
In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - atondwal
http://custodians.online/
======
walterbell
Remember that the TPP will enact new laws and penalties related to copyright,
affecting 800 million people. First they came for the librarians... Unless
there is public opposition, the TPP will likely be voted into effect during
the US post-election lame duck period. Instead, the TPP can be made into a
visible 2016 election issue, to forestall post-election flip-flops.

The US Copyright Office has a progressive report [1] on Orphan Works, a
positive example of practical steps negotiated among a wide range of business
and civil society stakeholders. This example can be expanded to other areas of
copyright law. Instead, the TPP favors a subset [2] of corporate interests, at
the expense of competing corporate and public groups who were excluded from
deliberations. We can do better.

[1] [http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/](http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/)

[2] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-
yo...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-
digital-rights)

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mirimir
SciHub is now at [http://sci-hub.io/](http://sci-hub.io/) :)

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gaur
Just one more reason to never publish in or cite from Elsevier journals.

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DarkLinkXXXX
Thank you for sharing this.

I wonder, apart from financies, how can we support their efforts?

~~~
petra
One thing to do is to improve peer-2-peer technology , that it will be fit for
the task.To do this we'll need a few things :

1\. Torrents(as the most proven tech) should be able to handle storage of rare
file (i.e. persistence) well[a].

2\. A working peer to peer search mechanism - i believe tribler has that. It
might need some customization for academic papers - but it's written in python
, so it won't be terribly hard.

3\. Tribler has mechanisms for anonymity and against censorship. One more
thing that should be added is a secure pdf reader - maybe pdf.js via chrome is
the most secure we have today.

4\. Maybe there would be a need for some spam protection.

[a]search for 'bad for storing "rare" files' in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10962253)

~~~
toomuchtodo
[https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/) is the long term solution.

~~~
petra
I don't know. like i mention in the link of the previous discussion - At least
for this goal - Tribler seems to be mostly there including being part of the
huge torrent community, it's written in python - so it's seem like it could
easily do the job - so why complicate things at this stage which should be
about and MVP and building a community ?

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danuker
Why do they publish like this anyway? Does Elsevier offer anything extra? Or
does it force scientists to use it?

~~~
santaclaus
Inertia, mostly. If you want your research visible and you want mad street
cred for tenure, you publish in the biggest and baddest journals. The biggest
and baddest journals are the biggest and baddest because they've been around
since the days when scientists would go the university library to read papers.

~~~
NotOscarWilde
_> Inertia, mostly._

I agree with inertia, but I want to add a few more details from experience
that could shed a bit more light onto it:

* There are not that many open journals around (see e.g. [1], probably slightly outdated); plus the throughput of a journal is generally low (the linked journal ToC has published 20 articles in 2015).

* Graduate students often want to maximize the impact of the journal they're submitting it to simply because the work itself is say of medium importance to the field.

* The review process takes a lot of time, it can even take more than 100 days. This encourages the researcher into trying as few journals as possible, which benefits the more impacted, more numerous closed journals.

* At least at my university neither the administration nor the school library promote open journals in any significant way. Which is strange, seeing as they are the ones paying the journal subscription fees.

[1]:
[http://theoryofcomputing.org/toclinks.html](http://theoryofcomputing.org/toclinks.html)

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jordigh
If you support Sci-Hub, don't forget to donate:

[https://blockchain.info/address/14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQg...](https://blockchain.info/address/14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA)

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return0
How hard is it to nullify a publisher's copyright claim (which has been
consented by the authors), based on the fact that they do none of the work,
thus indirectly appropriating public money?

~~~
DannyBee
It's not possible in the US. If the authors validly transferred copyright,
they validly transferred copyright.

(There is a takeback provision after 50 years or so, but ...)

~~~
dredmorbius
Anything is renegotiable or litigable.

Schools and academics can drop subscriptions or boycott submissions. Law can
be changed.

Even if that's future-looking only, it can change the balance of interests for
journal publishers.

~~~
wolfgke
Or you can show civil disobedience:

    
    
      > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
      > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
    

If lots of people would do it, there can only few show trials be initialized
by the publishers.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win." \- Mahatma Gandhi

~~~
metasean
I'm proud to have done something similar to this. I knew I was going to have
to sign over the publication rights to my dissertation. Before I did that, I
published the approved, and signed off "final draft" to the Internet Archive
with an open license. (I hadn't heard of Aaron or the Guerrilla Open Access
Manifesto at the time.)

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vasili111
Anyone here remembers gigapedia?

~~~
demonshreder
I do, it was a nice site. libgen.io has taken it's place I guess.

