We used to say the same thing about Gigapedia (later library.nu) and had the same sentiment about Smiley (the admin).
And similarly about Grooveshark.
The truth is that, these types of things always come to an end. It is of utmost importance and urgency for the Sci-hub infrastructure to be made distributed and resilient.
This make me thing, could it be possible to set up a Smart Contract in some blockchain to achieve a similar thing? (I understand that this works by using user/passwords provided by some people, so it may not be feasible given the easiness to look at the information). That way the system will be very resilient given the nature of blockchain.
Nevertheless, I think I give more merit to Library Genesis. Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge.
There's a pretty long history of technical efforts to achieve censor resistance, of which Ross Anderson's 1996 "Eternity Service" is probably the most influential. I'm not very hopeful, but it would be cool to see something like it come into existence.
"Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge."
That may have been true in the beginning but the blog post says:
"In 2014, I copied articles collected by Libgen to create Sci-Hub's own database. I did not fork Libgen: only the papers PDF files were copied. Then I configured new servers to serve these files to Sci-Hub users.
Today Sci-Hub uses it's own servers to store research papers. However all new articles downloaded by Sci-Hub are mirrored to Library Genesis databases too. Libgen also publishes torrents to download these papers."
It should also be noted that Elbakyan has suffered personally from her enormous contribution to science: she is currently living in fear of extradition to the United States, where scientific publishers have obtained several multi-million dollar judgments against her [Wikipedia].
Under most copyright laws, lets assume worst case scenario for real life example of broken laws.
If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial).
In USA, each infringement is $250,000 and/or 5 years jail according to RIAA [1]. With 100, that's $25,000,000 fine and 500 years of jail if USA decides to prosecute you.
Corporate interests have driven us to this broken, unworkable model. I think it may end up costing a lot to get things fixed, monetarily, time, and resource-wise.
You can choose to donate, spread the word, join and contribute, etc.
It's slow but works sometimes. “In 1987, over half[1] Australian households had a VCR, but it only became legal to record TV shows at home in 2006.". IIRC Politicians said their children were criminals for taping their cartoons.
Keep in mind that the US uses first-past-the-post voting for many elections, meaning the party with most votes takes the entire pie that was voted for. Thus not voting for one of the two biggest parties will help that other big one you like even less. Yes, this kind of system doesn't allow a diverse set of parties.
I apologize for being so cynical, but based on our track record, it'll take a high-profile conviction that is so obviously and blatantly unjust and contrary to the public interest, that the mass media outrage machine tunes in. Sadly, if she gets extradited, this might just be that case.
No, he did not. The question is: is the government allowed to go for that course?
Look into why "plea deals" have exploded in popularity. People get faced with the choice between pleading guilty and getting off with a light(ish) sentence even if they are innocent in reality, or having to face the "full force" of the law which can mean a sentence longer than the live span of whole generations.
The "right to due process and a fair trial" may still be there, but are you free to choose the right to due process and a fair trial if you know you can end up for life?
> Under most copyright laws, lets assume worst case scenario for real life example of broken laws.
> If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial)
This is not a crime, it isn't a criminal offence, and so the criminal sanctions do not apply. It's a civil tort. For the criminal sanctions to apply it has to meet the criteria of the crime, and that includes commercial infringement -- in the example you'd have to sell the wedding photos to the guests.
Copyright law is stupid and it needs reform which is why it's important that people don't misrepresent what it actually says.
Apparently if the retail value of the works is less than $2,500 then it's a misdemeanor, and its only punishable by up to a year in prison and/or a fine of a maximum $100,000.
It's only a criminal offence if you do it as part of trade. If you distribute those photos but don't ask for money you're committing a civil offence, and the remedy is that you get sued (not prosecuted) and have to pay for the losses, and pay for the costs of the court case.
If you sell the photographs you're now trading and that tips it into a criminal offence.
That is how the law is phrased. However, as I understand it, people have successfully managed to argue that simply receiving a copy of the work as part of the infringement is sufficient "trade" on its own to qualify the infringement as a criminal offense. Under that interpretation there is no effective distinction between civil and criminal infringement.
Please link to even a single case where that actually happened.
