
Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can Be Dangerously Useful - okket
https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-proves-that-piracy-can-be-dangerously-useful-180804/
======
nightcracker
I wish I had Sci-Hub as a teenager. Many times I was interested in some
algorithm, but got presented with Elsevier's "you shall not pass" page. Very
frustrating to know the knowledge exists but being unable to access it with no
recourse.

For me this is a more important purpose of Sci-Hub than for academics. If an
academic wants a paper he/she can ask colleagues, check the library, email the
author or other people in the field.

But what if you're a 17 year old, or an interested amateur? You don't have
those options, or worse, don't even know they exist.

~~~
tschwimmer
When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress
has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if
knowledge flowed more freely?

I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system
that we have now seems broken.

~~~
TACIXAT
I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to
intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an
idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't
want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive
they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of
power.

If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary
amount of progress in a very short time.

~~~
projektir
I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one
can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The
problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that
every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through
acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing
has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation
take a lot of time.

We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in
research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research,
or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits
pocketed by side actors?

> If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in
> the first place.

I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to
survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety
nets?

~~~
komali2
In my mind, it boils down to an extremely simple question - if money didn't
exist, and you didn't have to work to stay alive, would people do job x or job
y?

The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist,
personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and
fridges, etc.

In a society like this, things might move a little more slowly (probably we
wouldn't have the airline or public Transit systems we have now), but things
would absolutely still get done.

~~~
projektir
> The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist,
> personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and
> fridges, etc.

Volunteers and especially personal projects really strike me as activities one
undertakes when they have secondary means of survival and/or safety nets. The
latter is commonly mentioned as problematic in terms of requiring GitHubs from
job applicants.

The existence of these people is not sufficient, we also have to prove that
these people are not distributed in some highly biased way, which I suspect,
they are. There could be a lot of consequence to such biases. For instance,
software developers creating software that blind people can't use.

~~~
peterburkimsher
I've done personal projects precisely because I don't have another safety net.

Posting my projects here on Hacker News gets attention, which might possibly
lead to a job offer. (In practice this doesn't work all the time, but it's
been more successful in the past than trying to cold-email HR departments). I
think personal projects show my interests and skills better than interviews.

On that note, I am looking for work, and I'll do your (2 month) project for
free just to get a reference letter. The 2 month limit is because I'll be out
of cash by then.

------
mirimir
> In fact, Sci-Hub has become such a commonly used tool for some scientists
> that they include Sci-Hub URLs in the references sections of their published
> papers. Ironically, there are even links to Sci-Hub in papers published by
> Elsevier, showing how dangerously useful it is.

Damn, I am _impressed_!

~~~
crtasm
And a screenshot of some of the search results on science direct, beautiful.
Plus I'm imagining the blog writers grinning with glee when they were
provided/discovered this.

~~~
jacobolus
The sad part is that the linked sci-hub domain name has been shut down, so
those are now dead links.

------
confounded
God bless scihub!

Aside from it's primary benefit of making access possible, one of the really
nice things about it is that it _uses open standards_ (regular unauthenticated
HTTP, DOIs, no clever js obfuscation). This means that whenever you're
searching for a paper and see a DOI, you can do something like:

    
    
        wget --recursive --span-hosts --no-directories --accept '*.pdf' --quiet \
            --execute robots=off https://sci-hub.tw/$DOI
    

And instantly get a local copy of the .pdf. It's a hacker's dream!

~~~
komali2
What's the $doi bit?

~~~
imode
A variable representing the DOI of the resource in question, fill it in with
whatever you're searching for (the DOI of a paper, for instance).

~~~
westmeal
beat me to it

------
chrisamiller
Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We
want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it
difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a
measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding
that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out
of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects.

This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints
in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that
journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There
are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly
communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.

~~~
amelius
Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?

~~~
chronic3u9
> Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this
> out?

The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field
greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to
copy it.

And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the
entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.

