
Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed - happy-go-lucky
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/sci-hub-s-cache-pirated-papers-so-big-subscription-journals-are-doomed-data-analyst
======
TeMPOraL
I'm very happy to see SciHub going strong - for all the obvious reasons. Now
let's just hope they back up to IPFS (if they do, I'll happily pin some of
it).

I want to go off a tangent here, though. Now that open access (whether arXiv
or SciHub style) is becoming the norm, I wonder what can be done to improve
the format of scientific papers? Like e.g. making them more like this:

[http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...](http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/)

instead of regular PDFs?

~~~
lucb1e
I don't know what that link is, but after 10 seconds of loading over LTE I
gave up in favor of my data bundle. I hope it doesn't go towards whatever that
is.

Personally I'm a big fan of blog posts: they're written for a broader audience
in understandable language. I don't have _any_ trouble reading English, but
papers are almost universally written in a way that is more complicated than
necessary. And in blog posts, if someone made a "novel new algorithm", at
least you can be sure there's code, raw test data, screenshots, or whatever
else is needed to DIY. And someone on the web is talking about it, perhaps
even with comments below the post itself.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The link is to the Bret Victor's rewrite of a scientific paper, in which he
introduces illustrations and interactivity for the important (and difficult)
points of the paper.

I edited the link to the more "lightweight" version (i.e. just the page,
without loading his entire homepage as well, which is kind of heavy), so
please consider trying again.

I agree with you RE blog posts, and the point of me linking to Bret Victor's
work is to give an example of a form that's better-suited to the media we
operate with today. Papers still live in the paper age (pun not intended).

~~~
groby_b
I love Bret's work, but I consider this rewrite pretty much entirely
unreadable. I'm sure it's great for skimming - what with the bolding, and the
flood of pictures - but that's not the point of scientific papers.

~~~
tomjakubowski
It would be better with a layout that flowed only from top to bottom. Reading
text mixed with diagrams left-to-right, and then top-to-bottom, is hard, as
you point out.

Since Bret has liberated the scientific article from paper, we may as well
take advantage of the more flexible layout possible with digital media.
Interactive diagrams are so nice for learning that I think it's worth pursuing
Victor's idea further. Fred Akalin's blog has a couple great examples!
[https://www.akalin.com/quintic-unsolvability](https://www.akalin.com/quintic-
unsolvability)

------
welder
Good riddance, limiting access to scientific articles is a detriment to the
advancement of humanity.

~~~
isoprophlex
The sooner all these assholes go out of business, the better

I hope scihub has a well thought out exit plan, in case of seizure.

~ 40 M files, at 1 MB each (my own estimate). I hope they have backups /
insurance files with all the papers collected this far. Given the data volume
it's not trivial but surely not impossible.

~~~
th0br0
They backup to Library Genesis as far as I understand it, Library Genesis is
available via Torrents & Usenet -
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/)

~~~
nannal
The IPFS network is ideal for this kind of situation.

I should say I'm bias as I run ipfsstore.it but to host all 26gb there would
not be expensive.

~~~
dmix
So for your service 26TB * 0.044 USD/Gigabyte = $1144/month to host all the
Scihub data

Quite a big fee :p

~~~
kobeya
That seems rediculously cheap and easy to come up with funds for. Storing the
entire progress of science for $1k/mo? That's a good deal.

~~~
dmix
True, a low grade ICO for SciHub, backing an multi-country IPFS store with a
decent web interface on top could raise that money easily. You could create a
mini forum/social network around it for commenting on papers. Buying a coin to
make an account or freemium buying a 'VIP' accounts ala Dribbble...maybe even
a DocumentCloud style annotation system, so it has some self-sustaining
business model other than raising initial capital.

Although I don't know much about creating 'DApps' or how Ethereum or IPFS
works or what SciHub contains beyond a primitive grasp [1], just sayin :p

[1] I watched a video of a talk "Distributed Apps with IPFS (Juan Benet) -
Full Stack Fest 2016"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w)

~~~
kobeya
Why does everything have to be an ICO? What's the point of a token here? Just
give the appropriate organization some charitable funds.

