
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone - nkurz
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
======
leot
Elsevier and others can go something themselves.

Their behavior over the last two decades has been little more than
reprehensible rent-seeking. Whatever goodwill they had disappeared as they
sapped with increasing ruthlessness the dollars of students and non-profits.
See, e.g., one of many such figures:
[http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_grap...](http://www.lib.washington.edu/scholpub/images/economics_graph.png)

It is absurd and dishonest to call Sci-Hub "piracy", given that all of its
contents were originally created and given away with the express goal of wide
dissemination.

~~~
nailer
I don't understand academia (genuinely):

Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc?
Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?

~~~
dalke
Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or
"Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the
"Proceedings of the National Academy of Science".

Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are
published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can
affect grant funding and career advancement.

Researchers can publish their own papers. But researchers also tend to want
that work to be disseminated, both to spread knowledge and get recognition for
the work. Journals help simplify that process. A field typically has one or
two main journals, which most people in the field track. It's more likely that
a publication will be noticed if it's published in one of those papers.

~~~
nailer
> A publication in "Science" or "Nature"

What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?

~~~
return0
Even if they could (and they can publish their preprints), scientists rarely
bother. That's because they want to communicate their science to people who
matter to them (e.g. grant giving bodies), not to the general public.

~~~
DarkContinent
Which raises the question of why we the taxpayers should be funding this
research if it's not easily available for the public good.

~~~
dalke
Copyright, according to the US Constitution, exists for the public good:

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
> Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective
> Writings and Discoveries.

You may disagree with that conclusion, but there's 200+ years of belief that
it's possible to be "for the public good" _and_ be covered under copyright
which restricts redistribution. The short term loss is outweighed by the long
term gain, or so the belief holds.

Bear in mind that the copyright term back then was decades shorter than it is
now.

That said, grant organizations are turning towards requiring publication
either in an open access journal, or by having papers restricted for only a
short time, rather than the full length of copyright.

~~~
chris_wot
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and even the Act before it (the
Copyright Act of 1976) seems to rather violate the constitution then:

1\. It doesn't promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

2\. 120 years since creation or 95 years since publication for corporations,
or the life of the author plus 70 years is not what I would call particularly
"limited Times".

There may be 200+ years of belief in copyright, but things have significantly
changed in the last several thirty years. Copyright doesn't make as much sense
as it used to, and though openness and transparency has always been supported
in theory (and in practice by a minority) movements that support Open Source
over a range of disciplines far greater than just software are now quite
significant. Whilst it predates the Internet in it's current form, the current
web and other global distribution mechanisms powered by the Internet have
radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and
ideas.

~~~
dalke
Your objections were presented to the Supreme Court, who decided they were not
actually un-Constitutional in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft)
. You won't be the first to disagree with a Supreme Court decision. But the
only recourse you have is get the courts change their mind in the future, or
amend the Constitution.

I have a hard time empathizing with an argument which, with the change of a
few ephemeral names, Mad Libs style, could have been said at any time in the
last 200 years.

The statement "thing have significantly changed in the last several thirty
years" has been true for centuries. People in the the 1950s, or 1910s, or
1870s, could and likely did say the same thing.

Nor is your rhetoric about "openness and transparency" unique to these last
two decades. Look to the populists and muckrakers from around 1900s as
effective proponents of that. Look to the newspapers of the late 1800s, when
the Linotype made it possible to have cheap newspapers, and look to the growth
of wire services and the telephone, radio, and television, as recent examples
of other technologies which have "radically changed a lot of people's views
about freedom of expression and ideas."

~~~
chris_wot
"My" objections? Alrighty then.

~~~
dalke
Are our wires crossed again? I don't understand the point behind your reply.

~~~
chris_wot
Your comment seemed a bit... personal. Whilst you had some decent points, it
seemed like you were more arguing against my character.

~~~
dalke
I had no intention to argue against your character, nor upon rereading do I
see myself doing that.

I do argue against the meaningfulness of your comments, given the judgement in
Eldred, and given the last 250 years of incessant technological change. I also
think you, like many, see the near history with a much better focus than the
further past. But that is not a character flaw.

~~~
chris_wot
Well, I'm glad to see I was wrong :-) thank you. It's just you seemed to
compare my, uh, rhetoric to what the "populists and muckrackers" of the 1900s
were saying. Though in certain company I guess that could be considered high
praise, I'm not sure I was too fond of the comparison...

~~~
dalke
My intent was to say that 100 years ago people would have said that the
muckrakers and populists pushed for a level of "openness and transparency"
which had never before been seen. I don't see how that is coupled to your
character.

In the 1970s, after the Watergate hearings and the new FOIA and Sunshine laws,
people again could have, and likely did, say that it was also a level of
openness and transparency which had never before been seen.

Your essential argument seems to be "things are different now so throw out the
old". But things _always_ change, so that argument is always true, and can be
therefore be used to justify anything.

~~~
chris_wot
Not all things always change. Like change, for instance. Change that doesn't
change remains the same. Just sayin' :-)

~~~
dalke
Or, as I pointed out, the existence of copyright, which brings us full circle.

------
daveguy
If anyone is having trouble accessing [https://scihub.io](https://scihub.io)
(the site providing the papers) you can find the site directly at the ip
address: [https://31.184.194.81/](https://31.184.194.81/) ... Apparently the
domain name was seized. The certificate is for sci-hub.io (safe to accept). Or
you can just connect to [http://31.184.194.81/](http://31.184.194.81/) if you
don't want to bother with the warnings (and are ok with DOIs and papers being
transmitted without encryption).

EDIT:

Their other domains:

[https://sci-hub.cc](https://sci-hub.cc) (uses sci-hub.io certificate)

[https://sci-hub.bz](https://sci-hub.bz) (uses a separate certificate and ip
address -- 104.28.20.155)

And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion

~~~
alco
Have there been attempts at dispersing the whole collection of papers through
torrents or IPFS? The goal here is not to have a central location with a
pretty web page but to make the content freely accessibly everywhere by
anyone. Distributing it over thousands of nodes would achieve that goal.

