
Where Sci-Hub Is - garner
https://whereisscihub.now.sh/
======
Vinnl
Hi all, I made this. I just received a notice from Zeit that they blocked it:

> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment:
> whereisscihub.now.sh

> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.

> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.

I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden
attention.

While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and
proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit
are not too happy about it.

The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That
said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any
more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub
to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].

 _Edit:_ I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once,
and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to
remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access)
journals: [https://plaudit.pub/](https://plaudit.pub/)

[0]
[https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/](https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/)

[1]
[https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/issues/9](https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/issues/9)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub)

[3] [https://sci-hub.now.sh/](https://sci-hub.now.sh/) (though also hosted by
Zeit)

~~~
Cenk
Something similar happened to me
([https://twitter.com/Citationsy/status/1156626811398307840](https://twitter.com/Citationsy/status/1156626811398307840))
when I posted a link to Sci-Hub on my blog. In the EU it’s apparently
copyright infringement to link to copyright infringing URLs.

I ended up removing the links because I didn’t want get into more legal
trouble with Elsevier. More details here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606362)

~~~
rndgermandude
It's a bit more complicated and a result of:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-playboy-
copyright/play...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-playboy-
copyright/playboy-wins-copyright-battle-over-web-links-to-its-images-
idUSKCN11E1LR)

Basically, if you post a link and know it links to illegal content, you are in
violation of copyright law. If you do not know, you're not in violation, but
upon being informed, you do know and have to take down the link.

In case of Sci-Hub, it would be reasonable to assume somebody who made a
website with the purpose to link to the ever-changing Sci-Hub domain, that is
ever changing because of copyright takedowns, then I'd think a court would
find it reasonable for you to know you're linking to something violating
somebody else's copyrights and thus are in violation of copyright law
yourself, in EU jurisdictions at least.

~~~
Vinnl
I do know that the website hosts lots of illegal content. That said, I also
know that many people use it just because it's so much more convenient, and
who do are allowed to access the material: either because it's already Open
Access, or because they're at an institution that has a subscription. See [0]:

> Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same
> papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience
> rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim.

Note also that the article you linked spoke about linking directly to photo's
and articles, not to websites that host both infringing and non-infringing
content. I presume Wikipedia wouldn't do that either, even though they _do_
link to the homepage.

(And fun fact: some articles published by Elsevier actually _do_ link to Sci-
Hub versions of articles. Not really relevant to this, but still funny.)

[0] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-
pir...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-
papers-everyone)

~~~
rndgermandude
Problem is that even when people who have valid licenses are using the site
out of convenience, it's still illegal for Sci-Hub to host the content.

Sure it has some legal content too, but it has undeniably and openly a LOT of
infringing content (bad faith), so I'd guess a judge would convict. Wikipedia
may have some infringing content, but they hardly flaunt it and actually work
to minimize such content (good faith).

------
dragonsh
I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. Research
papers through sci-hub only helps to make knowledge easily accessible.
Humanity's progress depends on people who shared their knowledge, not by
people who use it as a tool to rule and hold on to power.

It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and
accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the
nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of
the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as
intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the
default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.

Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and
anonymous.

Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary
for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In
USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is
so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have
deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.

~~~
unityByFreedom
> I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible.

I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no
sense.

It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational
materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to
build a house.

~~~
dagenix
> It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating
> educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it
> takes time to build a house.

My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written
by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer
reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal.
Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have
access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually
brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication
they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive
no direct compensation.

~~~
refurb
Look up Chesterson’s Fence. It’s always a good idea to figure out why the
fence exists before tearing it down.

Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they
choose to publish in these for-profit journals.

Do you know why?

~~~
dagenix
I'm a big fan of the Chesterson's Fence idea - maybe not applied slavishly,
but as a general principle. And I have no idea where the journals came from.
Nor do I have a suggestion for what to do about them. What I would be
interested in reading about is any type of value that they bring to the
process other than a name that was established long ago. I have yet to find
much in the way that explains their current value for advancing academic
knowledge.

~~~
refurb
Their value is very similar to that offered by Ivy League schools - prestige.
The journals have the reputation for only publishing the highest quality, high
impact papers. They act a filter.

Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you
need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at
all.

Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access.
Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they
didn't.

There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open
access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it
published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious
enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.

------
LeoPanthera
The Wikipedia article is also kept reasonably up to date with the URLs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

They used to have a .onion address, which I assumed would continue to be the
most reliable way in, but it's been down for a long time. I'm surprised, it
seems like Tor would be the best way to remain up and accessible.

~~~
shpx
DNS-over-Wikipedia is my goto strategy for websites like this (Scihub, Libgen,
Piratebay, Popcorn Time, etc.).

~~~
madacol
How does it work? I'm trying to find the referenced Wikidata entry about sci-
hub, but when searching, I don't understand what I am reading.

~~~
madacol
I think I found it.
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377#P856](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377#P856)
But it's not trivial to understand

------
WilTimSon
Sci-Hub is such a marvelous resource. I like to read research papers for fun
sometimes but I'm, let's put it gently, no scientist. So it'd be a huge waste
of money for me to pay the steep prices of scientific journal subscriptions
just to read 1-2 articles per month where I understand at most 75% of it.