~~~
kgwgk
CS may be the faster growing field in the arXiv over the last decade but it
was relatively late to the party.
[https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index](https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index)

------
plaidfuji
I have so much that I want to say about this - but beyond all the politics and
moneyed/tenured interests holding back change, I can see that Jupyter
notebooks are the disruptive innovation that will force publishing to
modernize. People I work with are producing notebooks that fuse text,
formatted equations, code, and interactive figures in a way that looks and
feels like a top-quality paper. Except with this paper, you can reveal the
code that produced each figure, probe and alter the analysis methods directly,
and download the raw data behind the figures (it's an attribute of the plot
object! Imagine that!). This format will win. It's too useful and solves too
many problems not to win. The only question is whether academicians have the
foresight to build in a decentralized DARE I SAY blockchain/smart-contract-
based peer review system to circumvent the rent seeking publishers.

~~~
edanm
Err do you mind explaining what the blockchain has to do with this?

~~~
vishnu_ks
This is the perfect application for Blochcian

* Nobody can manipulate the reviews as everything is stored in Blockhcian.

* Nobody can start asking for money one day suddenly as the whole thing runs on a smart contract and once a smart contract is deployed there is no way to change the code.

* The articles are not stored or controlled by a central server.

~~~
edanm
Thanks for the reply!

I'm not sure I fully understand (or buy into) Blockchain, so forgive me for
probing further on this, but: I'm still not sure how blockchain is helping
here? Can't you get the same results by just publicly publishing the articles
with an open license? That's kind of how things work right now in open-access
journals (or with something like StackOverflow, for that matter) and it works
fine, what is blockchain adding here? There are tons of copies of
StackOverflow's data running around in mirrors, they are (or it's easy to do)
hashed for a crypto signature, so you can't just change their text on people.
No one can ask money for the answers because they are licenses CC.

So what is Blockchain adding to this? As I understand it, what blockchain
provides is most importantly an incentive mechanism, to make people actually
donate the PC time to store things (iiuc), but it seems to work fine in
popular cases without having the incentive mechanism (e.g. StackOverflow), and
I'm guessing if it isn't popular, then just cause it's on a blockchain doesn't
change anything and no one will bother storing it?

But again, I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about, so I'd be more
than happy to be corrected.

~~~
vishnu_ks
In the current industry the authors are required to publish papers in the most
reputed journal rights for maximum rewards. The more reputed a platform
becomes the more power does it have. So it's totally upto the people who runs
the journal to change the rules one day if they decided to make more money.
They can easily change the license of the new papers that are waiting for
review and the authors would still have to publish in the journal because of
it's reputation. They can also theoratically censor the articles or authors
that they don't like. On the other hand this can't be done for an application
for example running in Ethereum. Once a smart contracts is deployed there is
no way to modify it.

The other argument is modifying the text. I don't think dumps of data running
around like that of StackOverFlow doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat
for modifying the user comments or reviews in the past. The average person who
is using a site is not going to go through the reviews and the dumps of data
and see whether anything has been modified or not.

StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the
incentive mechanism. Also none of the users gets a portion of the money that
they helped them to make. I am not sure whether this is the greatest example.
One can easily write a smart contract that will facilitate the transfer of
money from writers to reviewers without the need of any central server. The
amount of money the reviewer gets would be a function of their reputation. So
it would be in the best interest of the reviewer to produce high quality work
and high quality reviews. A far as the storage is concerned one can make use
of Ethereum or a general purpose blockchain for building this. You would have
to pay for the storage(reviews, ratings etc) only once and the nodes in the
network would make sure that its their for ever. The research papers can be
stored in IPFS due to their large size. The files can be seeded by anyone. If
the research paper is popular it would be always available. If it is not
popular the author or the university can still seed it as its in their best
interest. I don't think it matters much where the PDF file is stored. It can
be in a central server run by University as well. So this is not a big issue.