~~~
petra
Torrents are pretty bad at the archiving problem , i.e. maintaining copies of
things with no readership over a long time. Not a great fit for this stuff.

~~~
alco
I agree. Setting up mirrors would probably be a better fit for this kind of
content, but mirrors would be susceptible to the same dangers that the primary
website may face: forced take-down by the hosting provider, domain blocking,
etc.

The fundamental difference of content-addressed networks is their resiliency
in the face a single authority trying to track down all of the sources that
have copies of the content.

Even though IPFS is still in its infancy, one of its primary goals is to solve
the problem of content suddenly disappearing from the Internet.

------
taneq
> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director
> of universal access, Alicia Wise

You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free.

Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given
for free. Hmmmm.

~~~
userbinator
That reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay
for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the
situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source"
distinction.

~~~
throwaway7767
Ugh, yes. I recently wrote a parser for an ISO standard file format. I had to
base it on the draft submission because they wanted me to pay them a bunch of
money for the actual end standard.

I really hope the final standard didn't have any substantive changes, so that
my implementation is correct. But all I can really do is cross my fingers
since it at least seems to work with available data.

Charging for standards has a direct negative effect on the proliferation of
those standards, especially today when a lot of code is written as open source
hobby projects, which are left out in the cold.

~~~
userbinator
You can find some standards at the usual places for books etc. (LibGen has
some), but if you are not in a hurry then scouring the Internet _very_
thoroughly will usually yield results. Google won't as easily show you as it
used to, but careful queries and following leads through forums and such can
bear fruit. You know you're getting close when Google starts showing "results
removed due to DMCA" messages and requiring you to enter a CAPTCHA "because
your search queries look unusual" \--- the latter may even be intended
purposely as a form of discouragement, but persevere and eventually you will
find what you're looking for.

Then, once you've found a source, always remember to bookmark it and save a
copy. They disappear from search indices quickly, despite the site still being
around. It also helps to repeat your search periodically as sometimes the
"shifting sands can uncover treasure momentarily" ;-)

------
hyperion2010
> “Graduate students who want to access an article from the Elsevier system
> should work with their department chair, professor of the class, or their
> faculty thesis adviser for assistance.”

Now THAT is chuckle worthy.

~~~
Jerry2
Imagine wasting some researcher's valuable time on tracking papers for you!

The gall of these publishing companies never ceases to amaze.

~~~
chris_wot
Not very helpful for Wikipedia researchers. Or people who are outside the
walled garden of academia!

~~~
kqr
To be fair, I haven't set a foot in my university for 3 years (planning to
return soon!) but since I still send them the occasional email asking to be
registered for a course I'm considered active there and get access to a lot of
publications as long as I'm logged in to their systems.

~~~
majewsky
Do any universities offer something like "passive studentship"? i.e. you pay
only a small fraction of the tuition, it does not include any courses, but you
may attend the facilities and specifically the library and get access to the
university network. If that existed, hobby researchers and the like could get
access to all these journals for a probably smaller amount of money.

~~~
NoGravitas
The state university library here has a [membership program][0] that gives you
access to the library and its various subscriptions -- so effectively library
donors get access. Individual membership is under $50/year, so it's definitely
an affordable option. Not sure if it gives remote access to their network
(they used to have a web proxy server for off campus students, don't know if
they still do); you may have to go to the library and use the computers there.

[0]:
[http://library.sc.edu/p/Develop/Society/ThomasCooperSociety](http://library.sc.edu/p/Develop/Society/ThomasCooperSociety)

------
jimrandomh
Elsevier believes they have United States law on their side. And they're
right; they _do_ have US law on their side. That just doesn't mean much
anymore; it's been worn away by decades of conspicuous corruption, and lost
most of its respect. In principle, this should be addressed by the US
legislature. In practice, academia has effectively voted no-confidence and
bypassed the legal system entirely.

~~~
studentrob
> In practice, academia has effectively voted no-confidence and bypassed the
> legal system entirely.

Yup. Seems like civil disobedience from the research community. Pretty
interesting to see a civil rights movement happening online. Who says you
can't sit at home and be an activist? ;-)

------
bendykstra
I recently wanted to read a five page paper on graph theory from 1977. The
company entrusted with it 40 years ago is charging $38 for it. It is just
absurd. I can't imagine that the author, now long dead, would have wanted his
work to be so difficult to read.

~~~
sigjuice
Just out of curiosity, what paper is this?

~~~
jonathankoren
All of them.

~~~
drewm1980
70's graph theory papers FTW! I bet if you actually pay that $40, the pdf you
get will still be typeset with a typewriter.

------
Artoemius
I'm sad Aaron Swartz did not live to see this unfolding. He might have been in
prison now, but he would still be a world-class hero.

~~~
ryanlol
> He might have been in prison now

For hypothetical crimes he could've committed had he lived? Because he
certainly wouldn't be in prison for things he actually did.

~~~
ryanlol
For whatever reason lots of people here seem to disagree.

Could any of the 4 downvoters clarify in what conceivable scenario would Aaron
still be in prison if he was alive?

Had he pled guilty, he would undoubtedly be out by now. And going to trial
obviously wasn't a realistic option considering the plea deals he was offered
(BTW If someone here disagrees about that, I'd _really_ like to know why.).

Read:

[http://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-
charges/](http://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/)

[http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-
aa...](http://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-
part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/)

~~~
ryanlol
This blanket downvoting is somewhat odd, what is it I'm saying that's so
disagreeable? For afaik I've only presented _facts_ about the time Swartz
would probably have spent incarcerated.

~~~
maxerickson
Your first comment is open to interpretation (it doesn't say would not _still_
or in and out of or something like that) so people are reacting pretty much
entirely based on their existing emotions. They don't care about analyzing the
likely outcome of the case had he lived, it's brought up to share anger and
outrage over the injustice.

~~~
throwanem
> They don't care about analyzing the likely outcome of the case had he lived,
> it's brought up to share anger and outrage over the injustice.

Precisely. He didn't have to kill himself, and if he'd put a bit more
forethought into what he was doing, we'd probably be discussing this in a
thread around an interview with him rather than with Ms. Elbakyan. But nobody
wants to hear that, because it detracts from the story of this generation's
Bobby Fischer.

------
kken
It looks like this is EXACTLY what is needed to distrupt this abusive
industry. There have been numerous attempts of enforcing a change in positive
ways - open access journals, campaigns by researchers and so on. But none of
these had any effect.

Let Elsevier go down in flames. I have published more than 50 academic papers
and have actively avoided Elsevier. To be honest, this was not too difficult,
as they have a lot of journals addressing specialized subtopics that rather
seem to appeal to manuscripts that were rejected in first tier journals.