------
fsloth
Basically, the publishers asked for this. Denying open access to old papers
from humanitys point of view is wastefull. The planet is full of hungry minds.
Who knows where the next Ramanujan comes from and which discipline he or she
chooses but given the non existent transaction cost of reading an old paper it
would be beyond silly if they could not do it for free.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
Publishers _can_ provide value, and should not be forced to do so at a loss.
Peer review, curating for quality, editing, typesetting, and creating physical
copies could be expensive.

True, current publishers don't compensate peer reviewers, limit curation to
the set of people who will pay their submission fee, force editing and
typesetting back on the authors, and charge egregious fees disproportionate to
the cost of distribution. But the concept of the business isn't invalid.

~~~
infogulch
Nobody cares if publishers could _theoretically_ add value in some alternate
universe. In practice, none of them _do_.

This isn't throwing the baby out with the bath water, this is people trying to
stop this nasty ass bath water from being thrown out because there _used to_
be a baby in it.

~~~
Aeolun
Working at one, I have to say I don't think this is true for _all_ publishers.

Prices are a different thing, but I'm definitely spending my day here adding
value.

~~~
fsloth
Some think anything can be open sourced but that does not work in the current
world where we live. For an obvious example SpaceX could not have been an open
source project.

I suppose the general notion is that the only problem publishers solve is the
distribution which is kinda non-value-adding nowadays, but don't think about
the editorial process, which needs actual work.

Sure, I think you guys add value. My critique was towards the cost of old
papers and the ownership which journals take for published work. You guys need
to get paid but the world also needs it's open access to the scientific
corpus.

The papers which have very little value adding editorial input do have a
harder time legitimizing their slice of the pie, though.

~~~
Mathnerd314
Maybe not open source, but an open hardware project. The particular problem
for SpaceX is that a lot of the IP is covered by ITAR:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations)
See this FAQ entry:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/faq/company#wiki_what_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/faq/company#wiki_what_patents_do_spacex_hold.3F_would_they_consider_releasing_them_like_tesla_motors_did.3F)

But in theory it's possible, e.g. Facebook's Open Compute Project, it just
needs the right kind of funding model.

------
philipkglass
I had quite a bit of exposure to pirate journal archives before sci-hub
arrived. A couple of easy improvements that I saw with past pirate libraries,
that it'd be nice to have on sci-hub:

\- Strip download watermarks ("Downloaded by Wisconsin State University
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on January 12, 2017 13:45:12"). Many times, journals published
by the same publisher do the watermarking similarly so you need write just one
pdftk (or other PDF manipulation software) script for every journal under
their banner. At worst, it's a one-script-per journal effort.

\- PDF optimization. A lot of publishers produce un-optimized PDFs that could
be 25% (or more) smaller with a completely lossless space optimization pass.
This should save storage/network costs for access to individual papers and,
more importantly, reduce the burden for bulk mirrors.

(I'd contribute the scripted passes myself if I had contacts within sci-hub.)

~~~
mkl
I deal with making PDFs a lot, and some of my processing steps (using pdfjam)
make the file size explode. Currently I have no efficient way to make them
smaller again. I would love to see how you do it.

~~~
philipkglass
The Multivalent PDF tool is still my go-to. It hasn't been updated in ages,
but the jar still works fine:

[http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/download.html](http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/download.html)

If you run

java tool.pdf.Compress file.pdf

it will generate file-o.pdf and often trim quite a bit of weight.

That's probably what I would suggest sci-hub use too because it's easy to use
and automatic.

EDIT: this looks quite promising too:
[https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt](https://github.com/pts/pdfsizeopt)

But it has bugs with handling some images... converts them to black boxes. I'd
only use this one if you manually verify the result first (so not a fully
scripted process). (Or this could be due to me not installing all the bleeding
edge dependencies from source as instructed.)

~~~
mkl
Thanks. I didn't try Multivalent as I didn't have a Java VM. Maybe I should
take another look. I tried pdfsizeopt, and IIRC it didn't actually reduce my
particular PDFs.

------
headcanon
The change won't be immediate though. I don't think universities, which are
journals' bread and butter, are going to stop their subscriptions anytime
soon. Stopping a journal subscription because everyone is using sci-hub anyway
(even if they researchers really are on an individual basis) might open the
door for copyright suits against the universities, which would undoubtably be
more expensive than just keeping the subs going, especially since its just a
line item in an accountant's book. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but
journals might have enough time for some to pivot to some more nuanced
business model before they go bust.

