Edit: I should add that I would not encourage the user of Sci-Hub, and am in fact myself trying to create legal alternatives [0]. This is mostly to hopefully clean up my Twitter timeline :)
Took a look at flocakademic — looks like a great idea and platform, but I'm curious as to where you see it fitting in with the rest of the research lifecycle, with institutional repositories and OSF starting to pick up the slack?
I see Flockademic in its current state to be complimentary to OSF, fulfilling a similar role at a smaller scale [0].
That said, I am currently pivoting a bit; I really want to focus on making Open Access beneficial to the researcher, i.e. a carrot rather than a stick. Thus I'm hoping to tempt researchers to voluntarily deposit their research at Flockademic, rather than mandating them to as is often the case with institutional repositories. If I'm successful at that, than hopefully I will be able to cooperate with university libraries to provide the IR service for/with them.
(Of course, I'd be really happy if the OSF or IRs manage to make academics independent of the traditional scholarly publishers as well.)
Scihub checks Libgen first when looking up an article or book, and if there is no hit it will attempt to retrieve the document from the publisher directly using stored authentication credentials. The retrieved file will be later uploaded to Libgen by Scihub for caching purposes.
Seems like the publishers could relatively easily figure out whose credentials are being used by searching for presumably uncached files, which will then trigger an access to the file using the credentials Sci-Hub is using, no?
But I suppose it's no use since the authentication credentials to scientific portals aren't that exclusive anyway, so playing whack-a-mole would be pretty ineffective.
Hehe, I guess - I just thought of this and coded it up this morning. Feel free to host it somewhere easier though, it's open source :)
I agree that Wikipedia is easier to remember; it's just that people don't seem to realise that it's always up-to-date, as people keep tweeting the latest links. The point of the website is simply to make it clearer that there's a place to stay up-to-date. (And that you can bookmark for a direct link.)
If you bookmark it then your browser will autocomplete when you type “scihub”.
If you bookmark the Wikipedia article as well then you have autocomplete for “sci-hub”.
So then together you have autocomplete for both.
However I predict that the Wikipedia article will outlive the site OP made. It’s a fact of life that most sites (including a bunch I made myself so it’s not meant as any form of criticism) don’t last very long, either because the owner forgets to renew the domain or they’ve lost interest and don’t want to pay for it, or their hosting provider shuts down (don’t think heroku will anytime soon though), or the server they are hosted on has a disk malfunction (probably heroku customers will not suffer from that since I think heroku has a redundant storage solution in place), or the site gets out of date in regards to either the runtime on the server or an external API that is being used.
Although I agree that it's just fine to use Wikipedia directly if you're aware of it, the main risk in this case is reaching the limits of the free tier of Heroku, I think. Otherwise, it's only dependent on Heroku, the Wikidata API, and Wikidata being maintained. Those are relatively safe assumptions.
Also, the code is open source, so you can easily fork it and host it on e.g. your own Heroku account :)
Don't wanna sound like a party pooper. But isnt this the same as what movie streaming sites are shut down for, linking to sites with copyrighted material?
For information: I love to download or stream movies and tv-series.
Don't think so, as these are the exact same links as on Wikidata (and, hopefully, Wikipedia).
I think the difference is between linking to material directly, and to such a website. For example, I don't think linking to the Pirate Bay is prohibited.
Did it not also search those sites and link directly to the search results page?
I'm also not quite sure how it got taken down. I'm currently not convinced that this site nor Wikipedia are illegal for linking to these domains. If someone can either convince Wikipedia to remove those links, or make a strong case for why this is different than Wikipedia linking, I guess I'll have to take it down, yes.
There's a difference between the page for a pirated movie and the front page of TPB.
Where things really get interesting is info hashes. I could right now post a 160 bit SHA1 hash of any content on the bittorrent DHT and you could obtain it simply by tacking "magnet:?xt=urn:btih:" on the front. So perhaps simply sharing the hash of pirated content with some sort of encouragement could be enough to land you in hot water.
It's not different. As in: both are fine. It's not a crime to link to a site that links to content; TPB itself hosts no content. Linking is not a crime.
If I know the url of the publisher's web page describing the paper I want, I append that url to "http://sci-hub.tw/". For example following this link will immediately cause the pdf of the full text of what is otherwise a paywalled paper to start downloading into one's browser's download directory:
But I was unable to get a similar concatenated url to work with whereisscihub, which means I cannot replace "http://sci-hub.tw/" with "https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go/" in the definition of the simple command I use to interact with Sci-Hub.
(The reason for wanting to use a URL instead of a DOI is that some paywalls have stopped publishing the DOI, so if all I start with is a link to a page at a paywall, there's no reliable way I know of to discover the DOI.)
Oops, sorry - I had actually fixed that, but apparently didn't deploy it properly (it's at whereisscihub.now.sh as well now, which makes it somewhat hard to keep track of). It should work properly now.
OP: sci-hub.tech has a list of good working links. There's some contact info on there as well in case you want to get in touch. Maybe you could add them as an alternate data source.
Thanks, that doesn't appear to have an API though. In any case, I think Wikidata is kept relatively up-to-date, and I'd warmly recommend people to use and contribute to that :)
You can also visit https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go, which should always redirect you to a valid URL.
Edit: I should add that I would not encourage the user of Sci-Hub, and am in fact myself trying to create legal alternatives [0]. This is mostly to hopefully clean up my Twitter timeline :)
[0] https://medium.com/flockademic/announcing-flockademic-academ...