You'll find that either people are monetizing the distribution; or they're distributing so much content the rights-holders claim it distorted the market.
I'd agree that neither of these should be criminal offences, but neither of them involve "simply receiving a copy".
> or they're distributing so much content the rights-holders claim it distorted the market
Sorry, I heard about the case years ago and don't have a link handy. However, that point by itself would be enough to undermine the original claim that only for-profit distribution is considered criminal.
> I run a few mirrors and other mirrors are run independently, //and Sci-Hub also uses accounts to access library resources provided by others.//
The last part is the one that makes it different in my opinion.
It’s not just people uploading material to share. Seems the platform accesses these systems and downloads from them what’s missing (not sure if metadata or if actual publications).
It's real publications. If you ask for an obscure or new paper that nobody has gotten before you can get routed through e.g. a Russian university library portal as if you were a student. Then sci-hub and apparently libgen will save copies to avoid doing it next time. The fact that all scientific articles have a doi number makes the whole system very simple.
I just don't understand why publishers don't use technical measures to prevent downloads. Simple system would use recaptcha to prevent bot downloads and it would be hard to work around. Also they could just investigate and ban accounts that Sci-Hub uses to download papers (just ask rare paper via Sci-Hub and check which account just downloaded that paper). Of if they actually are fighting, it would be very interesting to read details.
Actual publications. The primary controversy is about how those credentials were obtained: they usually maintain they were donated, but some in the scholarly publishing industry maintain they were obtained through hacks (and also that Sci-Hub is a Russian plot to overthrow Western democracies, so take them with a grain of salt...).
The Wikipedia page says says she has had default judgments entered against her in the United States for civil offenses. If I am not mistaken extradition requires criminal offenses, and usually only a limited number of offenses are deemed serious enough to be "extraditable". It also requires an extradition treaty. Does her country of residence have an extradition treaty with the United States?
A Nature article some years ago mentioned she has no assets in the United States. The plaintiffs are therefore unlikely to ever collect any of the $15 million in damages.
Even if she can't be extradited, she definitely cannot travel to the US, which is a shame considering that most of what is happening in the digital space in general is still there.
A lot of others probably would rather not visit the US even if they could, given the current political climate and the whole security theater surrounding the borders.
I'd love to visit the US sometime, but right now I'd rather not go there for the reasons you mentioned. The only exception would be if my job required it.
I've lost count of how many articles I've been paywalled from accessing but ended up getting through sci-hub.
I have gotten so much utility from it that I have donated a number of times.
Frustratingly there's still certain papers that I've failed to find. Random example: http://jddonline.com/articles/dermatology/S1545961612P0742X/.... I even tried paying for access to this journal and weirdly none of my credit cards worked. So, it's not always even an issue of "oh you're just not willing to spend money".
It is shocking to me how much quality research is gated behind paywalls and thus hardly ever sees the light of day. The scientific ideals (or perhaps enlightenment ideals?) of free distribution of knowledge and community collaboration are completely forgotten. Academic science has been made a complete mockery.
email the authors. the authors own the rights, and the money you pay for access never hits their pockets anyway. they're usually happy to share a pdf if you're polite.
What percent of Sci-Hub is research papers or other publicly funded material, and what percent is more general, not publicly funded material, such as articles from popular science magazines like "Scientific American"?
Elbakyan is a hero, but it seems like if anything happens to her sci-hub will die. Her writings in the past appear to make her seem she is at least a little anti-social, so I don't hold out much hope of her creating a team.
As others have said, she has truly built a Library of Alexandria.
Where's the slur? It's clearly a joke, and there's a link included if you didn't get the reference. I think it's absurd that Kazakhs would need to be protected from this, or that anyone would read my post as trying to elevate my country (which I never mention) over theirs.
You're the boss, but I'd like if you set a different tone.
You say "clearly", but intent doesn't translate clearly online. Often it doesn't come across at all.
I believe you that your joke wasn't coming from any mean place. But I do wonder how it would land with HN readers in (or from) Kazakhstan, running across a comment like that on this site. Probably some wouldn't mind, but it's easy to see how some might, especially if they already feel a little bit like outsiders here. And the whole Borat thing did have a demeaning edge to it.