However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the
scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm
reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that
I could contribute to?

~~~
boldlybold
If you enjoy a paper you read, email the first or corresponding author and say
so! It would make my day if this happened to me, a PhD student.

Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone
the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.

~~~
Beldin
This.

Paying taxes is (at least in western countries where i know a tiny bit about
academia) sufficient to support the authors.

If you want to go beyond that: reach out / blog / tweet / etc about papers
that peek your interest. If someone else wrote about a paper of mine, I'd be
over the moon!

------
palijer
HTTP 451. I never thought I'd see one of those before. I live in Canada... Not
some authoritarian dictatorship. Wonder who blocked it.

~~~
matheusmoreira
Same result here in Brazil. An HTTP status code implies the domain name was
properly resolved to the IP of the HTTP server. The page must have been
removed by the host.

~~~
eteos
> An HTTP status code implies the domain name was properly resolved to the IP
> of the HTTP server.

This is not true. Your ISP can in theory route the requested address to
whatever they want. In the Netherlands TPB is blocked and my ISP returns a 200
status code which shows their blocking landing page. Other ISPs give a 30x
redirect to their domain.

Basically the ISP can do a man in the middle attack.

------
p0llard
The sooner academic publishers die the better—not a very original thought, I'm
aware.

There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv
and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community,
and I think it comes down to two factors:

1\. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty
rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv
which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a
shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather
that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.

2\. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per
month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.

I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions
they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for
proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access,
perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic
affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the
US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic
publishing in months.

~~~
xvilka
Just an arXiv with peer-review is not enough. There is a lot of room for
innovation and improvement. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about
creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia,
moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social
networking. Check out the last[4] article in that series. There are a few
implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[5] and MIT's
PubPub[6] (it is the open source[7]). See also GitXiv[8]. See also the
Publishing Reform[9] project. Moreover, there is quite an interesting
initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind -
Polyplexus[10].

[1] [http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-
gitwikxi...](http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/)

[2] [https://www.overleaf.com/](https://www.overleaf.com/)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)

[4] [http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-
up-a-...](http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-path-to-
forkable-papers/)

[5] [https://authorea.com/](https://authorea.com/)

[6] [https://www.pubpub.org/](https://www.pubpub.org/)

[7] [https://github.com/pubpub](https://github.com/pubpub)

[8] [https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-
computer...](https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-
science-e5fea734cd45)

[9] [https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion](https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion)

[10] [https://polyplexus.com/](https://polyplexus.com/)

~~~
shuhari
I will probably create a Show HN thread very soon to officially announce it,
but I am creating a startup that aims to cover these areas.

Essentially it's 'Reddit + Patreon for research'.

[http://asone.ai/](http://asone.ai/)

~~~
wiggler00m
What is your business model?

~~~
shuhari
We plan to take a cut of the crowdfunded transactions, like Patreon or
Kickstarter does. We could also show academia-relevant ads on the sidebar. We
will never paywall content on our platform.

------
rahuldottech
In libgen, you can search for stuff and find books/docs that match the query,
but unfortunately that appears to not be possible on sci-hub, which is
inconvenient.

That said, both are incredible resources for academics, researchers, students
or even folks just wanting to read up on a subject in more depth than
Wikipedia has.

~~~
lvs
It's not really acting as a search engine, no. You can use Scholar for that,
find the DOI, and paste it into sci-hub.

Speaking of which, Scholar should really be showing DOIs on their search
results. That is, the DOI should appear as a top-level clickable link from
every result entry. I've tried to suggest many things like this to Scholar
over the years, but to no avail... Like Google in general. Just a feature
request into the void.

~~~
type0
They would never display it. It's basically the same reason why they won't
show a complete url anymore, the more time you spend on Google the more money
they get.

~~~
adtac
Google does not run ads on scholar.

------
boshomi
webarchive URL (orignal shows http 451):

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200225000142/https://whereissci...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200225000142/https://whereisscihub.now.sh/)

~~~
matsemann
> HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

So not exactly useful if this one is blocked, heh.

Or is it some joke going over my head?

------
eyegor
PSA for those looking for access to research papers. If it's hard to find via
scihub/libgen, you can also email the authors. No researchers want their work
to be inaccessible, they just need to publish in journals for
visibility/prestige.

Source: have research publications, always happy when someone reaches out

~~~
ufo
In computer science you can often find copies of the paper on the author's
website as well.

------
lsb
Oh no! I'm seeing it down.

[https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whereisscihub.now.sh](https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whereisscihub.now.sh)

Sending HugOps to everyone at Zeit trying to keep 99.99% uptime for now.sh at
a time like this

~~~
Rauchg
There are no issues with the platform ([https://zeit-status.co/](https://zeit-
status.co/)). The deploy has been blocked due to ToS violations.

~~~
bithavoc
What terms?

Edit: I didn’t know Sci-Hub was illegal.

