
The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019) - apsec112
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/02/19/the-unstoppable-rise-of-sci-hub-how-does-a-new-generation-of-researchers-perceive-sci-hub/
======
Topolomancer
I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers
without using Sci-Hub.

Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing
model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is
all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at
least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I
have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a
journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into
JPG just 'because'.

On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is
egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF,
often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few
times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF.
Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF
that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with.

Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is
definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.

~~~
maeln
When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of
paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time
because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so
much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login
procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was
sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).

~~~
qwerty456127
That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use.
That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a
game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and
enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a
legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because
a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country
and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix
would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your
country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a
particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that
of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only
available as pirate scans.

I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally
buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free
copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible
given today laws.

Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring
blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local
copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell
because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.

It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are
already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate
websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in
the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels.

Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for
the disks.

Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is
you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong
from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend
of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it
to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely
available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a
birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual
property infringement.

~~~
speeder
I am brazillian.

Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original.

The reason is convenience and good service.

When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get:

often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you
ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells
you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style)

easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff).

sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in
older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at
launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy
XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people
speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better
optimization settings during compile time).

Translated to portuguese.

Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while
because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people
would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even
for software that has no manual at all.

Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before
Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy
dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience.

EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it.

Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it
wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region
restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America,
sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights
would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP
rights from publishing here.

This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company
that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that
were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them
and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought...

Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online,
leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't
play legally here.

~~~
bergstromm466
Ok you might want to watch this short documentary. Your fun 'pirated' games
and software with 'better support' might cost you dearly when your daughter or
your girlfriend/wife gets filmed by a hacker, using your own webcam.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw)
\- "Security awareness: Filmmaker explores RAT malware, buys access to random
PCs for just 15 cents a piece - made short film about his experience"

Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're
careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an
invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.

~~~
Accujack
The Adwind Remote Access Trojan typically spreads by phishing e-mails.

Which is why you shouldn't believe everything you read.

By the way, this last sentence:

>Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're
careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an
invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.

Is entirely wrong. If you're worried about malware, you already know that it
can come via video files as well as binary programs.

The rest of what you wrote is just spreading fear for notoriety's sake.
Pirated software isn't an "invitation" to anything provided you have good
anti-malware defenses and good security practices.

~~~
thulecitizen
Dangerous for Windows maybe? Most cracked OS X apps make you disable
Gatekeeper or System Integry Protection. Game over. So yes, to me that is an
invititation.

~~~
htfu
Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in cracked version and
not original? Never heard of it, sounds implausible but then I'm hardly up to
speed.

Like I get swapping dylibs, but not why that'd be best done by poking around
in /System rather than the binary.

~~~
thulecitizen
Both 'appked' and 'macbed' websites have guides for disabling both Gatekeepr
and SIP (now they are derivative websites because the domains keep getting
banned/confiscated):

macappdownload dot com slash fix-damaged-app-message

macappdownload dot com slash how-to-disable-system-integrity-protection-in-
macos

These guides are all over their websites, especially at the download stage,
where there is a short list of 'download instructions' with a link to these
guides.

A while back I read someone saying that these websites are owned by a Russian
hacker network. Touch at your own risk.

~~~
htfu
My question was "Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in
cracked version and not original?", this (while certainly possibly relevant)
is not an answer to that.

~~~
thulecitizen
To me this is an answer. I think somehow you're not understanding what I am
implying.

These guides I linked to are there because when the software is being
installed, it asks for these guides to be applied, to make the apps work. The
modifications added to the cracked applications by the crackers take them off
Apple's trusted developers list. So the only way to get some of them to work
is to disable SIP and GateKeeper. This move then makes the user's computer
vulnerable to all malware, because most forget to turn them back on. They also
often don't know about the importance of these security features in the first
place.

I am not concerned for your safety - I trust you will be safe. I am scared for
the user I described above.

I hope this make it clearer.

I won't bother replying to more of your messages until you can show that
you've actually tried this all out on a VM, because otherwise we just won't be
talking about the same thing.

~~~
htfu
Off course gatekeeper needs to be off once something doesn't have a valid
signature. But SIP protects /System, NVRAM, kext loading and some additional
stuff. Not user app signatures. Hence my question.

------
Calloutman
I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my
papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics
who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't
partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been
expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free
access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key
holders.

~~~
matheusmoreira
> My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed
> my paper nothing.

Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value
provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to
be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.

~~~
einpoklum
> Why are these intermediaries still around?

Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real
world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some
networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields
etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain
expertise.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing,
> maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc._

Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it
either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to
introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a
self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself, with
no actual surplus value being produced. It's a resource leak, a circular
reference in the economy.

~~~
afiori
My understanding is that the real job of a publisher in academia is brand
recognition.

~~~
einpoklum
That's part of it, sure.

It's not meaningless, either. If you have a hundred venues for publication -
what should you choose to follow? What should a library subscribe to? What do
you recommend to students? etc.

------
qwerty456127
I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal
alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist
and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is
usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal.

To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's
19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made
possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five
loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to
feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread
this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal
paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a
pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary
to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use).

At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific
society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people
would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the
copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn
using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a
number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had
scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they
magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in
intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two
stances you mention.

There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the
others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no
value at all.

Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not
necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright
laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are
mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone
stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for
hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music
would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with
books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not
paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people
that are doing honest work.

On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant
would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who
actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid
anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of
science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve
(everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that
would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing
(restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue
that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for
free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to
sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you
generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net
negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to
be true) of most other IP markets.

~~~
qwerty456127
> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant
> would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who
> actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being
> paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The
> quality of science wouldn't suffer at all.

Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets
submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published
there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they
publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal
websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier
for some reason.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc.

For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers?
In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only
indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite
irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If
you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you
not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount
of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any
professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much
needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in
Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only
thematic fit for a given paper.

Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant
calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I
can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.

~~~
xamuel
Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple
authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide
credit by the number of authors?

~~~
anticensor
Turkish higher education committee ignores multi-author papers completely and
only counts single-author or advisor-student papers, in the first appointment
of professors; and severely discourages multi-author papers in reassessments.

~~~
einpoklum
... which is another silly approach. So a pair of researchers who always work
together on projects supposedly never publish :-(

~~~
anticensor
They do anyway, because there is no negative consequences for publishing
multi-author papers, just not rewarded at first appointment (this is mainly
because they failed to figure out which fields have their authors ordered and
which have it unordered).

------
Gatsky
One of the big problems with disrupting journal publishing has been that there
is no way to get access to the massive archive of papers that have already
been published. Sci-Hub took care of that before the publishers even really
understood what was happening. It is now much easier to just bid adieu to
Elsevier and the rest.

I predict that the preprint servers will take over, killing most of the
journals which are barely read anyway, and a few top tier journals will
survive because academics need to signal status. I personally find
[https://www.biorxiv.org/](https://www.biorxiv.org/) the most useful place to
browse for papers at the moment, and stopped browsing actual journals some
time ago. If something important gets published in an actual journal, I'll
hear about it on twitter.

------
entee
Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current
startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from
friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I
use it, I support the concept.

I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough
numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but
it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal
operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher
(Nature asserts $40k).

Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the
numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of
submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and
just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications
and two dozen original articles.

If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to
publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how
do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't
have answers, but want to get opinions.

EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small
contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee
journals.

~~~
rlayton2
Academics write the paper for free, academics review the paper for free. I've
published quite a bit and never had worthwhile input from a non-academic
editor. A journal's only real cost would be in hosting costs, which I'm sure
would be minimal for static content.

While the big-ticket journals have a value from being so picky, often this is
at the expense of some things. For instance, it is hard to get replication
studies published, as journals like Nature want every article to be "front-
page news" if they can. I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used
instead, where academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it
a total weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and
haven't got much traction.

I don't think there is an answer in the above, but I'm not sure that the
substantial costs are justified.

~~~
devurand
> I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used instead, where
> academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it a total
> weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and haven't got
> much traction.

A reddit-clone with strong verification/validation of user accounts seems like
it would fit the bill. I can imagine a system with a small monthly fee to
participate, subreddits with paid moderators (read: reviewers), voting system
that would float good papers to the top, and of course comments. The pay-to-
participate barrier would hopefully keep the quality high but at a minimum
cover the hosting costs. And run by a non-profit foundation.

~~~
unlinked_dll
I feel like quora could have gone this route

------
kerkeslager
It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and
you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV,
etc.

It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to
nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information
that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives.
The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's
hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.

~~~
DrJaws
not only that, most of those studies are paid using public funding just to see
private companies profit from them.

That's totally unacceptable and unethical

------
givepause
A few people are active trying to modernize the database code for Sci-Hub's
sister project. PHP and SQL experts needed, it seems.