~~~
jamessb
> I don't think universities, which are journals' bread and butter, are going
> to stop their subscriptions anytime soon.

Around 60 German universities have cancelled their contracts with Elsevier:
[http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49906/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49906/title/Major-German-Universities-
Cancel-Elsevier-Contracts/)

Obviously, the stated reason for cancellation would be that costs or too high,
not that everyone downloads papers from sci-hub.

~~~
Derbasti
The European Union requires publicly funded papers to be publicly available.
Elsevier did not provide open access, and was therefore deemed illegal for
publicly funded research.

They have since introduced open access options, and universities have renewed
their subscriptions.

------
icelancer
Alexandra Elbakyan's work is one of the most positive and important things to
happen in the last 3 decades in the field of science, which has been gradually
losing its luster due to the bastardization and devaluation of the field by
politicians and salespeople using it like hucksters.

Elbakyan's work has inspired me to only publish my work in jornals that
embrace open access and open data. I'll be damned if I am a slave to impact
factor and other haughty metrics.

------
dekhn
The origin of the web was to disseminate scientific knowledge. The guardians
of that knowledge- the journal publishers- have absolutely failed to make a
viable business model out of this, while many companies who adopted the web
made billions.

While I do not use Sci-Hub, I think that users who use it are doing so morally
and ethically (in the sense of conscientious objection). i hope they are also
willing to pay penalties if they are found to be violating copyright (this is
generally considered a requirement for intential protest).

~~~
TeMPOraL
SciHub shows the way papers should work on the Internet.

The other day in a HN discussion, someone cited a paper in response to my
comment. I was able, in 30 seconds, get to the _full text_ of that paper,
which allowed me to reevaluate my opinion in context of what I read.

This is how science can, and _should_ be useful for individuals. And beyond
arXiv and SciHub, it generally isn't.

~~~
benbreen
I'm an academic and fully making research open access. But when I read
discussions like this I always wonder about the people who work at journals.
The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online publication is not
something that can be done for free.

Granted, the current journal publishers spend too much money on overhead, and
I certainly don't support the for-profit ones like Elsevier that rake in huge
profits. But I also don't see much allowance made for the fact that publishing
research in a peer-reviewed format involves labor which should continue to be
compensated in some way (incidentally, it's not entirely true that researchers
themselves aren't compensated - publishing offers an indirect benefit but a
real one in the sense that publications are directly linked to salary
increases down the line).

~~~
JoshTriplett
> But when I read discussions like this I always wonder about the people who
> work at journals. The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online
> publication is not something that can be done for free.

Peer review is done by others in the field (peers), typically for free. Online
publication is "where do I stick this PDF", and does not require per-paper
work (or if it does that can be done by the author). That leaves us with
copyediting, and in many cases, copyediting issues are caught by peer review
rather than any paid editor.

~~~
benbreen
I do peer review myself and am familiar with the model. IMO, when I'm
contacted to review someone's work, the journal employee contacting me is
performing a legitimate service. They did research to find my name and email
and determine that I'm competent to assess the paper. They or another editor
have also reviewed the paper in the first place to determine if it's worthy of
being peer-reviewed at all, which requires some domain-specific knowledge. And
if I pass on peer reviewing, they have to find another person to ask, and so
on. Multiplied by dozens of papers, that can be a substantial amount of work.

I also think that you underestimate the importance of copy-editors. It's not
the job of a peer reviewer to make sure that the author uses an apostrophe
properly, etc. There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching
those errors, particularly since, as you note, peer-reviewers aren't directly
compensated so it's unfair to burden them with a whole other set of
responsibilities.

