
Scientific research piracy site hit with $15M fine - mantesso
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/scientific-research-piracy-site-hit-with-15-million-fine/
======
ziotom78
I cannot say how useful Alexandra's work has been for me. Apart from the fact
that subscription prices to scientific journals have increased significantly
in the last years, in the same period Italy has severely cut research funding.
As a result, my department's library has had to cut a number of subscriptions
to journals that are very important in my field. (The funny part is that since
a few years the Italian government is evaluating universities according to the
number of articles published by the staff, their citation count, and the
prestige of the journal where these articles have been published...).

Without SciHub, my research and my work would have been made much more
difficult. Thank you, Alexandra!

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pzh
Why Elsevier would feel entitled to the copyright of publicly funded research
is beyond anyone's guess.

This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of
failure, and if it gets closed, there won't be anything else to replace it.
Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows,
research paper sites aren't something that the average Internet users care
about.

~~~
davidgerard
If you have a few petabytes of disk handy, you can in fact torrent the lot.

[http://libgen.io/repository_torrent/](http://libgen.io/repository_torrent/)
[http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/](http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/)

~~~
ClassyJacket
Buying a bunch of disk space isn't impossible. What I don't have is unlimited
downloads.

~~~
Asooka
Buy VPS hosting in a place with sane ISPs and unlimited data, then torrent at
a responsible rate of like 1MB/s, max ~50 connections. It will take about 694
days to torrent the 60TB at that rate. If you can afford to pay for better
bandwidth, say 10MB/s sustained 24/7, it will take only 2-3 months. BitTorrent
being what it is, if enough of us torrent it, we should have all chunks
between us much sooner than the estimated 2 years, so even when SciHub goes
down, we'll be able to piece everything together.

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closed
A lot of academics I know point people to sci-hub!

For example, the American Psychological Association has been issuing take-down
requests to academics who distribute final article PDFs on their sites. As a
result, there's been a fair amount of activity on twitter telling people that
they can get them there.

~~~
rsfern
Why not just post the finalized version of the manuscript instead of the
journal's typeset version? It's the same content, and most journals seem to be
ok with this practice -- are preprint versions against APA's copyright policy
in some way?

~~~
closed
Preprints are fine to post, and that's definitely what some people are pushing
for. There's a good article on how some psychologists have responded here:
[http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670/...](http://www.the-
scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670/title/Authors-Peeved-by-APA-s-
Article-Takedown-Pilot/).

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Tomminn
Because of sci-hub, scientists such as myself no longer need anything more
than food, an internet connection and some shelter to do first class
theoretical work. It cannot be emphasized enough how much of a boon this is
for scientists who don't have good journal access, _which is the majority of
scientists_.

In creating it, Elbakyan has probably done far more for humanity than Musk
will do in his life, and I am a massive fan of Musk. If it goes down, it will
be a tragedy for our species.

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hd4
The 2nd time in a week I need the wisdom of Pravin Lal in a thread about free
information?

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of
information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people
whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with
freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on
public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who
would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your
master."

~~~
dredmorbius
Who or what is Pravin Lal?

~~~
PeterisP
A fictional character in a 1999 sci-fi strategy game Alpha Centauri. It has
some quite memorable quotes about technology and society.

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dredmorbius
What the academic publishing industry calls "theft", the world calls
"research".

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

Thank you, Alexandra, for your library.

~~~
hatmatrix
The second great library of Alexandr(i)a.

~~~
dredmorbius
Her name is most apt.

I'm hoping it doesn't burn.

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biehl
Reminds me of:

Sci-Hub As Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

[http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-
effect...](http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-
civil-disobedience/)

~~~
nayuki
The web site is being hostile by thrusting this message upon me: "Your browser
is blocking some features of this website. Please follow the instructions at
[...] to unblock these."

Does the author not believe in the civil disobedience of ad-blocking?

~~~
a_bonobo
Looks like this comes from a wordpress plugin (The Champ), I don't think the
author knows that blocking JavaScript triggers this

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Dolores12
Another reminder to donate. Thanks, Alexandra!

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williamle8300
If history tells us anything another Sci-Hub or more powerful reiteration will
surface and will eventually "win." You can't contain ideas.

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agumonkey
How many people used sci hub to this day ? how many donated ?

150K persons donating 10$ (even though the fine basis is debatable)..

~~~
sivvy
...is $1.5M.

~~~
agumonkey
Maybe we were a million users ?

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TheGorramBatman
Elsevier is from the Netherlands, not the USA.

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xtracto
This is the kind of thing that should be massively mirrored in onion links.

~~~
zeep
I think that you can download the 10s of terabytes using the torrent files
found here:
[http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/](http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/)

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frozenport
Elsevier is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands[1]

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

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JPLeRouzic
I had access through my job and through university to Elsevier and other
paywalled repositories.

I avoid papers found in "ScienceDirect", not because of some moral position,
but I found often that their abstract does no seem so useful for me. Oftentime
there are lot of jargon and it is hard to figure out what is new and what take
home points there are. The reader may get the impression that they try hard to
oversell their stuff.

I even prefer some free publishers who have a much lower reputation like
Indawi.

I have a different but still related problem with IEEE: On every subject it
seems there are tons of papers, so it is difficult to appreciate the relative
value of each paper.

I have no problem with Nature and some other paywalled publishers.