Does that makes any sense? Feel free to correct me as well :)

~~~
edanm
Ok, your last paragraph is the most interesting, because it makes me think
that I'm not sure how exactly you imagine this working, and maybe I'm missing
important details. I'd love you to explain a bit further how this will work -
who is paying whom exactly, etc, to make sure we're on the same page.

That said, let me address some of your points: > In the current industry the
authors are required to publish papers in the most reputed journal rights for
maximum rewards [...] They can also theoratically censor the articles or
authors that they don't like [...]

I agree with all of this, and would love for the system to change. But this is
basically orthogonal to the blockchain - it only requires everyone to decide
to give more prestige to whatever new entity replaces it, whether it runs on
the blockchain or not. Furthermore, the blockchain does _not_ fix any of the
incentive problems by itself (again, unless you imagine something I'm missing
here). Specifically, even if everything moves to the blockchain, if it ever
loses prestige, then people won't want to publish there anymore, and we're
back to square one. And the existence of new, open-access journals (and things
like Arxiv) prove that you don't need the blockchain to solve this problem -
it's completely an incentives/economic/etc problem, and the tech here is
incidental.

> I don't think dumps of data running around like that of StackOverFlow
> doesn't help much. Many sites have got heat for modifying the user comments
> or reviews in the past. The average person who is using a site is not going
> to go through the reviews and the dumps of data and see whether anything has
> been modified or not.

Well, yes, but the average user isn't going to be downloading the entire
blockchain, or running algs to make sure nothing was modified, either. But in
fact you _can_ find dumps of the Stack Overflow data, and they're probably
hashed, so _someone_ could always prove what was the original content, even if
the "central entity" here (Stack Overflow itself) decides to one day try to
censor something.

> StackOverflow makes money by storing the questions and answers. Thats the
> incentive mechanism.

Not, really? I mean, sure, they store things, but in terms of money, they make
money by selling advertising, job listings, etc.

As I said before, the other stuff you wrote is a lot more interesting, but I'm
not sure I'm getting it - who is paying money here, or another way to say it,
how is money getting into the system? Right now, publishers make money, and
afaik, the reviewers and the contributors mostly don't. I'd love to fix that
too, but, how does the blockchain help to do that? And specifically, what does
it do that I can't replace by building the equivalent of a Stack Overflow for
publishing?

------
alejohausner
In computer science, most academic authors make their publications freely
available, on their university websites. There's an online index for these
papers, called 'citeseer'. Other disciplines are more enslaved to elsevier,
but CS has always been more free.

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)

~~~
ahnick
how does citeseerx compare to arxiv? Are they just different networks
(PSU/Cornell) that function independently or do they index the same content?

~~~
bnewbold
They are very different beasts. Arxiv (and most pre-print repos) accept
submissions (with filters, like requiring academic affiliation or vouching,
and requiring reasonably-formatted metadata), have a moderator do a skim-level
review of the work, and then post it. CiteseerX is an automated crawler, like
Google Scholar, which finds PDFs on author homepages and extracts metadata
from the PDF. There is no human review or cleanup process, and there can be a
long delay before content gets discovered.

------
dorchadas
As a non-academic who is interested in reading academic articles (and doing
personal research), sci-hub is a blessing for those of us without university
affiliation and access.

------
messe
Sci-Hub is so much more convenient than attempting to find things in my
university's library system. There are browser plugins that let you click on
DOI links, taking you directly to a pdf of the relevant paper.

For more recent papers, however, I tend to go to arxiv first.

~~~
elektor
Can you share the browser plugin that you use? I've noticed Google has been
removing many of the Sci-Hub related plugins from the Chrome store.

~~~
messe
Mozilla too apparently. I just checked and the one I'm using —"Sci-Hub
Links"—is no longer listed.

------
jimnotgym
Government grants should come with open access strings (un)attached.

~~~
votepaunchy
Why should taxpayers be funding the massive profits of Elsevier and others?

~~~
garmaine
Yes, that's the point, right?

~~~
jimnotgym
That is the point. Currently lots of research is taxpayer funded, and then
published in closed journals where the people who paid to create it have to
pay to read it. Elsevier are the only winner.

Taxpayer funded research should be open access, and this could be stipulated
in the grant itself.

------
OisinMoran
For anyone interested in getting to the relevant paper in Sci-Hub in one
click, there is the Sci-Hubify bookmarklet:

[https://bookmarkify.it/9864](https://bookmarkify.it/9864)

------
apazgo
Worked at a university dealing with this some years ago, the publishing
companies blocked our IPs on regular basis because they had detected "hacked
student accounts" Then we had to block them and swear they changed password
before they unblocked us. They said that it was Chinese phising emails that
tricked students to give up their password. If you dont know, a couple of
years ago almost everyone accessed the publishers sites thought revese proxies
at the school, so sci hub collected accounts and proxied you thought them,
dont know if its still the case. We used this software called ezproxy, Think
it was pretty common.

Also pretty sure many students gave away their passwords freely, based on that
nobody seemed that surprised/worried when we said their accounts was
compromised.