------
sachkris
The first three paragraphs of the article clearly tells what is wrong with the
system - "Publishers are overcharging for content". Basically, they just
continued their business model from the printed-book era to the e-book era
without much change. The publishers should think of allowing individuals to
subscribe to the content and charge them (nominally) for what they use, rather
than putting the load on the Universities and making them subscribe the entire
spectrum of journals. The Pay-per-view model of Elsevier currently charges an
individual researcher (a staggering) "$31.50 per article or chapter for most
Elsevier content. Select titles are priced between $19.95 and $41.95 (subject
to change)." [0]

[0]
-[https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay...](https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-
per-view)

~~~
chris_wot
The median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year. Currently the exchange
rate for USD to AHD is about 68.3 AHD to 1 USD. So basically, for one article
it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of someone with s median
income.

That's for one midrange article.

------
abhi3
While pirating music or movies, one may try justify ones actions, but deep
down it feels wrong.

 _This_ doesn't even feel wrong. These parasites had it coming.

~~~
skoczymroczny
I don't feel wrong pirating music or movies (especially considering it's legal
in my country). I think trying to apply laws of limited amounts of goods
(physical objects) to unlimited amount of goods (digital files) is silly.

~~~
kqr
The laws are silly, I think we all agree on that. The big record labels are
silly, most of us probably agree on that too.

It still feels wrong when popular artists do not get paid for their work
because it's more convenient for people to pirate it.

I mean, creative/artistic efforts take a lot of time, regardless of how easy
reproducible the results are. By paying for their previous songs, you're
basically funding their next songs, something you should be interested in as a
fan.

~~~
marknutter
> It still feels wrong when popular artists do not get paid for their work
> because it's more convenient for people to pirate it.

Popular artists _barely_ get paid for the sale of their music. They earn the
bulk of their money from touring and merchandise sales (see: finite things).

Given that, piracy is actually far more detrimental to the publisher/label
than it is to the artist because it could mean an additional fan to purchase
another ticket at a show or buy another t-shirt at a merch table.

In fact, by charging money for the music, it actively discourages people from
listening to it because they can't afford it or already spent their budget on
artists they already know and like. In an industry where gaining fans is the
most important thing you can do, this seems counterproductive.

------
blaze33
So one commenter said that "Journals are used as a proxy for quality", another
that they loose so much time browsing through low-quality papers. Isn't the
root issue that we need an open and standard way to review, sort and rate all
those academics papers ?

Developing voting, flagging, moderating mechanisms, that's what many
developers have done for years now on the web. Obviously you wouldn't rate
papers like reddit comments but plug arxiv/sci-hub to a system allowing
researchers to say what papers they reviewed, what their degree of approval
is, eventually where it's been published, who references this paper etc. Seems
like Arxiv has an endorsement system but as they say "The endorsement process
is not peer review", just a way to reduce spam. Isn't there anything done on
this subject ?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
well there is one way to rate academic papers that has proven pretty
successful, and that is citing the paper in other papers - however sometimes
that can take a long time to find the quality.

~~~
fsloth
"however sometimes that can take a long time to find the quality."

As a non-academic but with some insight there - this matches with most
research, I think. Upvoting at a heat of the moment is kinda worthless as it
comes to rating academic output. You need quite a lot of time to draw valid
conclusions about a paper. If everyone voted for every paper this would mean
that a huge chunk of the competent population would spend an inordinate amount
of time on a single paper.

That's why it's far more efficient that only a few people of more-or-less
guaranteed competence spend considerable effort in reviewing results. One
high-quality vote is much better than thousand low-quality ones.

This efficiency mechanism and validating the qualifications of the reviewers
is the only added-value the established publication systems brings in to the
table as discoverability has become cheap commodity.

~~~
blaze33
I'm not advocating for anonymous instant votes like we can do it here.
Researcher already do peer-review for free, allow them to do it on an open
platform with free publication afterwards, I don't see why it couldn't work.

------
dredmorbius
I was interviewed for this article though not mentioned in it. My use case
isn't mentioned: unaffiliated researchers with limited access to journals
doing our own exploration of areas. I've compiled a library of several
thousand articles (and via other sources, books) which for both access and
portability I prefer electronic versions. My 10" tablet is almost perfect for
reading printed material, and functions as a small research library on its
own. (Organising this content is another headache -- Android and apps are
sadly lacking in this area, one of the few options being Mendalay, owned by,
you guessed it, Elsevier. Burn it with fire.)

While I can and do access materials from libraries, including online access,
Sci-Hub is both more complete and _far_ more reliable and convenient. Find a
resource, plug in the URL or DOI, and I've got it. Versus locating the same
reference _independently_ through one of several distinct libraries, each with
their own multiple subsystems, authenticating, and sometimes, sometimes not,
securing the material.

Another point Bohannon failed to address, which is covered in the discussion
here, is the role of journal publishers as gatekeepers not only to _content_
but to _careers_. Academics, increasingly squeezed by budget retrenchments and
awful working conditions[1], _must_ publish through prestige journals in order
to establish and advance their careers.

Journal publishers are rent-seeking at both ends of this channel.

Sci-Hub, or as I like to call it, the Library of Alexandra, hs a tour de force
demonstration that information is a public good, and that information _access_
wants, and _needs_ to be free. Sci-Hub isn't a complete answer to the problems
of current academic publishing (again: publish or perish), but it's a relief
valve for many, and an absolute and irrefutable proof of the pressing demands
for access.

________________________________

Notes:

1\. See the amazingly awful story of a young newlywed biology postdoc who lost
her arm in a lab explosion involving an improperly instrumented gas cylinder
in which oxygen and hydrogen were being mixed under pressure. This after
repeatedly reporting short circuits and electric shocks from the equipment.

[http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/03/postdoc-loses-arm-
in-...](http://chemjobber.blogspot.com/2016/03/postdoc-loses-arm-in-lab-
explosion-in.html)

~~~
sghi
Just as an aside, you could try Zotero - I use it on my laptop and phone and
it works pretty well for me. There is a dedicated app as well.
[https://www.zotero.org/](https://www.zotero.org/)

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm not sure there's any one tool that fits my needs, and I've looked at a
few, Zotero among them.

My understanding is that it's more a _bibliographic management_ tool.

There's also Calibre, which seems like it's a close solution, though that too
is problematic, particularly at scale.

Another problem is that my laptop (as opposed to tablet) isn't particularly
useful for reading formatted documents -- PDFs can't really be viewed _either_
one-up or two-up, and FBReader, which I like on mobile, formats ePub and
similar eBook formats poorly (too wide, insufficient paragraph separation,
unfamiliar controls), which is frustrating as well.

The tablet's much superior for _reading_ but even worse for _organising_
material.