~~~
dgacmu
> There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching those errors,

I think "needs" might be too strong here. We (the field of CS) get by without
it just fine -- the standard practice is to include copy-editing "nits" at the
end of one's review. A shepherd, assigned during the final phase, does a final
pass on the paper before approving it.

Yup. Typos slip through. There are papers with poor English. Oh well. For the
most part, it works out pretty well.

(And as a reviewer, I have little objection to also noting writing fixes while
I'm reading your paper. I'm going to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours
reading the thing -- the writing fixes are a small additional cost. _If_
you've done a decent job on the writing in the first place. If it's totally
botched, I'll reject your paper and tell you to fix it before submitting it
again. :-)

Now, would I prefer that the authors of submitted papers had to pay $50 for
someone to do a copy-editing pass before I reviewed it? Heck yes. But perhaps
we'll get DNNs to fix this for us one of these days. :)

~~~
benbreen
That's a fair point. One thing I'm getting from this discussion is that it's
difficult to generalize when it comes to academic publishing, because norms
vary substantially between fields. I've seen the copy editing "nits" you
mention at the end of reviewers' letters in my field (history) but I suspect
that historians would rebel if the copy editor's job was entirely foisted off
on us.

Likewise, it's normal for editors in my field to make meta-level suggestions
about writing style. I'd wager that history journals place a greater emphasis
on prose style than CS journals do, since making an historical argument often
depends on telling a compelling narrative. Hence a publishing model that works
for a CS journal might not work for humanities journals and vice versa.

~~~
dgacmu
Absolutely. And our papers are a fair bit shorter than yours, for the most
part. :). 14 pages, 2 column, 10 or 11pt type is the norm for us, with figures
and references included.

------
sixdimensional
So, fundamental question here - if scientific articles (or anything that can
be copy protected, etc.) can be released online in this manner to "free the
knowledge", and yet, given such free access, there are still people that will
pay for a subscription to access the same scientific articles, wouldn't that
be the best solution?

I see people commenting that just because of this release, universities won't
cancel their subscriptions to the journals. Well, that would be great - let
them keep paying, while the content also gets out for free.

This is like the trend where you can pay what you want for stuff, or nothing.
I wonder if that model would apply to scientific research - pay what you want
for the paper, or nothing - but if you want to support that research..
hopefully people would still pay.

Just thinking out loud... probably already been thought of or wouldn't work
(or I'm just self-defeatist). :)

~~~
notyourday
Let me give you an unpopular answer -

\- outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces
quality papers.

\- the manuscripts received by EICs are garbage. EICs themselves rarely touch
anything, or edit anything.

\- "peer review" process in all non-the-most-upper-tier publication is a joke.

\- copy-editing and proofreading is non-existent.

About 15 years ago a lot of journals that are now owned by the major
publishers were society publications. This means that societies owned the
title, owned the copyright and owned the process. Societies could not find
people capable and willing to run a journal for $5k or so a paper including
distribution and printing. So the societies went to the likes of Springer,
Informa, T&F, Elsevier etc. Those said "Ok, sure. $2k per paper and we produce
and distribute it or $5k per paper and we do everything". That was too much
for societies. Instead the societies said said "Hey, what if we sold you the
rights to the journal? Would you in that case do all of it for free, and let
our EIC suck his or her thumb while still being the man/woman on the title
page?" "Of course" said the publishers.

And so now we are here. Production costs did not go down. Distribution costs
did not go down. In fact, distribution costs increased because before that the
journals were printed by a little printers in the US as the volume of most of
journals is microscopic ( later printing went to China in the same microscopic
quantities ). Now, however, journals also need to be distributed in all kinds
of wacky XML formats on all stages of production, which needs to be coded, in
most cases by hand.

So unless every Joe, Jack and Jill, the scientist, wants to go back into the
publishing world _nothing_ is going to change.

[Source: pillow talk]

~~~
majewsky
> outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces
> quality papers

Just to make sure I read this correctly: Are you saying that, when judging by
paper quality, there are only 500 good scientists on Earth?

~~~
notyourday
Only about 500 produce readable manuscripts to start. Publishers have their
_names_ because it changes schedules _that_ much.