[https://gitlab.com/libgen1](https://gitlab.com/libgen1)

------
godelmachine
Sci-Hub and Library Genesis are indispensable.

What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an
idea whose time has come.

I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only
bitcoins.

~~~
yazan94
I don't understand. There are plenty of trivially easy and user-friendly ways
to purchase Bitcoin (Coinbase for example). What is the issue with only
accepting Bitcoin?

------
sct202
Alexandra Elbakyan is very brave especially considering all the US based
lawsuits that are thrown at her. Aaron Swartz was trying to do something
similar at around the same time, and he got the book thrown at him and he
didn't even launch anything.

~~~
tsomctl
Brave, or smart. She lives in Kazakhstan, which doesn't have an extradition
agreement with the US. All she has to do is stay there, which is harder that
it sounds. We've nabbed a number of people from former USSR countries when
they've gone on vacation someplace warm.

------
einpoklum
> Sci-Hub ... an out and out copyright pirate

Arrr! Shiver me timbers.

> papers harvested (illegally)

illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others.

Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many
other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them
a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific
publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable
for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of
copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually.

> in China Sci-Hub is banned

(Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.

~~~
marcosdumay
> I wonder why it's banned there.

Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central
governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely
stupid.

But, well, it's their loss.

~~~
einpoklum
That's a valid point, but it might be the case that it's not actually banned.

------
timonovici
There is only one reason for me to use it: as a historical reenactor, I strive
to make my equipment as accurately as possible, and I read various articles
regarding roman military food, how widespread were certain metal alloys, how
they used to do soldered joints, and so on. I wouldn't make an account to
JSTOR just for a hobby - I use their search to find DOI's, and get them via
Sci-Hub. I do buy books and stuff as part of my documentation, but there are
really specific articles, usually a few pages long, that I can't find in both
a convenient and legal way.

------
jchallis
For all the tech wizards out there who want to meaningfully science from the
comfort of your own laptop - help Sci-Hub scale. Your experience with helping
build massively extensible web systems is completely and wonderfully needed in
the existential fight for researchers to get information.

From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!

------
Rerarom
Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The
latter is a way more comprehensive repository.

~~~
teekert
Do you have a tor link? Also for scihub for that matter?

~~~
michaelt
My go-to source for links to piracy websites that sometimes change URLs is
Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

------
fbn79
Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers
(and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to
more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business
that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose
author/reviewers gratification.

~~~
michaelt
University of California terminated a $10 million / year subscription to
Elsevier [1] but $10 million per year divided between 21k academics and 280k
students [2] is only $2.76 per person per month.

Of course, how you square that with the journals that charge $30+ for a single
paper and $600+ a year for an individual subscription is, perhaps, your
point...

[1] [https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2019/3/1/18245235/uni...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2019/3/1/18245235/university-of-california-elsevier-subscription-open-
access) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California)

~~~
Terretta
Is there a single commercial source with the same or more coverage as sci-hub
for $600/yr or less?

I’ve got a half dozen subs in a kind of Venn diagram and still am missing
things. I’m in a position to pay for convenience, but while paying, am
constantly annoyed it’s worse for the user. Same story in film/tv.

~~~
wrycoder
Deep Dyve?

------
beowulfey
One way publishers could get me, a Millennial, back into their good graces is
to actually put some _effort_ into their publishing. As in, if you're not even
going to publish a paper copy of this article, but still going to charge
>$1000 for "open access" rights, then at least go the extra mile and start
making eReader versions of them.

I would LOVE to use my kindle to read journal papers. Many books have well
formatted text with figures interspersed. It would benefit the scientific
community so much to be able to use them regularly.

(Note that PMC does this, and while I wish the figures were placed correctly
rather than at the end, it's a great start!)

------
sadmann1
We will probably never be able to quantify the effects of scihub on global
science and implicitly on the well-being of everyone. Still I wonder how
substantial it is, how many budding researchers and truthseekers were helped
by it.

------
neiman
The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv
and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not
because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and
their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers.

Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with
Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly
public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen.

Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize
their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self-
organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old
style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.

~~~
sytelus
Hardly. It's, in fact, booming right now. You know who are the biggest
benefactors? Top journals like Nature and all of IEEE. They are paywalled like
nobody's business. In fact, they are much worse than Elsevier. But community
only hypes about the later while lusting over publishing in Nature and much of
the IEEE.