~~~
dalke
I use Zotero to store the PDFs, movies, text files, and other things related
to my research. It has an option to either link to an existing file or to copy
the file into its own archive.

It can also extract text from those files, for use in a text search.

I use it on a laptop, not a tablet. I see there are Zotero apps for a tablet.
I have no experience with them.

------
yagyu
What can you do as a researcher without violating your contract? I decided to
not referee papers to be paywalled. You can, too!

[http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-
revi...](http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-review.html)

------
cameldrv
One of the reasons the deep learning field is moving so fast is that
everything is open access. Generally, it's considered prestigious to present
at a conference, and not much gets published in journals. The major
conferences have been adopting a model of posting first on arxiv and then
submitting to the conference, so the reviewers see the paper at the same time
as the general public.

The amazing thing is that weeks after the paper hits arxiv, new papers are
coming out, improving on the previous one. By the time the paper is accepted
and the conference rolls around, it's actually almost old-hat.

~~~
woodson
The quality of reviews of conference papers is mostly terrible, though. I've
been on both sides of it, here are some major complaints:

* There is only one round of reviews, with a binary accept/reject outcome. In case of rejection, feedback cannot be incorporated. In case of acceptance, there is basically no incentive for incorporating feedback, as the paper is already "through" and putting in any more time is considered a waste.

* Assigning papers to reviewers is very arbitrary and often the reviewers are not at all familiar with the field. Getting a paper reassigned to another reviewer is often so complicated and time-consuming that reviewers just do the bare minimum (if asked to rate novelty/originality etc., on a scale 1-5 they give it a "3", which given the usual acceptance rate of <50% means the paper will get rejected).

* Reviewers usually get a lot of papers to review. They don't have time (who does?) but have to finish by a two-week deadline. If one of the papers is relevant to the research of the reviewer or has been written by colleagues they know (double-blind does not help, you recognize who wrote it..), that paper will receive attention; the other papers are seen as distraction and are dealt with as outlined above.

Peer-review is important, though. Some fields of research, particularly those
where a lot of research is done by actual practitioners and not just pure
research scientists, are mostly driven by conferences with short (one page or
less) abstracts without full papers. There are often very few citeable sources
that have been peer reviewed; conference websites and abstract books vanish
over the years. An arxiv-like repository can help with that, but it does not
solve the problem of peer review. Community-run open-access journals seem to
provide a solution, but rarely take off.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
So that sounds like the review system is broken, but not the concept itself. I
always had the impression that anyone could review the paper, as in anyone can
read a book and write a review about it, and then they all publicly could ask
questions about parts of paper that are incorrect, science paper "bugs" if you
will, that the author would have to clarify/fix and when there are no more of
these "bugs" it is considered as peer reviewed. Although it wouldn't mean
there are no more incorrect things, just that nobody asked about them. Also
that would mean that mostly people interested in field are involved in review.
What you described sounds really detrimental to the whole process. Is peer
reviewing so hated between researchers that they need to be assigned and
forced a deadline to get papers reviewed?

------
jnsaff2
"The numbers for Ashburn, Virginia, the top U.S. city with nearly 100,000 Sci-
Hub requests, are harder to interpret."

Am I the only one who thinks this is just the location of AWS us-east-1?
People might be using proxies located there or have bulk download jobs.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Undoubtedly. Ashburn has a population of less than 50,000 people. There's no
way it could have almost 50% more use than New York City with millions of
people.

------
jmcgough
Researchers have been (illegally) helping each other out with paper access for
years. I used to hang out in the neuroscience group on livejournal years ago,
and about half the posts were people asking "Does anyone have access to Foo et
al 2012?" and then having it passed along to them by email.

~~~
maccard
I've had a 100% success rate contacting an author and asking for a copy.

------
eggy
They may have started servicing a need in the beginning as simply setting up
some servers, and serving as a central repository, which I do not understand
why this wasn't just setup by some other part like a university or research
foundation for public use, but Elsevier have turned that into holding
publicly-funded research hostage. You know when you are debating with
somebody, and their logic runs out, they start floundering and emoting? That's
what the comments from Elsevier are starting to sound like. I have no problem
with them making some money from Ads to help their monthly server hosting and
maintenance costs, but they have a weird, self-strangulating business model
that is headed nowhere real fast.

~~~
gh02t
The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was
organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends
meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point
that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it
basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in
the first place. And lets not even talk about publishers who require exclusive
rights, so that technically I can't distribute copies of my own work...

~~~
mirimir
Yes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books,
and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As
recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about
profiteering.

~~~
chris_wot
Is there a source for that? I believe you, I'm just interested in the degree!

~~~
mirimir
I based my comment on memory.

As I recall, reprints cost on the order of $0.50 each in the early 80s. Based
on
[http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)
that's about $1.20 in present dollars. That's a lot less than $30.

~~~
chris_wot
Bloody hell. So we are looking at a 2,000% increasing since the 80s?

~~~
mirimir
Well, what I don't know is what publishers charged third parties for reprints.
Or what license fees were for universities etc. As an author, I paid $0.50 per
reprint, and I was allowed to give them away. Anyway, I'm confident that
there's been huge price inflation.

------
thirdsun
I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those
papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit
the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way?

As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how
to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand
for an open platform to publish and read those papers - from authors and
readers alike. Why does this role need to be filled by an at best semi-legal
party like SciHub?