~~~
mkl
That sounds absurd. What are your sources?

~~~
notyourday
Pillow talk with someone who ran production for hundreds of STEM journals for
two of the publishers

------
drewda
I'm all for Sci-Hub disrupting the dominance of RELX Group (a.k.a. Elsevier)
and other for-profit publishers that make such a big profit off the backs of
researchers (who write and edit for free) and grant-making organizations (who
fund those researchers).

But it's unfortunate that Sci-Hub is also disrupting non-profit scholarly
associations that cover their own budgets through journal subscriptions. In
these cases, the fact that libraries and readers have to pay for access to an
article is somewhat balanced out by the fact that those fees are going to pay
for staff, conferences, and the other worthwhile activities of the non-profit
associations.

------
koolba
So is Sci-Hub like Oink[1] for scientific papers?

EDIT: For those not familiar, Oink was a torrenting site but what
distinguished it from the tons of other sites was how highly curated it was.
High quality audio, proper grouping and genres, and best of all you could
request anything that was missing and the community would magically add it.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace)

~~~
_delirium
Kind of the opposite, sci-hub isn't really curated at all. Its goal is to have
a PDF for everything that has a DOI, more or less. And the primary way of
retrieving papers is to already know the exact paper you're looking for, found
via some other search method like Google Scholar. It's not at all focused on
categorizing or browsing papers, just slurping all of them into a big
repository.

~~~
Osmium
> Kind of the opposite, sci-hub isn't really curated at all. Its goal is to
> have a PDF for everything that has a DOI, more or less.

Side-stepping the politics and legality for a moment, I find it interesting
how this is a very natural example of the fault-tolerant design of networks.

A 'DOI' is a resource locator. There's a 'fault' in the network in that some
people cannot locate the resource when providing the DOI. Sci-hub has sprung
up to route around this fault, and provide people with the resource.

Practically, there are real people making decisions who are involved in this
process, but on an abstract level it feels like this is somehow inevitable? It
feels like an emergent behavior from any sufficiently advanced network, and
any attempt to stop it seems futile.

~~~
pizza
I guess another important part is that it's the universities' connection that
scihub 'uploaders' tunnel through that are key - they have the special network
access to DOI resources that make it free for on-site university users to get
anything for free, and then the 'uploaders' relay them to outsiders. That's a
difference between papers and something like 'scihub for any pdf ebook via
ISBN' \- there's no special network that can get all ebooks for free just via
ISBN - except maybe the Library of Congress ;)

~~~
mariuolo
> I guess another important part is that it's the universities' connection
> that scihub 'uploaders' tunnel through that are key

Does this happen in realtime? I read that sci-hub sometimes uses credentials
from legitimate users, but in that case they would be easily identified.

So, perhaps someone with access submits papers on request? And if so, what
about watermarking?

~~~
kanzure
> And if so, what about watermarking?

years ago i recommended to scihub that they should use
[https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia](https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia)
but they weren't too concerned.

------
darawk
The death of for-profit scientific journal companies will be a beautiful thing
for the world. It's really rare to see something that is so purely valueless.
This industry is sort of unicornlike - they've managed to extract rents in an
area where they add _literally_ zero value. It's truly an amazing thing, and
it will be even more amazing to watch it die.

------
CorvusCrypto
How does this doom subscription journals? I mean it would be nice but
realistically it just means they move to exploit the university subscriptions
since the professors can't admit use of illegally obtained copies. They can
further exploit the authors since many journals require payment from the
author for submission and some journals charge in the hundreds. One might say
"just publish to a different journal" but it's not that easy. Because of the
heavy reliance on Impact Factor in scientific publishing, it is the journals
with those high impact factors that the authors will try to publish to.
Regardless of whether or not they are being pirated.