"Even if arrested, Elbakyan says Sci-Hub will not go dark. She has failsafes to keep it up and running, and user donations now cover the cost of Sci-Hub's servers. She also notes that the entire collection of 50 million papers has been copied by others many times already. "[The papers] do not need to be downloaded again from universities.""
While what she's doing might have some positive side effect to it, calling a Putin stooge who only does it to stick it to those evil Western capitalists and does not care an iota about, you know, science, a "hero" seems to be a bit of an overkill.
For those of us datahoarders, how large is sci hub? Surely it compresses extremely well considering it's all human readable text? I would love to mirror it via a torrent or on ipfs and whatnot, and I have a gigabit connection with roughly 80TB of space I can throw at this.
It's mostly composed of PDFs actually. Judging from my own library the average publication is about 2 MB, and I believe about 1e8 publications are currently indexed, so it's on the order of hundreds of TB.
This got me curious. For reference, my Zotero library is predominantly biomedical in nature. This device currently has 810 of the pdf files pulled down to the local drive, of which the vast majority are journal articles (a very few of the largest ones are presentation slide decks).
That means if you have access to a LTO-6 tape drive (best price per TB right now at around 8,88€ per TB) it only costs around 622€ ($700) to create a backup.
"Sci-Hub started by accident, there was no Big Plan behind it. After a couple of months, users asked to add some option to donate and help the project."
These are the signs of a really great project. Much needed.
> There a people though, who create mirrors of Sci-Hub articles database. I run a few mirrors and other mirrors are run independently, and Sci-Hub also uses accounts to access library resources provided by others.
I haven't found anything about setting up a mirror. Is there a link somewhere explaining how?
This is the ongoing saga of a brilliant female kicking a big dent in the universe -- all by herself! Predictions of the demise of sci-hub are greatly exaggerated. How do we know what steps she has taken to make sure sci-hub is not totally dependent on her? Let's assume the best outcome, instead of the worst.
Better to assume the worst, so that we can help her and retain access should it come to it. E.g. better that people with the capability assume the worst and make backups now than assume the best and we don't have a copy later.
I truly hope she is able to find others she can work with in order to maintain and build Sci-Hub. She is an inspiration and a great example to those of us that believe in the ideals of transparency, freedom, and the pursuit of truth through science.
It's amazing to think of this as mass civil disobedience across nations. And unlike pirating movies, professionals in the field are tacitly supporting it, if not outright advocating for it.
A new paper in my field recently came out regarding how to reduce patient reliance on a particular med, with possibly better results for the patient. The paper had data to back this up.
I couldn’t get it through my institutional subscription. I got it in 5 minutes through sci-hub.
Why a tax-paying patient shouldn’t get up to date care from their tax paying physician through data gathered and analyzed via their tax dollars is baffling.
I'm surprised it took you five minutes. I usually see papers appear in five seconds. The site is shockingly fast. Just append the DOI of the paper to the domain and presto!
Well, because journal publishers are parasites, they just burrowed too deep to remove easily. But the removal should be done anyway, no matter SciHub or not. They produce more harm than value these days. And every single researcher or academy should be ashamed for supporting them.
Agreed. I'm in favour of laws dictating that research funded with public funds must be published without paywalls. France has such legislation IIRC, other countries should follow.
I wish billionaire do-gooders like Gates or Buffet buy Elsevier etc. set the knowledge free and restructure how they do business. Sadly this would cost a fortune. RELX, the owner of Elsevier has a market cap of $42 billion. Can a 51% owner a company torpedo its business model without being sued by the other 49%?
Gates is a billionaire and generally benevolent yet opposing "intellectual property" and giving things away for free for everyone doesn't sound like something about him at all.
They would get a lot more done for the price by just contributing to existing Open-Access-focused efforts. Mind you, there is a lot of "IP" (or even just tacit know-how!) floating around, that could be "ransomed" out for cheap from its current holders and then set free, with huge society-wide benefits; but the cheapest is probably held by failing businesses, not ones that are still successful on their own terms.