The fact that users with legitimate access to those papers actually opt for
SciHub to get them confirms that the current solutions just aren't working for
their users. So why would authors rely on them?

~~~
Laforet
I've just had a paper accepted last week in a traditional journal (peer-
reviewed and paywalled) and I'd share a few things I know and feel about
scientific publishing from an anthor's perspective.

The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission
protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a
panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further
consideration it was forwarded to three peer-reviewers who may and may not be
reimbursed for their time. After several rounds of comments and changes, the
accepted draft was sent to a publishing house in India for typesetting and
proofreading (They've done a very thorough and professional job with it)
before it was ready for print. There are a lot of man-hours spent of making
this happen and if the hours were billed individually it will add up to a
pretty hefty sum. Earlier versions of this paper had been submitted to other
journals and were eventually rejected - more hours of work done without
output.

Open access journal such as PLOS ONE charges a non-trivial sum ($1500 and up)
to cover these costs and all I could say is that you get what you paid for:
How much does a good lawyer/consultant charge per hour? Most people only
submit to OA journals if they are ideologically compelled or have ran out of
other avenues.

The quibbles between Elsevier and librarians is actually an old one (the
article linked below dates from 2003) because they own a number of high impact
journals and can bundle less popular titles with high impact ones to increase
their margins. While this is a pretty underhanded tactic to use, these less
circulated journals would probably have gone out of print without the
practice.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/426217a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/426217a.html)

Piracy has been around as early as universities had been around. There were
more than one usenet groups dedicated to these activities and reddit's
/r/scholar remains as its latest iteration. I was quite active on a medical
forum where doctors and academics help each other out with paywalled papers on
a quid pro quo basis. (Doctors are probably the most affected since their job
requires access to latest research articles yet few hospitals have the budget
for it unless they are affiliated with a university) All because there will
always be a few odd journals that are not covered by my university's
subscription but others might do. Publishers mostly turned a blind eye because
their use are limited to a small group of people who cannot be persuaded to
pay anyway. Sci-hub is something different since it is much more accessible
and comprehensive, which threatens the current business model of publications.

P.S. This thread from another HN front page submission offers an interesting
parallel on paywalls and access to journalism.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11592293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11592293)

~~~
chris_wot
Oh, so if doctors weren't to pirate they wouldn't remain abreast? That sounds
like yet another disservice from the publishing industry. They are indirectly
decreasing people's health. Fantastic.

~~~
jrapdx3
Many years ago hospital systems employed librarians who acquired articles for
medical staff. Costs associated with maintaining a library were at least
partially offset by fees physicians paid to be "on staff" at a hospital (or
group of them). BTW those fees were typically on the order of several hundred
dollars/year.

Of course, among small-medium size hospital systems the libraries are long
gone. Some of the largest or those affiliated with universities may still have
access in some form. It's an ironic development that so much more research is
going on, yet less available to practitioners on the front lines.

~~~
hanklazard
And that's not even taking into account the thousands of docs in the US who
work out of private practices and community health centers.

~~~
jrapdx3
Many (most?) primary care docs work for large clinics which are often owned by
hospital systems. IOW practice environments that tend to be driven by
"productivity" stats, and refined clinical knowledge is not the highest
priority. Don't know about public/community clinics, but given the chronic
underfunding of these agencies amenities like library services are unlikely.

------
Dolores12
Papers that meant to be free are now pirated. Nice paradigm shift.

------
Hondor
If the business model of Elsevier/etc somehow collapses, I wonder how
universities will make hiring decisions? They high fees of their journals are
effectively a recruitment or candidate selection service paid by university
libraries and serving departments when they hire faculty. Perhaps they'll have
to revert to assessing applicants on their merits instead of such arbitrary
metrics as the impact factor of a journal that they published their work in.

~~~
return0
How do they do it in CS? People there communicate with arxiv links, not dois.

~~~
ufo
One thing that helps a lot in CS is that most authors upload their papers to
their personal websites.

------
EvgeniyZh
The system is broken. Rich universities are ready to pay money, so publishers
can raise price, basically making papers unavailable for poor universities who
can't handle subscriptions or individuals.

At the same time publishers hardly spend any money - most of people access
publications online, not printed, and tons of journals don't have minimal
review. So publisher does nothing and wants much money for that.

Scientist at the same time are stuck - if you want people to read your paper,
you need good journal or conference, else you might be not heard. Leave alone
prestige and fame.

So, something has to be done. Maybe Sci-Hub is that something.

------
davesque
It's just so funny how blatantly parasitic some of these publishing companies
are.

~~~
tmalsburg2
Let's not forget that this whole business would not exist if researchers
weren't so addicted to the prestige offered by glamorous journals. Most of the
people complaining about scientific publishers are actually complicit in their
success and dominance.

~~~
chrismonsanto
The "prestige," as you call it, is necessary to get a job in academia. Where
you publish your research is considered a trustworthy approximation to the
quality of your research, and requires a lot less time & expertise to vet.

~~~
sgift
Basically, the same reason why it's easier to get a job offer if you already
have a job at a great company: "Someone vetted him for us, he is probably
good" \- so much easier for those hiring this way than if they'd actually had
to check your previous work.

------
musha68k
Wow <3 Alexandra Elbakyan is my new favorite super hero:

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-
fo...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/alexandra-elbakyan-founded-sci-
hub-thwart-journal-paywalls)

~~~
SXX
This doesn't really affect the project, but keep in mind she is very
controversion person. For instance she support government censorship of
political opposition and generally don't support freedom of speech. And likely
half of people commented there would be banned on any sci-hub related resource
since she usually ban anyone who don't fully agree with what project doing.