This is sad to say, but in reality I think this isn't going to massively
impact things for the publishers. Academia at its core is where the problem
lies. Sure paid subscriptions are a big part of things, but it's the stuff
most don't realize (the authorship fees and institution sub fees) that give
the publishers power.

~~~
x0x0
It dooms subscription journals because it breaks their leverage.

Right now, publishers offer take it or leave it bundles of hundreds of
journals at prices the publisher set. If a library doesn't want to pay, the
library/university system loses access to everything. And many people at the
university can't do their work without such access.

SciHub existing allows negotiators for the universities and libraries to shrug
and say whatever when Elsevier threatens to cut access to every Elsevier
journal.

~~~
CorvusCrypto
Even if this were the case, then it's still very easy to control the market
because of the authorship fees coupled with the drive toward publishing in
subscription-model journals (thanks again to Impact Factor). Maybe your
advisor took care of some of those costs, but most journals do have a
significant fee for submission alone, not to mention the re-submission after a
review requires a significant change. Sci-Hub can't change that so it still
doesn't doom them.

Not to mention Elsevier, till exempel, WILL be cracking down on piracy
especially after their grant from the US courts regarding Sci-Hub. Sci-hub
hasn't doomed anything and the publishers still control academia. You should
be mad about this, and you should blame academia itself. Push for open
journals like PLoS One when possible and try to convince people to move off
that god-awful Impact Factor metric and you might inflict damage on the big
publishers.

------
biomcgary
I've met the author of the study, Daniel Himmelstein, who is quite passionate
about making information free. Projects in his github account
([https://github.com/dhimmel](https://github.com/dhimmel)) tend to use a CC0
license. Some of his work involves aggregation of data (e.g.,
[https://github.com/dhimmel/hetionet](https://github.com/dhimmel/hetionet))
that is encumbered and he has put a lot of effort into making it as free as
possible. His project carefully documents the license for each data point and
he took the time to ask copyright holders that do not provide an explicit
license to do so.

------
return0
The Noah's Pirate Ark that will save all of humanity's knowledge from
unreliable publishers.

------
turc1656
Looks like Aaron Swartz's vision for the free, collective ownership of
mankind's scientific knowledge is well on its way. I wish he were still alive
to see Sci-Hub in action.

------
philipkglass
I don't think that sci-hub is going to kill off institutional journal
subscriptions in the developed world. It's similar to how developed-country
universities didn't stop buying licensed software and start passing around
cracked versions to their faculty and students. Journal revenue isn't going to
plummet like CD sales after Napster, because it's not individuals doing most
of the purchasing in the first place.

Individuals and institutions in poor countries may well turn to sci-hub. I
certainly have. But I would venture that not much of the journals' revenue
came from individuals or poor institutions in the first place. I didn't pay to
read paywalled papers before sci-hub either; I got them via authors' sites or
personal contacts, or just didn't get to read them at all.

~~~
ballenf
Tend to agree. There might even be an argument that SciHub provides something
of a pressure release valve that will allow paywalls to continue. Similar to
how pirated Windows copies can be said to have helped solidify Windows' market
share. Or even, in my own mind, how pirated Adobe applications helped people
learn the tools and go on to work at companies with legitimate licenses.

Elsevier, et al, can now make a legitimate claim that they are not restricting
access to those who cannot afford a sub. But their tax on academia will
continue.

------
return0
The academic world has missed some decades of advancement of communication. In
a world where all published science is open for meta-processing, the burden of
validating science would shift to search engines. There would be search
engines competing with scientific-SEO of course, but in the medium-run this
would improve scientific writing, and possibly speed up science in general. In
the end there will always be some private actors doing the work of "ranking"
scientists. Academics are hanging on to the current peer-review journals
precisely because they don't want to give that power to other actors.

------
revelation
Does Sci-Hub actually have all the papers or are they just retrieving them on-
demand?

Publishers are tracking mass downloads (see the Aaron Swartz case) so given
some of the very obscure papers I've retrieved from Sci-Hub I assume it's
unlikely they downloaded them beforehand. My go-to assumption for how it works
is that a bunch of people have donated access to their university network
access and Sci-Hub is just a load-balancing / cache layer.