I think evaluating Gates as a do-gooder is somewhat inaccurate. His charitable actions all seem to align to increase his stock portfolio. And not only would open-sourcing scientific knowledge not likely help his stock portfolio, but it is antithetical to everything he has ever done in the software world.
What really needs to be done is more and more editors and editorial boards of Elsevier-owned journals revolting, as happened with Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa. (Lingua lingers on as a 'zombie journal', filled with articles of very dubious quality. But everyone in the field knows this.)
What really needs to be done is the government needs to require all research that is funded at all with tax payer money (which is the vast majority of research) must be open access to all
This is a very half-baked idea, but perhaps a compromise would be to make the text content free to access and reserve PDF downloads for subscribers or paying customers. Ideally the content would be presented through something like eLife's Lens project. [1]
PubMedCentral (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) hosts full-text for biomedical journals that don't automatically provide un-paywalled access to covered articles, as does DTIC. The one caveat is that there is an optional one year embargo for journals that aren't open access.
You can often find PDFs on researchers' home pages, and preprints are increasingly common too.
Well, all governments would have to do that, and actively enforce that. Many do already, few enforce it.
Alternatively, there is now a coalition of funders that is taken an even stronger stance: not only must research they fund be published as open access, but the journals they are published in may not hide other research behind paywalls either.
If enforced (big if), this could give an important push to making open access the default, even for places where the government does not demand it that strongly yet. However, it would help to have some more big hitters explicitly sign up, most notably the US.
> Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa
In case any readers aren't aware, "lingua" is Latin for 'tongue'/'language', while "glossa" (γλῶσσα) is Greek for 'tongue'/'language'. (We also have English words that come from the Attic dialect form "glotta" (γλῶττα); for Ancient Greek dialectal variation between σ and τ, see https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html.)
I think "do-gooder" is usually a negative connotation applied to someone who advocates for existing authority, by e.g. reporting others for copyright violations. This is the exact opposite. I'd say "rebel" would be a better description of the type of person to "set the knowledge free" --- Elbakyan fitting that description too.
There is another difference with Aaron Swartz: I'm not sure if Aaron would block access for a whole country over petty squabbles. [1] TL;DR: a few grateful scientists named a newly discovered bug in her honour, she took offence and banned Russian IP's as a form of collective punishment.
I find the whole story deeply fascinating, because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible) does unequivocal good to the society. It's so easy to fall into the trap of black-and-white hero narrative, but sometimes reality is just more gray and weird.
>>>because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible)
What behaviour? Blocking Russian IP's or releasing data to all?
I find the blocking of Russian IP's to be petty, which I believe she backed down from but then had the ISP in Russia start banning the site.
I dont think it raised to "reprehensible"
Now if you mean ignoring Copyright law, and releasing copyrighted works to the world, I do not find that in anyway reprehensible, I am universally anti-copyright and do not believe it should exist at all
Not a tenable position unless you qualify it. It amounts to saying here should be no protection for those whose work output just happens to consist of copyable material?
Blocking Russian scientists' access is pretty small example Elbakyan being reprehensible, regardless of whether Sci-Hub is or isn't a good thing. From all that's known about her, including her own chest-beating, she's a genuinely bad person, and her motivations have nothing to do with the "good of humankind".
Yes, that was a remarkable episode in the history of SciHub, and a good example of the danger of relying on a non-distributed system essentially controlled by a single person. I hope it will be remembered.
I would love to hear specifics if you can share them.
Personally, I've used articles obtained through Sci-Hub to guide my approach to managing my own rare health condition. I wouldn't say it saved my life, but I've found the information very useful in figuring out the relative merits of new treatment options.
In particular, there is one specialty journal that's only available by institutional subscription at a cost of more than $2,000 per year. The publisher was particularly unhelpful in trying to find a way to enable access for patients. So despite trying to do the right thing, I just go to Sci-Hub to get this info.
She saved me from an unnecessary surgery. It's an amazing resource and is the commons we should have always had. None of these journals are funding any of this research.
re inquiries as to specifics: both cases involved treatment-resistant depression with acute suicidal crises. One is a family member, the other a friend-of-friend.