~~~
pencilcode
She's the one who's putting herself at risk. Amazing. Amazing. Amazing. And
every time you slander someone you really should link to independent sources
so others can at least verify and judge for themselves.

~~~
SXX
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't like the project, but likely you don't
want to have "heroes" like that. At least comparing her to Aaron Swartz is
really bad idea in my opinion.

If you want source there is her comments on Russian website:

[https://geektimes.ru/users/sci-hub/comments/](https://geektimes.ru/users/sci-
hub/comments/) (most importantly latest one)

She's heavily downvoted there since most of IT-related audience in Russsia
don't support autocratic regimes. She call that community downvoted her is
"fifth column" (which in CIS is term for political opposition used by
dictators fans) and censorship of internet resources that support political
opposition is good thing.

There was other case when sci-hub community made some poll on their social
network page about supporing what they doing and then banned everyone who
voted against. Sadly it's harder to find source on this one since everything
related to incedent is deleted and everyone posted about that is removed from
their group.

------
darawk
These journals contribute precisely nothing to the world. They don't pay the
authors, and they pay the reviewers a trivial amount (if at all). They provide
exactly nothing, and they extract tremendous amounts of capital from what
would have been some of its most productive uses.

There are only a few things that I can truly say I will watch wither and die
with unconditional, unreserved glee, and the academic publishing industry is
one of them.

------
nxzero
Access to pubs is just a symptom of a huge issue, calling science science;
science as it is at best a "soft" science and at worst, in many cases, whack
quackery that preys on the weak.

As an example of what I mean, as of 2010, 91% of published pubs for the field
of psychology supported their original hypothesis; if this isn't an obvious
red flag, not sure what would be.

Intellectual fraud needs to be criminalized and claims based on science must
require not only reproducibility, but solid means of denying the authors of
any form of plausible deniability from escaping responsibility for what in
many cases is fraud, or worse, blindly seeding their own bias as reality.

_______

[1] Quackery
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quackery)

[2] Positive Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010068)

[3] Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.
[http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)

------
fferen
As a grad student at a university with ample access to journals, I still use
sci-hub occasionally, as many journal sites are surprisingly unreliable (cough
IEEE, cough Nature).

------
lottin
This isn't just about the academia. As soon as you want to write about any
technical subject, even if it's only for your own personal use, you need to
study the relevant literature. Often this means reading dozens of papers.
There's no way a normal person who isn't working at a university or research
institution can afford that.

------
ujjwalg
I wrote about horrors of scientific publishing not just from the viewership
side, but also from publishing side a few years ago. tl;dr - Publishers have
just too much control on publishing process and distribution process when they
bring almost nothing to the table in the digital world we are living today.
The very fact that as a scientist you can only submit a paper to one journal
at a time and wait for months and sometimes a year to get a response is insane
and completely unacceptable. Imagine if you have to do it when you are
applying for a job.

If someone wants to read it, here is a link:
[http://ujjwalg.com/blog/2013/5/3/the-problem-with-the-
scient...](http://ujjwalg.com/blog/2013/5/3/the-problem-with-the-scientific-
publishing-process)

------
throwaway3523
Just as a note about who gets denied access.... I work in a US research lab
but my department got spun off into a company. With the loss of my university
credentials came my loss of library access.... I still need to read papers in
random journals to do my job though.

EDIT: A cash poor company.

------
wsfull
If the cost to students attending universities that have adequate
subscriptions is small -- previously, commenters suggested this portion of
their tuition amounted to only a small annual fee -- then what would be the
reasons the publishers would not offer individual subscriptions at similar
cost to the public? As any serious student knows, the "a la carte" prices are
absurd -- how successful have they been with this idea?

One silly idea deserves another:

Generally, journals manage their subscriptions through filtering on IP address
ranges.

Imagine a customer-ISP agreement that had an option whereby a subscriber could
"opt in" to academic journals for a few extra dollars per month.

These subscribers might then be assigned addresses in certain designated
ranges by their ISP.

------
kriro
I'm ideologically primed to favor free access to information (especially if
any tax money was involved which is true for pretty much all research) but I
think a middle ground of moving scientific publishing to a
nextflix/itunes/kindle model would solve a lot of issues. Access a paper ->
(micro) payment to the journal (who could in return set up another (micro)
payment to the actual author). The biggest issue is the pricing model
(35$/paper when a researcher typically needs to read 100+ papers per papers
he/she writes) and the lack of a single point of access.

Like iTunes for science. Go do it someone. I won't envy you, I'll expect you
to fail but if you pull it off I'll be forever grateful.

~~~
Jonathanks
I read "Internet Book Piracy" recently about this issue and the author, Gini
Graham, has valid points and suggestions for reducing piracy; this was one of
her suggestions. I have no problem with Elsevier crying wolf when there's
none. They had it coming. I'm concerned about the actual cost to authors. We
need a new model that puts the authors and their readers as first priorities
and facilitates the movement of information, not hoarding it. Publishing
companies did that for a while, then they declared themselves custodians of
our common knowledge and hoarded it from us. I'm thinking of ways publishing
can be made what it should be. Gini Graham has good suggestions that I'd like
to see tried out.

------
guelo
As in so many other endeavors the law works to protect the true criminals
against humanity.

------
erwinbierens
[http://sci-hub.bz/](http://sci-hub.bz/) and [http://sci-hub.cc/](http://sci-
hub.cc/)

------
tibbon
20 years ago, most people assumed that MP3 file sharing would _never_ take us
to a place where you can pay a company $9.99/month for unlimited streaming of
a huge portion of published music. Surely, the Industry would never allow that
to happen!

Yet, it did. I'm told that the journals will never allow themselves to become
antiquated and that they play a vital role in the review process. I'm seeing
this being chipped away at slowly, and have to wonder if soon that small
movement will accelerate greatly.

~~~
Hondor
You could say it also took us to a place where there are no more Elvis's,
Michael Jacksons, Beatles or Queens. This might just be my perspective failure
due to growing old but maybe the quality of music has degenerated into singers
shouting insults at each other for the past 10 years?

Academia is already plagued with too much research. Useless methodologically
faulty research because every man and his dog wants to publish sometime,
anything.

------
foobarbecue
The author refers to Napster as a "pirate site." I stopped reading at that
point because I realized the technical info in the document is likely to be
incorrect.

~~~
KMag
Napster was famously run by a group that would board container ships full of
music CDs as they rounded the Horn of Africa, kill the crews, rip the CDs to
MP3, the burn and sink the ships. At least that's my impression from reading
press releases at the time.

------
onetimePete
The economy of disrupting ruptured by it shear forces - aka by itself? AIs
crawling over the knowledge base? Good thing they cant publish papers with
meaningful recombined results yet. Or can they. The irony is that the church
of singularity is not relevant to the process - its like declaring evolution
some godlike principle or cataclysmic event- while it just is a glider gun
going forth, not knowing, not wanting to know. Still interesting times. I
guess in the end, the science journals just where roadblocks in Alphabets way.
So they have to go- so they will die, the usual way- with there resource
supply systems stripped from them by a not "attackable" third party, condemned
by those who benefit, as a barbaric, lawless act.

If they would have foresight, they would release all the papers they have into
the public domain, and have there true opponents wrestle with the GPL and thus
the allmende that produced the wealth. Instead they are having a nap at the
ste ering wheel moment. In the end it will help mankind. So can we drop the
charade and get on with it?

