks might be possible based on the file contents or using a side-channel to ID the downloader; meaning only specific targeted users would get the malicious files.
Either way, being able to hold Sci-Hub accountable as this source would be important.
How can you exclude that case that Alice does care where she gets the paper from, but she simply cannot afford it from the original source?
Or how can you exclude the possibility that Alice wants a version of the paper that does not embed a watermark that makes her or at least the setting (e.g. university, IP address) that she downloaded the paper from identifiable. I can witness myself that Elsevier embeds such information into paper downloads.
Click around the header, you can find a link to sci-hub.cc
Chrome gets through.
You're right that academia is full of perverse incentives that need to change, but it's not clear how we get from where we are now to the end of "publish-or-perish". There's a need for large-scale coordination and construction of alternatives with the support of funding agencies. Suggestions beyond "individuals will sacrifice their own career standing for the greater good" are what we need to gain the strength of those individuals who are not in the most idealistic portion of the research community.
This is a stop-gap that attenuates the problem until people discover some way of getting the actual solution.
The people with the money need to put their money where the public interest's mouth is. Certainly not where Elsevier's mouth is.
The biggest example has to do with the NIH "indirect rate". The system, incredibly, is set up so that the larger a proportion of an institute's funding comes from NIH, the more money per grant goes to the institution. "Indirect" refers to the fact that each grant comes with "direct costs" that go to the scientist and "indirect costs" that goes to the institute, and the "indirect rate" determines the amount, expressed as a percentage of grant direct costs, that goes to the institute. This dumb system results in institutes discouraging their own investigators from applying for non-NIH grants.
At my institute if you take a non-NIH grant you have to actually "pay back the difference" in lost funding for the institute that is caused by non-NIH grants lowering the institute's indirect rate.
The research must become more open, better reviewed, etc. But we can't just stop submitting our work.
I mean are you ready to decrease an impact of your discovery and opportunities for future work, just to make a statement?
Because it works. It delivers information and knowledge to those who need it.
Because information and knowledge are public goods. As CUNY/GC says, an "increasingly unpopular idea",1,2 but an absolutely correct one.
Because it democratises information.
Because much the world cannot afford to pay US/EU/JP/AU prices for content. Including many of those in the US/EU/JP/AU. And most certainly virtually all outside. Billions and billions of people.
Because the research is (often) publicly funded, conducted in public institutions, and meant for the public.
Because information and markets simply don't work. Deadweight losses from restricted access and perverse incentives for publication both taint the system.
Because much the content, EVERYTHING published before 1962, would have been public domain under the copyright law in force at the time, and much up through 1976 and the retrospective extensions of copyright it, and multiple subsequent copyright acts, have created.
Because 30% profit margins are excessive by any measure. Greed, in this case, is not good.
Because the interfaces to existing systems, a patchwork fragment of poorly administered, poorly designed, limited-access, and all partial systems are frankly far more tedious to navigate than Sci-Hub: Submit DOI or URL, get paper.
Because unaffiliated independent research is a thing.
Because the old regime is absolutely unsustainable. It will die. It is dying as we write this.
Because the roles of financing research and publication need not parallel the activity of accessing content. Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (1937, ), a paper which should be public domain today under the law in which it was created and published, and should have been by 1991 at the latest, but isn't, tells us why: transactions themselves have costs.
Because journals no longer serve a primary role as publishers of academic material, but as gatekeepers over academic professional advancement. This perpetrates multiple pathologies: papers don't advance knowledge, academics are blackmailed into the system, and access to knowledge is curtailed
Because what the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research".
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...
I use Sci-Hub extensively, it's one of a few of my go-to sources for information, which I'm using in large amounts (1000s of articles and books) for an area of large and broad scope.
Others includie BookZZ / Book4You and LibGen, both also democratising information in opposition to the copyright cartel.
The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and a number of largely special-purpose archives also serve my needs, but the simple truth is that a large and comprehensive archive is itself useful on account of reducing search and access frictions. As the US Library of Congress discovered when it became the largest book collection in the United States in the early 20th century, and hence a magnet for scholars. It might not have everything, but odds were good that it had any particular thing. Shoe-leather costs being somewhat higher for trekking between Cambridge, MA and DC in those days than navigating through websites is today.
What's truly pathetic is that oftentimes its the indices themselves which aren't online. I've been stymied repeatedly in trying to access old periodicals because there are no generally available indexes that don't require academic affiliation or on-site access.
The frustration de jour is in trying to find access to several works published between 1920 and the 2...
However, academics do sometimes sell books. It is actually much closer to theft to download an academic book than an article because the money does go to the author.
The arguments for deadweight loss and equal access apply particularly to books.
Libgen also redirects you to sci-hub.bz if you search scientific article it doesn't have.
They collaborate, but different people are behind these projects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
Source: I review papers (pretty irregularly) on Elsevier journals and my supervisor was/is editor of such journal.
Since the papers not being reviewed would include our own papers, that'll never work. Plus Prisoner's dilemma (or whatever theory I'm thinking of). Plus, they could be criticized for effectively "blocking cancer research" etc.
But still, it'd be nice to see what would happen.
Most journals nowadays do not even do basic linguistic editing but instead let the authors choose highly expensive services for it. They expect you to deliver a camera-ready copy based on their LaTeX or Word templates and then send it to final copy editing to India. (Source: My own experience with very nice and professional Indian copy-editors, and I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with sending articles to India for copy-editing, of course.)
So you got lucky, I know of people who had quite the opposite experience with India.
> and I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with sending articles to India for copy-editing, of course.
Except for justifying ridiculous prices.
You're probably better off installing the alternative in the Chrome web store (search sci-hub)[0]
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sci-hub-links/olcg...
And yes, it seems old domains are still working.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scihubs/jamkadfgfk...
But yeah back up domains are useful, I guess.
Choosing imagery for an audience like that could be a challenge.
https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=%22sci-hub.ac%22%20site%3Ayco...
BTW, how does one distinguish a 'real' sci-hub domain from a spoof?