Many of you are aware that Ketamine has been used off-label for rapid treatment of depression and that one of its enantiomers, S-ketamine, has been (I think) approved for clinical treatment of depression.
In these two cases, it was not possible to quickly access either a ketamine formulation or a physician who was familiar with its use.
Google search showed that dextromorphan (yes, the OTC cough suppressant) has similarities to ketamine in its receptor targeting and is being tried in cases of treatment resistant depression. Combined with quinidine (as Neudexta, I think), it is used to treat a condition called pseudo bulbar affect.
All the papers on use of dextromethorphan for depression were paywalled. Thanks to Sci-Hub, I was able to access and annotate 23 papers that together gave enough information (side effects, med interactions, etc.) for the two treating physicians to try dextro with their patients.
Results are N=2, so obviously anecdotal, but both patients experienced recession of suicidal impulses within 48 hours and both continue to show decreasing depressive symptoms.
I believe that neither of them would be with us now but for Ms. Elbakyan's work. I'm deeply grateful for what she's done.
I would assume graduate students around the world pass them to her to use and she just starts up a VPN to imitate the location of the university. That said it's not like these publishers are losing money, universities are still paying for the access like they always were. Plebs such as myself could always get a free copy of some paper by requesting a printout from the campus library just now I do it from my phone instead.
I think one of the best way to shield her against threats would be to host thousands of sci-hub mirrors. How hard can this be done considering the size of the whole site?
How is bitcoin not an option for you? You can buy it with virtually every possible payment method online that I know of, and if you prefer offline, you can buy it in the streets as well.
If you can find a way to get some euros on my bank or PayPal, I'd be happy to send you coins.
Why though? If they see BTC as goods then it's the same as buying a piano; if it's currency then it's the same as buying euros. Is either of those things illegal in India?
Also I assume this would be a small amount, not something that would have a tax impact regardless of whether it's a good or currency.
Another thing Sci-Hub gets right is UX: I have online access to many papers through my uni, but it takes like 7 clicks, 4 redirects, and a minute of my time to get there -- when the system works at its best! Through Sci-Hub, it reliably takes one click and 5 seconds. Of course that's what I'm going to use.
Haha yeah. I’m also a researcher at a big uni and I do have legit access to every relevant journal for me. If I need a new paper I do a google scholar search first, and if it doesn’t say “pdf” but instead wants me to jump through hoops to log in and download then I just hit my bookmarklet to get it from scihub.
When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed.
Nothing of that happened. Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadAnd similarly about Grooveshark.
The truth is that, these types of things always come to an end. It is of utmost importance and urgency for the Sci-hub infrastructure to be made distributed and resilient.
This make me thing, could it be possible to set up a Smart Contract in some blockchain to achieve a similar thing? (I understand that this works by using user/passwords provided by some people, so it may not be feasible given the easiness to look at the information). That way the system will be very resilient given the nature of blockchain.
Nevertheless, I think I give more merit to Library Genesis. Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge.
See this interesting 2004 review by George Danezis: https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/redblue.pdf
That may have been true in the beginning but the blog post says:
"In 2014, I copied articles collected by Libgen to create Sci-Hub's own database. I did not fork Libgen: only the papers PDF files were copied. Then I configured new servers to serve these files to Sci-Hub users.
Today Sci-Hub uses it's own servers to store research papers. However all new articles downloaded by Sci-Hub are mirrored to Library Genesis databases too. Libgen also publishes torrents to download these papers."
If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial).
In USA, each infringement is $250,000 and/or 5 years jail according to RIAA [1]. With 100, that's $25,000,000 fine and 500 years of jail if USA decides to prosecute you.
Her judgment would make sense.
[1] https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/about-piracy/
EFF is a lobby/political group that tackles copyright issues: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/its-copyright-week-201...
You can choose to donate, spread the word, join and contribute, etc.
It's slow but works sometimes. “In 1987, over half[1] Australian households had a VCR, but it only became legal to record TV shows at home in 2006.". IIRC Politicians said their children were criminals for taping their cartoons.
Look into why "plea deals" have exploded in popularity. People get faced with the choice between pleading guilty and getting off with a light(ish) sentence even if they are innocent in reality, or having to face the "full force" of the law which can mean a sentence longer than the live span of whole generations.