------
philshem
Another use case for Sci-Hub is bulk downloads. This is especially important
for machine learning. Building a dataset of academic papers across domains
would be a insurmountable task, even with APIs like PubMed and using "interal"
university networks with good journal access.

Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata
stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub,
including torrents: [https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-
downl...](https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-download-sci-
hub-papers)

Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org:
[https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data](https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data)

And platforms like [https://unpaywall.org](https://unpaywall.org) try to link
open access papers.

-

And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and
making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did
so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks:
[https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-
research/](https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/)

------
cousin_it
Since the valuable service provided by publishers is, more or less, predicting
future citations of a research work for funding purposes, what do people think
of using a PageRank-like system for that instead? That way, instead of trying
to publish in a high-impact journal, people will just put their papers online
and try to get them approved by high-impact researchers. I think that could be
just as reliable signal of quality as the current system, while costing less
money, because high-impact researchers would find it in their interest to
approve only the best work sent to them.

------
rafiki6
I've never understood why a wikipedia or github style publishing platform
doesn't exist for research papers yet. Why do we ascribe reputation to the
journals themselves? Is it the journals or is it the academics who participate
in the journal who matter? Also why does reputation even matter really?
Wouldn't an open source model make more sense where anyone can offer feedback
and comments would be public? Wouldn't it make more sense to have all
academics and even non-academics from around the world offer review? Generally
speaking there's a right answer, whether it's a hard science where equations
are likely involved and can be validated, or a soft science where you can
mostly focus on validating the process and analysis. Even in the arts where it
might be a bit more subjective. If anything given the reproducibility crisis
in modern science, I would say the current model as failed and deserves no
reputation at all. This reminds me of this:

[https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-
ac...](https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-academic-
research.html)

If anything such a platform would be incredibly valuable in that academics can
also create profiles on them and have an additional CV of their activity in
contributing back to their field. This can be used as a real additional metric
towards providing someone tenure or getting lab positions.

------
cybert00th
"He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring
down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?"

I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see
to that.

Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what
you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream -
but not fast enough...

------
Herodotus38
I use sci-hub regularly to look up medical papers in my work as a hospitalist.
My community (US) hospital can’t afford to pay for subscriptions. Often, I
need a case report or small journal article to better diagnose or treat a
patient. Sci-hub has directly benefitted those people and I love it for its
simple interface and ability to get you directly to the pdf with one click.

------
timkam
Perhaps my perspective is ignorant, but in my sub-field of computer science,
most people put their papers/pre-prints openly accessible on arXiv,
ResearchGate, or personal web pages (if the publisher is not open access).
I've never used Sci-Hub because I never had to, and when at home or traveling,
I rarely have to use my university's VPN, because I cannot read a paper "for
free". This is probably a good cultural indicator of my domain.

~~~
Joker_vD
Sometimes you want to read some seminal paper from the 70s (somehow, most of
the seminal papers are from the seventies), and half of the time it's re-
hosted by someone or some university and is freely available, but another half
of the time, all you have is an acm.org or citeseer page without the "Download
PDF" link. Now what? This stuff is 40 years old, by all rights it should be
public domain by now.

------
goatkarma
One thing that is often overlooked is method that Scihub uses to obtain
articles, and the impact that method has on the very researchers who use it.

Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which
are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's
quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the
phished credentials) . The same credentials given to Scihub are often not just
used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other
third parties, causing harm to the phishing victim.

Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be
looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform
with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through.

Of course, this is just a tiny piece of the much larger problem of the rotten
unsustainable commercial journal publishing ecosystem..

~~~
ovi256
Do you have any evidence for this ? Because otherwise it's just a piece of FUD
to poison public perception of scihub.