------
Cenk
FYI, this post is kept up to date with the latest scihub links:
[https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-
scienti...](https://citationsy.com/blog/download-research-papers-scientific-
articles-free-scihub/)

------
jostmey
I work at a University and frequently need to read papers. I can only access
the manuscripts on campus or through a VNP. That is way too much hassle, which
is why I love Sci-hub. Sci-hub makes it easier to access the manuscripts than
the providers themselves.

------
devoply
> dangerously useful

Ah yes danger to the profit motive. I would say the real danger is third party
using other people's research to pocket billions and denying legitimate access
of the research to millions and billions of people. That's extremely
dangerous.

~~~
wolfgke
> Ah yes danger to the profit motive.

I see no problem in a profit motive. I see the problem that countries enforce
censorship via violence (I am talking about copyright laws).

~~~
anticensor
All countries do that, even ones that do not observe copyright (NK does not
observe domestically but enforces foreign copyrights, Micronesia has an IP
regime stricter than copyright).

------
buboard
it's barely piracy when you are pirating publicly-funded material that should
be free in the first place.

------
flibble
Why are the authors of the papers giving rights to Elsevier? If the papers are
being peer reviewed for free, why doesn’t SciHub corral the reviewers and
allow authors publish directly to SciHub.

Papers upvoted by leaders in the field would carry as much weight as those
published by any named journal.

~~~
jacoblambda
It's unfortunately detrimental to one's academic career to not publish in the
most "prestigious" journal one can. This results in researchers publishing in
closed journals either to try and maintain their own careers or due to
pressure from their department as a way of looking more attractive in grant
applications.

Extremely prominent researchers and departments may be able to pull this off
but everyone else in the trenches will be more or less committing
career/department suicide by allowing this to happen.

Hopefully those who can stand up will but I wouldn't expect a sudden leap from
the trenches until this situation changes.

~~~
dqpb
I really don't want to insult anyone with this comment, but after hearing
about how shitty academics are treated during their entire career (phd,
postdoc, faculty, publishing), including the low pay, politics, and giving
away the rights to their work, they seem like one of the most manipulated and
least self-confident demographics in the global workforce.

~~~
BeetleB
>but after hearing about how shitty academics are treated during their entire
career (phd, postdoc, faculty, publishing), including the low pay, politics,
and giving away the rights to their work, they seem like one of the most
manipulated and least self-confident demographics in the global workforce.

I'll both agree and disagree. Starting with disagree:

A lot of these problems arose mostly in the last 20 years, and is somewhat
dependent on the discipline. To give you an idea, someone getting an
engineering PhD with, say, 3-5 papers published in peer reviewed (but average)
journals had a good chance of getting a tenure track job as late as, say, 2005
- without doing any postdocs - no concerns about impact factors, etc. Most
advisors were not slave drivers. Now if you switch to something like biology
or physics, then it was much less likely and you needed a post doc. Still, if
you went back another 20 years, you'd likely get a tenure track job straight
out of a physics PhD.

For publishing, most academics never cared until the last 10 years or so. The
cost of journals to universities did not explode until some point in the
2000's - so even less prestigious universities would subscribe to most
journals an academic needed.

Once you got through tenure, it's hard to describe how you're treated as
"shitty". You choose your hours. You choose if you want to get paid for summer
or not. You choose what you want to work on. The pay is low, but it somewhat
tracks that of industry (i.e. engineering professors still get paid more than
humanities, etc). Having all that freedom _should_ cost you in terms of pay.
And just like in the real world, you can always get paid more if you do pretty
good work in things that _others_ care about (i.e. sacrifice your freedom
somewhat).

Where I agree with you: In my experience, _any_ group that insulates itself
from the outside and uses only in-group metrics will eventually reach the
stage they are in. If only they get to decide what makes one academic better
than another, then you will get pettiness.

------
Biqh1
What is the best way for me to access Sci-hub? Does it cycle through domains?
If so, what is the best way for me to access the most up to date URL. Is there
a UNIX command line method for doing this?

~~~
psychometry
Bookmark [https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go](https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go)

------
amthewiz
What would be the best way to help sci-hub anonymously if one wishes to do so?

------
akerro
How can I mirror all their pdf?

~~~
akvadrako
Look at the libgen torrents - I'm not sure it's a complete copy, but it's
massive.

------
samwise666
R.IP. Aaron Schwartz