------
topstriker515
I'm not familiar with the procedure of publishing a paper, so please excuse my
ignorance. What's preventing someone from submitting their work to publishers
AND uploading it to an open access platform? They can rely on the journal for
quality-review/validation/etc. while still allowing for wide dissemination.

~~~
alceufc
Most journals require that the authors sign an agreement in which the
publisher retains the copyright of the paper (e.g. [1]).

Although a few publishers allow the authors to provide a pdf of the paper in
their personal home-page, they do allow it to be uploaded to an open access
platform.

[1] [https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-
information/policies/...](https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-
information/policies/copyright)

------
gambiting
I guess that soon governments will start forcing ISPs to ban access to Sci-
Hub, just like they did with Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents. It's still
trivial to type into google "pirate bay proxy" and access it quickly, but I
can see some legislation happening against it soon.

~~~
pahool
It's fully mirrored and available on a .onion site accessible through tor:

scihub22266oqcxt.onion

------
rdl
Journals becoming free would probably vastly more to the economy than the
rents extracted by the journal publishing industry. Sci-Hub is one way, but
perhaps another way would be either a philanthropist or government buying the
companies out, or applying eminent domain to the research.

------
kcole16
What exactly is the benefit of Elsevier for researchers? Is there no free way
to publish papers?

~~~
hyperbovine
Elsevier own some really high profile journals, including The Lancet and Cell.
Refusing to publish in these journals, or similar ones in terms of impact
factor, is simply not an option for junior faculty in most departments. I have
friends for whom "publishing in Nature, Science and/or Cell" is literally a
precondition for getting tenure.

~~~
Chinjut
Why does academia put up with this stupid system? Academics are already the
ones doing all the peer review on their own, free of payment, right? So why
not say "Hey, we'll set up our own servers, host papers free for all to
access, and then note which ones pass the same levels of scrutiny we'd apply
as reviewers were we reviewing them for Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet,
whatever"?

Doesn't seem like the journals actually provide much beyond asking professors
to do stuff for free, both in terms of writing papers and reviewing them. Is
inertia really worth letting them leech so much money and lock down access
(antithetical to the whole idea of public-ation...) while they're at it?

~~~
jccalhoun
It reminds me of the electoral college system: people complain about it and
realize it is outmoded system but it will never get replaced because the
people with the power to actually change it won't since the system got them
the power in the first place. Academic publishing isn't quite that bad since
it is slowly changing but I think it is similar.

Established faculty largely don't care because they are established (there are
exceptions of course). Some new faculty would like to change it but if they do
set up their own system it won't be taken seriously by the administration or
senior faculty in charge of tenure review. There are also new faculty who
don't know or care about these things so they just do what they know which is
traditional publishing.

I was at a faculty development session a couple months ago. There were 20
faculty members there from various departments and the topic turned to open
access journals. Some people were arguing that they weren't worth publishing
in because tenure review boards haven't heard of them so they don't take them
seriously. Then one guy - remember, this is a college professor - asked "where
are these papers stored?" He wanted to know where the actual servers were
physically located. And then he said, "This whole online thing seems like Big
Brother."

That being said, things are changing and in some fields open access journals
are seen as reputable and accepted but they are still new and in some fields
(non-stem mostly) they are seen much more skeptically. So if you are in those
fields and you want tenure you are going to try to get published in the old
journals first.

~~~
KMag
The Electoral College still offers a modicum of protection against the tyranny
of the masses. In a pure popular vote system, presidential candidates wouldn't
have to educate themselves enough to pretend to care about the lives outside
the US's 10 largest cities.

------
gregw134
Have any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yet? They
really should...

~~~
polarix
Yeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not
sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my
left foot.

~~~
goodplay
They should categorize papers into specific fields (and sub-fields). Each
party would torrent what interests them.

Also, this might make a great use case for IPFS as apposed to torrents.
Torrents are not designed to be mutable.

------
cant_kant
If the paper is retracted, do the publishers give a refund ? See
[http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/) to see the massive
number of retractions that happen.

------
biehl
Nice comment here [https://storify.com/KyleSiler/dupuis-on-sciencemagazine-
sci-...](https://storify.com/KyleSiler/dupuis-on-sciencemagazine-sci-hub-
artcle)

------
santialbo
Before sci-hub, whenever I needed a paper I would email the author kindly
asking for a copy. Almost everytime I would have the PDF by the end of the
day. Researchers are happy to share their knowledge.

------
sumanthvepa
I may be naive here, but why not search and download the article's preprint
from arXiv? Would it be that much different from the final paper? Why would
you need to pirate at all?

~~~
jboynyc
Not all disciplines use arXiv -- far from it. Especially in the humanities and
social sciences, there isn't really anything comparable to arXiv.

But you are right, preprints are not all that different from published papers,
as this recent analysis confirmed:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363](http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363)

[edited to add:] I suppose you could look at the data
([https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-
stories/](https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/)) and see
what proportion of requested DOIs have a preprint version in the arXiv. I
suspect it's rather small.

------
amelius
Sci-hub is nice, but it would be nicer if these papers were available in
torrent form, so we wouldn't have to depend on a single source (which can fail
at some point).

------
ylem
Just curious--where does ResearchGate fit into all of this? I see constant
requests where people ask for papers, but is it actually legal to give them
out? There is an interesting discussion here:
[https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_is_ResearchGate_dealin...](https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_is_ResearchGate_dealing_with_copyright_issues_when_posting_our_papers)

------
Fiahil
One of the many problems we have as humans and citizens of the world, is our
dependence on US laws. It's not like it's cataclysmic-bad but there are some
issues that would greatly benefit, to the rest of the world, from a little
push by US citizens on US law makers (It's not like we can do something about
it, we're not invited to the conversation).

This is one of them.

------
chris_wot
They compare SciHub to Napster. I have news for U.S. Corporate giants - this
is no Napster. For one, this isn't downloading what is essentially
entertainment. This is downloading serious content without which researchers
and students couldn't help the world progress in positive and vital ways.
Secondly, a lot of this content wasn't funded by the ones publishing it, and
it shows in the comments every time this gets broached because almost every
writer whose work is published tells the same story - they didn't get paid by
the publisher and all they are doing is preventing their work from being
distributed to the widest audience possible.

Thirdly, this time the bullies can't touch those who are distributing the
work. One of the consequences of the pervasive reach of the Internet is that
if pirated material falls outside of the jurisdiction of a nation that
strictly endorses its copyright law then there is virtually nothing that
nation can do about it.

When Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann prosecuted Aaron Swartz they thought
they had struck a blow for copyright holders everywhere. And they did for a
few years. Under three years later, however, the rules of the game changed and
this time there is no one they could easily prosecute, because they are
outside of their grasp and there is no way to persecute them, or make an
example of them.

The established order has changed. Those who should have known better, who
should have put conditions on publicly financed research to be open to all
instead allowed greedy and amoral companies like Elsevier to take the hard
work of others and sell it for a profit, giving almost nothing back to the
system they are pillaging. Too late they choose to open the door slightly ajar
to make those on the outside think they will be granted access, only to slam
that door shut before they can get inside. Too late do they realise that a
gentleman thief has broken in and distributed their ill-gotten gains to the
ones they stole from.

Those who ruthlessly pursued the Aaron Swartz's of the world have finally been
undone. Their arrogance and rapacity blinded them to the reality that they
cannot deny information to the world. They did not heed the words of those who
enabled the digital revolution. This struggle was predicted by Stewart Brand
in 1984, who said to Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference in Marin
County, San Francisco:

"On the one hand, information wants to be expensive because it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other
hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is
lower and lower all the time. So you have these two things fighting against
each other." [1]

That tension continues, but the old guard is now fighting a rear guard action.
They will fight back, but they will remain in retreat until one day they give
up, or are forced to and information becomes free. On that day be thankful,
because the bindings of the ones who wish to shackle your mind and creativity
will have lost the power to do so, to the incalculable good of humanity.

1\.
[https://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge338.html](https://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge338.html)

------
KKKKkkkk1
This discussion thread feels like a deja vu from the Napster and Kazaa days.
The wheels of the US legal system have been set in motion, and even if we
think that information wants to be free, the days of sci-hub are numbered.

------
ericjang
Does this suggest that publishing companies like Reed Elsevier plc (RELX
group) will eventually be starved of revenue from papers? Or have they figured
out an alternative business model to adapt to the changing times?