~~~
philipkglass
Yes, it lazy-loads papers using credentials from institutional subscribers and
then stores them for fast retrieval. When you're the first person to request a
paper you'll see an animation of a biphenyl molecule rotating while the site
fetches the paper from an institution with access. Sometimes, there is no
corresponding institution with access currently hooked up to sci-hub and the
retrieval process fails. But I've only seen that happen a few times.

------
pdimitar
I'll be that guy who will gladly eat some downvotes for this apparently
unpopular opinion:

"Science" and "subscription" (or any monetary incentive) _don 't compute in a
single sentence_. Aren't scientists funded by governments and/or corporations?
Why should anyone pay them a royalty above that?

It's a legit question and not trolling, don't mistake my slightly angry tone
for degrading please.

------
bogomipz
Can someone who's familiar with this research paper subscription model that is
threatened a la Elsevier explain to me how we got here?

I am curious if at one time did Universities publish these independently and
were they more accessible to the public? When did this practice of restricting
access to papers via subscriptions begin?

~~~
dougmccune
This long article about Robert Maxwell does a great job answering your
question:
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)

~~~
bogomipz
This is a really fascinating read. Thanks! Cheers.

------
filedrawer
I work for a scholarly publisher and I'd be very interested in hearing about
what—aside from cost—would cause you to go to Sci-Hub for a paper?

Is it reading experience? Site performance? Difficulty in navigating
publishers' sites?

Are there any good experiences you can point to? I'm really interested in
making this better.

------
kazinator
They should expand into engineering: I don't see any IEEE or ISO standards in
there, for instance.

------
daveheq
Now if we could get the government version of this...

------
andrepd
Thanks! That reminds me I should donate to Sci-Hub!

------
sonium
This will be a catalyst for open-access

~~~
Spivak
Yeah, but open access is just 'stuff the cost of publishing into the grant
application' and because journals make money for each work published it
encourages rubber stamp reviewing and publishing noise.

Open access is probably a net good, but it just shifts the costs around.

~~~
jabl
There's stuff like the fair open access manifesto:
[https://fairoa.org/](https://fairoa.org/) .

I suppose that's partly a backlash against predatory open access journals that
publish any rubbish as long as (significant) fees are paid..

------
joelthelion
If only. I'm convinced they will find a way to shut her down.

------
sillysaurus3
I was surprised that it's still considered rude to link to sci-hub:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714577#14715252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14714577#14715252)

Anyone know if this is a typical sentiment? I'm just curious if it's true that
many researchers are offended by this movement, and what the reasons are.

I firmly believe that there are always two sides to any topic, so we should
explore the flipside. What are some arguments against blatantly opening up
access to paywalled articles?

~~~
currymj
further down, the author in question says he supports sci-hub and is happy to
see it linked so that more people can read his work. he was just surprised
that someone would post a link so blatantly to a pirate site. on the other
hand, he says that he knows researchers who would be upset by this but doesn't
give their rationale.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Yeah, I should've clarified that I was curious about the people he mentioned.
Researchers contribute some of the most valuable comments to HN, so mainly I
wanted to avoid making them feel unwelcome. If linking to sci-hub ends up
shooing them off HN, it's not worth the cost.

It seems like the sentiment is in the other direction, though. Maybe most
researchers don't care.

------
mcappleton
It's not just the publishing industry that is the problem. _It is merely a
symptom of the greater malaise in higher education as a whole_.

The focus is on degrees, not on true learning. So much of what occurs is in
universities is total waste. But people put up with it to get the paper. As
long as people keep blindly giving absurd sums of money to get the paper,
these expensive publications will last. The answer is for people to wake up
and value learning over a diploma. When that happens, then finally issues like
this will go away. Heck, as a bunch of people have pointed out, many of these
papers aren't even for real learning. They are worded in such a way as to make
them sound smart to their peers, but unintelligible to the public.

~~~
lacismiles
Yes and it's no good if who you referring to is smart enough to read between
the lines

------
vbuwivbiu
and it's better than all of their websites!

------
agumonkey
Anybody mirrored (or attempted to do so) libgen ?