The "right to due process and a fair trial" may still be there, but are you free to choose the right to due process and a fair trial if you know you can end up for life?
Yes, he did.
> Under most copyright laws, lets assume worst case scenario for real life example of broken laws.
> If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial)
This is not a crime, it isn't a criminal offence, and so the criminal sanctions do not apply. It's a civil tort. For the criminal sanctions to apply it has to meet the criteria of the crime, and that includes commercial infringement -- in the example you'd have to sell the wedding photos to the guests.
Copyright law is stupid and it needs reform which is why it's important that people don't misrepresent what it actually says.
If you sell the photographs you're now trading and that tips it into a criminal offence.
You'll find that either people are monetizing the distribution; or they're distributing so much content the rights-holders claim it distorted the market.
I'd agree that neither of these should be criminal offences, but neither of them involve "simply receiving a copy".
Sorry, I heard about the case years ago and don't have a link handy. However, that point by itself would be enough to undermine the original claim that only for-profit distribution is considered criminal.
The last part is the one that makes it different in my opinion.
It’s not just people uploading material to share. Seems the platform accesses these systems and downloads from them what’s missing (not sure if metadata or if actual publications).
A Nature article some years ago mentioned she has no assets in the United States. The plaintiffs are therefore unlikely to ever collect any of the $15 million in damages.
I'd love to visit the US sometime, but right now I'd rather not go there for the reasons you mentioned. The only exception would be if my job required it.
I think she lives in Russia now, so no. If not that, it's Kazakhstan, of which I don't know whether it has such a treaty.
In any case, if she is "extraditable", that would still severely limit her travel options, I suppose.
Luckily for her there are no US drone strikes in Kazakhstan...
I have gotten so much utility from it that I have donated a number of times.
Frustratingly there's still certain papers that I've failed to find. Random example: http://jddonline.com/articles/dermatology/S1545961612P0742X/.... I even tried paying for access to this journal and weirdly none of my credit cards worked. So, it's not always even an issue of "oh you're just not willing to spend money".
It is shocking to me how much quality research is gated behind paywalls and thus hardly ever sees the light of day. The scientific ideals (or perhaps enlightenment ideals?) of free distribution of knowledge and community collaboration are completely forgotten. Academic science has been made a complete mockery.
/end rambling semi incoherent rant
As others have said, she has truly built a Library of Alexandria.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kazakhstan/2...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I believe you that your joke wasn't coming from any mean place. But I do wonder how it would land with HN readers in (or from) Kazakhstan, running across a comment like that on this site. Probably some wouldn't mind, but it's easy to see how some might, especially if they already feel a little bit like outsiders here. And the whole Borat thing did have a demeaning edge to it.
This article in Science suggests otherwise:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...
"Even if arrested, Elbakyan says Sci-Hub will not go dark. She has failsafes to keep it up and running, and user donations now cover the cost of Sci-Hub's servers. She also notes that the entire collection of 50 million papers has been copied by others many times already. "[The papers] do not need to be downloaded again from universities.""
Could you share some examples?
Could be an interesting project to try and make a sci-hub optimized compression system.
some journals can weight a lot (scanned pages) even though there's potential to recompress images while keeping it readable
[0] https://askubuntu.com/a/256449
There's also the very bottom file here: http://download.library1.org/dbdumps/
I think your link may point to the LibGen torrents (books, mainly, I believe).
I haven't found anything about setting up a mirror. Is there a link somewhere explaining how?
A new paper in my field recently came out regarding how to reduce patient reliance on a particular med, with possibly better results for the patient. The paper had data to back this up.
I couldn’t get it through my institutional subscription. I got it in 5 minutes through sci-hub.
Why a tax-paying patient shouldn’t get up to date care from their tax paying physician through data gathered and analyzed via their tax dollars is baffling.
What really needs to be done is more and more editors and editorial boards of Elsevier-owned journals revolting, as happened with Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa. (Lingua lingers on as a 'zombie journal', filled with articles of very dubious quality. But everyone in the field knows this.)
[1]: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens
Here are links to the major US funding agency's policies.