Especially the gratuitously cruel "credentials given to Scihub are often not
just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by
other third parties".

~~~
goatkarma
Sorry I didn't respond earlier, think account was rate limited due to being
new.

Not sure what sort of proof you want? "Gratuitously cruel" is quite an emotive
description! The simplest example is the same phished accounts used by Scihub
were also used to send more phishing emails to university and non-university
email addresses.

Hopefully you'll see below from my other responses, I'm not here to turn
people against SH (I admire it and what they did technically with creating
their own proxy on too of other University proxies is really clever stuff!),
but the access to articles need to come from somewhere, and I'm just pointing
out my experience from working at a university (who I'm sure is sick of paying
millions PA for resource access!).

------
hereisdx
Libgen is another noble attempt to bypass the unreasonable prices and
restrictions that publishers put on Textbooks.

------
djohnston
i consider scihub to be the greatest democratization of information since the
www. it will open up hitherto closed paths for people with nontraditional
educational circumstances, and should generally accelerate the rate of
progress.

------
roenxi
Curiously, even if the quality is lower the open platform would presumably
still win. There are a huge number of people in the category "desperately need
to know, but don't realise that their need justifies paying to know". The sort
of person who is comfortable reading an academic paper and will cheerfully
implement something from arxiv, but their employer considers them a boring
coder and isn't about to pay for access to a paywalled journal. Such people
turn up in every discipline.

And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension
present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine
unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it
can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...

------
hereme888
Taxpayers pay for lots of research, and lots of other research is legally free
in other websites, so why get ripped off by profiteering 3rd parties?

------
philpem
At least in my case, Sci-Hub was the difference between getting access to
research and not -- and I'm based in the UK.

I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a
number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal
doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a
paywall.

I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't
request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay
the yearly alumni society membership and access fee).

So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get
nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.

------
xorand
>Sci-Hub does not have the opportunity to sell its platform, there is no
advertising, or ‘social networking’ to obtain vital user data that it can
monetise; it is a pure and unashamed ‘pirate’.

Black is white and white is black. They are not pirates and they have no
connection with the 'pirates' political movement AFAIK. Feel free to
contradict me, I'll learn something new.

------
paulcarroty
When any platform really makes difference, their rise is only factor of time.
Piracy of books/document/magazines is much easier than multimedia, also tons
of cheap readers/tablets available(thanks, Amazon).

Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for
education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.

~~~
jplayer01
I don't see a moral dilemma. The journals don't pay anything for the research
that they publish. In fact, they paywall research that is often funded by the
public.

------
varelaz
I understand why people like Sci-Hub, but basically it will not exist without
work of journals that they scrape. If it will consist of unvalidated papers
that everyone can submit it will be far less usable, it will be bloated with
false research and non-science papers. I don't think that this format of work
is vitable in a long term. As far as I see it should be converted to format
like Apple Music, when new big player will come with some nominal subscription
fee, like 10$/month and will open everything it has, or to Wikipedia format,
when there is some comunity that can moderate open source articles and publish
them.

~~~
veddox
I would love to see Apple Music for papers. I refuse to use Sci-Hub for its
blatant piracy, but the basic idea really is what academia needs! We just need
to figure out how to make it legal - like the music and movie industries did.

------
3JPLW
If I were a foreign government looking to get insight into classified
research, Sci-Hub plus a targeted PDF exploit on a small set of domain-
specific papers would definitely be high on my list of targets. Cycling
through so many different domain names and TLDs makes it easy to spin up a
clone that _largely_ forwards to the real one but gives you the ability to
return some compromised papers.

I love sci-hub and have often used it, but the above idea has always been
rattling around in my head and gives me pause.

------
oli5679
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it
for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published
over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and
locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers
featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send
enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling
to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that
scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is
published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published
in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the
work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the
folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite
universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's
outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights,
they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly
legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we
can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you
have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge
while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally,
you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling
download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have
been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called
stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral
equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't
immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to
let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they
operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the
politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the
exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light
and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to
this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it
to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We
need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past.
Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

[https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt)

------
Jun8
Note that the article bends over backwards to underline the fact that Sci-Hub
operates illegally. Although copyright infringement does occur, this is not
true for all cases, i.e. Sci-Hub is not comparable to the Napster of old or
lib-gen.

This is because some of the research (actually I would wager that at least
>half, but don't have any figures to back this claim), is supported by public
funds and hence should, by definition, not be copyrightable

------
john4534243
Does it has C++ ISO standard pdf's.

------
pojntfx
Anyone who unironically thinks that the obviously positive effects of free and
open science are even comparable to piracy is a lunatic.

~~~
inertiatic
Piracy also has obviously positive effects, and you'd be a fool to argue
otherwise.

But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms
of consuming art.

Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube
model.

Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix
model.

Ditto for books, games, what have you.

The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have
vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially
on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale.

I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one
outweigh the other.

But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.

~~~
rakoo
Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade
motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy
definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.

------
foolfoolz
if most experiments can’t be replicated how important are these papers on sci
hub?

~~~
boldslogan
The knowledge or ability to test which ones are or are not seems pretty
good...? Instead of them being locked away?