~~~
judge2020
[https://zeit.co/terms](https://zeit.co/terms)

> You shall not... (b) use the Service in any unlawful manner (including
> without limitation in violation of any data, privacy or export control laws

> This TOS shall be governed by the laws of the State of California without
> regard to the principles of conflicts of law.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
Pulling domain names from a Wikipedia article doesn't violate any laws. That's
literally all the page did. It just checked the sci-hub Wikipedia article and
reposted the latest domain listed. But it's their site/company, so whatever.

~~~
judge2020
Ya I don't see it as illegal nor correct to block this site, but i bet they
don't want to be anywhere near elsevier's radar.

------
glenneroo
Too bad it's blocked by our telecom :(

> Dear customer, Due to a warning in accordance with Section 81 (1a) UrhG /
> preliminary injunction / court decision, access to this website had to be
> blocked.

~~~
Causality1
I'm surprised you put up with that kind of censorship. I'd get a VPN if I were
you.

~~~
glenneroo
I've tried various VPNs over the years but they add considerable latency to my
already latency-laden LTE connection, which is only very briefly fun for the
nostalgic 90s feeling.

------
bjonnh
As academics, your institution is paying publishers to get access to journal
(and you may loose access to electronic versions if the institution stops
paying contrary to paper versions), you write papers for free, you review
papers for free, you are part of the editorial board of the journal for free
(or some crumbs for travelling to a conference), as an editor you spend most
of your life managing people for a really small stipend compared to the time
spent. People still do it because they believe it is useful. But current
openaccess solutions that cost sometimes $5,000 are not a solution either. In
both options the publishers is making the money and the researchers or their
institution have to pay... There are legitimate concerns about scihub from
some librarians as it doesn't allow a correct attribution of funds to
ressources that are needed by researchers and there are some concerns of
researchers credentials being stolen and shared (willingly and not) by scihub
but also less reputable actors. University libraries are struggling with
credentials reuse as they are the ones that get punished by the publishers
with ban of ips or full institutions and harder contracts negotiations.
Talking about those negotiations, they are all confidential, despite often
using state or federal funds there is no way to know how much, what and how
these secret deals are negotiated. So we still don't have a good solution.
Preprints are useful, but we had already too many publications to skim through
and the fact that anybody can publish anything with no filters makes finding
meaningful information much harder....

~~~
el_cujo
>you write papers for free

Actually you often pay a couple thousand dollars as a publishing fee to get
your paper in the journal after review. I'm sure it's not necessarily like
that in every journal, but the bigger ones do it that way. So basically pay
them to take your content, pay them to view their content, and do labor for
them by reviewing papers for free.

~~~
bjonnh
True, but it is the case only in some high end tabloid-like journals, not more
regular ones (at least in my field). Unless of course you ask for their
openaccess option, then they charge thousands for CC-BY-NC-ND and sometimes
more for CC-BY...

------
why_only_15
I'm getting a 451... Did zeit.now take this down?

~~~
judge2020
For reference, 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451)

------
adtac
Did a mod edit the title? If so, this has to be the most useless edit -- it
completely eliminates the whole point of the domain name.

~~~
petercooper
If they did, they did it very quickly as
[https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/](https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/)
didn't track a change on it.

------
3xblah
" _Where_ Sci-Hub Is"

Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three
years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required
to access it.

------
covertlibrarian
As we can see by the fact the above URL is currently not working, there's a
high risk associated with the centralized nature of sci-hub. It's already been
the target of a major court case in the US and the only reason it's still
running is because the site and it's founder (Alexandra Elbakyan) are outside
of the court's jurisdiction. But there's still a chance it could disappear one
day, and what sort of impact would that have on the productivity of
researchers, many of which will be unable to access the articles they need?

If you have the disk space and bandwidth, I would strongly encourage you to
participate in this torrent seeding effort:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library_genesis_project_update_25_million_books/)

The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles
archived by sci-hub. At
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/) there are links
in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.

For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps
are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are
81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up
into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a
subset and seed those.

If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access
to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily.
This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it
will preserve those that have.

As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing
industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors
of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and
published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week:
[https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...](https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_00025)

As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life
for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.

------
processing
HTTP 451

~~~
MacsHeadroom
Which comes from the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, wherein society goes awry
to the point of publicly funding the destruction of valuable information. It's
also the temperature paper (books) burns at.

Nobody actually uses this status code, despite it being an official spec. I'd
like to think the dev or dev ops person who configured this server used the
status code as a minor protest. The spec authors would be proud.

------
swiley
I think in software you don't appreciate how important papers are compared to
other subjects like chemistry.

I wonder if they had hobbyists in mind when they built that site.

~~~
terminaljunkid
In software, many times new things come out of industry, and conference papers
are (IMO) equally prevalent as journal papers.

~~~
swiley
Sure but a lot of that still ends up on github (or so.) The feeling I get with
chemistry is that these journals are their equivalent to our github.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/cNLVe](https://archive.md/cNLVe)

------
accar0n
looks like you should look into skynet (It's a web hosting/CDN platform based
on a decentralized network of incentivised hosts.