NIH Public Access Policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/
DOE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...
DoD: https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/
PubMedCentral (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) hosts full-text for biomedical journals that don't automatically provide un-paywalled access to covered articles, as does DTIC. The one caveat is that there is an optional one year embargo for journals that aren't open access.
You can often find PDFs on researchers' home pages, and preprints are increasingly common too.
Alternatively, there is now a coalition of funders that is taken an even stronger stance: not only must research they fund be published as open access, but the journals they are published in may not hide other research behind paywalls either.
If enforced (big if), this could give an important push to making open access the default, even for places where the government does not demand it that strongly yet. However, it would help to have some more big hitters explicitly sign up, most notably the US.
[1] https://www.coalition-s.org/
In case any readers aren't aware, "lingua" is Latin for 'tongue'/'language', while "glossa" (γλῶσσα) is Greek for 'tongue'/'language'. (We also have English words that come from the Attic dialect form "glotta" (γλῶττα); for Ancient Greek dialectal variation between σ and τ, see https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html.)
I find the whole story deeply fascinating, because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible) does unequivocal good to the society. It's so easy to fall into the trap of black-and-white hero narrative, but sometimes reality is just more gray and weird.
[1]: https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-rus...
What behaviour? Blocking Russian IP's or releasing data to all?
I find the blocking of Russian IP's to be petty, which I believe she backed down from but then had the ISP in Russia start banning the site.
I dont think it raised to "reprehensible"
Now if you mean ignoring Copyright law, and releasing copyrighted works to the world, I do not find that in anyway reprehensible, I am universally anti-copyright and do not believe it should exist at all
Would you like to know more
https://questioncopyright.org/promise
https://questioncopyright.org/learn
Well done, Ms. Elbakyan.
Personally, I've used articles obtained through Sci-Hub to guide my approach to managing my own rare health condition. I wouldn't say it saved my life, but I've found the information very useful in figuring out the relative merits of new treatment options.
In particular, there is one specialty journal that's only available by institutional subscription at a cost of more than $2,000 per year. The publisher was particularly unhelpful in trying to find a way to enable access for patients. So despite trying to do the right thing, I just go to Sci-Hub to get this info.
Many of you are aware that Ketamine has been used off-label for rapid treatment of depression and that one of its enantiomers, S-ketamine, has been (I think) approved for clinical treatment of depression.
In these two cases, it was not possible to quickly access either a ketamine formulation or a physician who was familiar with its use.
Google search showed that dextromorphan (yes, the OTC cough suppressant) has similarities to ketamine in its receptor targeting and is being tried in cases of treatment resistant depression. Combined with quinidine (as Neudexta, I think), it is used to treat a condition called pseudo bulbar affect.
All the papers on use of dextromethorphan for depression were paywalled. Thanks to Sci-Hub, I was able to access and annotate 23 papers that together gave enough information (side effects, med interactions, etc.) for the two treating physicians to try dextro with their patients.
Results are N=2, so obviously anecdotal, but both patients experienced recession of suicidal impulses within 48 hours and both continue to show decreasing depressive symptoms.
I believe that neither of them would be with us now but for Ms. Elbakyan's work. I'm deeply grateful for what she's done.
I would assume graduate students around the world pass them to her to use and she just starts up a VPN to imitate the location of the university. That said it's not like these publishers are losing money, universities are still paying for the access like they always were. Plebs such as myself could always get a free copy of some paper by requesting a printout from the campus library just now I do it from my phone instead.
Have benefitted immensely from Sci-Hub. I wanna contribute to their cause but currently they only accept bitcoins.
I am from India. Does anyone know how else can I contribute? Online bank transfer is my preferred route. Also, I don’t have an account on PayPal.
If you can find a way to get some euros on my bank or PayPal, I'd be happy to send you coins.
I admit I don’t understand the full technicalities but it’s better to err on the side of caution and stay away from it.
Hence, direct bank online transfer.
Also I assume this would be a small amount, not something that would have a tax impact regardless of whether it's a good or currency.
They have already outlawed bitcoin publicly. That's their official stand.
When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed.
Nothing of that happened. Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’