~~~
isido
Publishers probably cannot keep up with the current revenue levels, especially
since the university library funding is constantly decreasing.

And besides Scihub, there are emerging institutional solutions to this
problem, like research funders demanding that research paid with public funds
must be publicly available, and universities setting up academic repositories
where papers published elsewhere are available in open access form.

------
jerryhuang100
some papers on that top 10 list are even free on the original publisher sites
or ncbi (eg. nejm). so why getting them on sci-hub rather than from the
original? ppl don't read supplements any more?

------
dewiz
Is sci hub dead then? DNS doesn't resolve the host anymore

~~~
youngbullind
See the other post in this thread with other URLs and the IP address.

------
vbezhenar
There's an easy way for Elsevier to find compromised accounts used to download
articles. I wonder if they will pursue account owners some day.

------
mrkgnao
Can someone explain the regular (weekly?) dips in the graph of Sci-Hub usage?
Is it people not working on Sundays?

------
jcoffland
I find a login at my alma matter and an HTTP proxy over SSH quite useful for
accessing research papers.

------
Zelmor
It is in the interest of the general public to mirror these services as many
time as we should. Paywalls for scientific articles are holding back the whole
species. Fusion reactor when? Maybe when the patents for technological advance
will not be held by oil companies around the world, whose short term interests
cap the our technological progress to make the world a more livable place.

I have a couple PhD student friends, who give me first hand account of biology
articles being inaccessible in 2nd world countries due to paywalls and
financial limitations of research facilities. It is holding back research in
just about every field, I suppose.

~~~
return0
Primarily in life sciences. In other disciplines, you have arxiv, or simply
publishing in commercial journals doesnt matter that much.

------
dschiptsov
Knowledge shall be free and unbiased by authority. Free access for everyone to
knowledge and healthy scepticism produces miracles. In India, for example,
lack of restrictions and tolerance to every opinion produced, besides
thousands of sects and cults, the best philosophy this world have seen so far.

The site, it seems, is a part of natural social movement, similar to FOSS,
rather than paid content piracy. It is against restrictions.

When some parasites are trying to construct a paywall then society sooner or
later would find the way around it, be it knowledge or any other form of
digital content - selling an output of the sendfile syscall by those who
haven't produced anything would never been tolerated, it violates the
hardwired notion of fairness. Especially when one assumes that these papers
has been written to spread knowledge and contribute to scientific community
(a-la contrubution to open source), not to make money by selling copies - it
isn't a paperback.

------
tmptmp
From the article:

>>Among the few things she would not disclose is her current location, because
she is at risk of financial ruin, extradition, and imprisonment because of a
lawsuit launched by Elsevier last year.

Elsevier should be condemned for its greedy acts. People should send them
letters of condemnation for their greedy acts, including for this lawsuit.

We can send them e-mails and therein can state, something on the following
lines:

>>>

Publisher,

I, a member of academia, am concerned about the hurdles you have put in the
path of the progress of science and education. I condemn your behavior and
also condemn your decision to file a lawsuit against a person named "Alexandra
Elbakyan" to throttle her efforts to spread the publicly funded research
knowledge to the public without any "middlemen" like you. I applaud her
efforts behind the sci-hub project that was far long due. You might have
forgotten by now, but due to, and/or by, the middlemen like you, a noble
person named Aaron Swartz was harassed to no end and it must be due to the
pain and stress inflicted in that harassment he committed suicide. Please wake
up and get rid of your mean tactics and save whatever little goodwill you
might have managed to retain. No thanks, as I cannot thank you.

<<<

Personally I have sent them a mail to this effect. Haven't got any response,
it seems obvious.

Are there any legal repercussions that these mean, greedy publishers can
pursue to harass the email senders, especially in USA? I am not from USA.
Legal experts there can advise.

No need to mention, I am a huge fan of Alexandra Elbakyan and Aaron Swartz.
They are great heroes of modern times. The thoughts of Aaron bring tears to my
eyes. They are legendary and remind me of (may be fictional) Robin Hood [1].

I also thank all the academics who are actively helping the sci-hub project
and all the people who are helping in their own capacity.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood)

edit: added thanks to all academics and people.

------
jbmorgado
It baffles me how a publisher that doesn't create the content neither pays for
it, was deemed by the law as the copyright holder of the works they didn't
create neither did they pay for.

------
tacos
The least secure format on the web (PDF) + sketchy (ex-)Soviet servers + high-
end researchers in aerospace and materials science. What could possibly go
wrong?

------
wutf
Torrent the papers. Why hasn't this been done?

