The thing I am concerned about with SciHub is its centralized nature. So far it has resisted everything, but supposed that eventually Elsevier manages to land Elbakyan in jail, or hack back SciHub and delete its content, what would happen? I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up. And I'd also be happy if the paper collection segment was free software, so that other entities could cooperate in case the original SciHub went down.
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
> I'd be much much happier to see the material kept in a more resilient configuration (IPFS, database dumps, ...) so that other entities can back it up.
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
Comment 1:
>The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia.
Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub:
>In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years.
Agreed, and with a very pure and selfless motive, in massively broadening access to works of scientific research.
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
> Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action (...)
The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
Authors choose to publish in these journals. They could choose to publish purely in open source journals and this would be a non-issue.
And “communal resources”? What if a private institution publishes a paper? You have a right to access that free as well? All public ally funded research is already available for free.
I didn’t know that Twitter deleted Sci Hub account. That company already had a bad record of political censorship but now it attacks science too. Disgusting. Elbakyan is doing an amazing and important work with Sci-Hub, I hope the site will continue to exist for long.
Despite how you and I feel about Sci-Hub, it is breaking the law. Copyright infringement, whether you agree with it or not, is a crime. If Twitter received notice from the journals’ legal teams to take down the account, they may not have the ability to fight back (depending on the journals’ legal arguments).
For some more context I would like to share a precedent specifically in India and Delhi that could be relevant to this case as well, "Rameshwari Photocopy Service shop copyright case":
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
Public mone is spent two times for a paper: first time to publish and second time to read it.
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
All of these publishers are also an impediment for the progress. Just look at more modern approach for the scientific publishing - Authorea[1], PubPub[2], some similar platforms.
"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 cofounded Reddit, resigned, turned down multiple opportinities to build out other tech companies, dedicated himself to open access activism and eventually killed himself as he was prosecuted for wire fraud.
Meanwhile, Relx currently has a market cap of £33 bn, and revenue of £8 bn, when it is essentially providing the service of pdf publishing to its unpaid authors and editors.
Arron and Alexandra are extremely brave, and it is Relx and other companies that are taking my property when my tax money is spent to generate research that they then want to charge millions of dollars for others to access.
Such is the complexity of laws, that, through a series of steps that each seem reasonable individually, one can become an owner of a thing that should not be their property.
We are not compensated for reviewing on behalf of journals. We even pay to publish, and then pay to read our own paper.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
This sounds like a valid viewpoint, but it could lead to significant downsides. Like pay per review scams on Amazon. I don't know how this policy will play out in reality.
That's inaccurate. When you publish to a journal, the journal will give you a pdf of your paper which you can put up on a personal site. You always have access to distribute your research.
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).
I would pay $10 if the author got at least payed $8 out of that. But since authors get payed nothing, I rather download the work from some other site and send the author a thank you mail if I really liked their work.
A whole lot of us post our papers on our websites. Those that don't are typically afraid of getting their employers in legal trouble, or don't know how to set up a website beyond the faculty bio page that their department makes for them.
My understanding is that the universities have contracts with the journals that mandate the professors and researchers publish in the journal with almost no exceptions. You’re putting the blame in the wrong place.
Readit News
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa7jxb/archivists-are-trying...
The paper collection software, if I recall correctly, is actually quite simple and uses APIs provided by publishers. It's the store of credentials that SciHub uses (that are provided by academics and scientists) which truly powers the site
For IPFS have a look at https://libgen.fun/ and https://freeread.org/ipfs/
Also see the HN thread on those: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
Maybe with some granularity, because I doubt many of us would have enough storage to spare to mirror the whole thing.
And while the paper collection software isn't FOSS, it's really the idea behind article sourcing that's important.
actually kind of surprised I haven't heard this yet
>https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/09/18/guest-post-th...
>Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions. While illegal access to published content is the most obvious target, this is just the tip of an iceberg concealing underlying efforts to steal multiple streams of personal and research data from the world’s academic institutions.
Comment 1: >The notion that Sci-Hub is not involved in hacking is laughable. The founder of Sci-Hub, when asked about this, disingenuously replies that Sci-Hub itself does not engage in hacking and phishing, without disputing that it relies on these to operate. More evidence that there is something big and powerful behind Sci-Hub: the Russian mafia.
Or this howler, a blog-post on Russian information warfare that then goes into Sci-Hub:
>In the scholarly information community, some individuals apparently sympathetic with the open information calls of Sci-Hub and LibGen actively shared authentication information, inadvertently providing institutional credentials to cybercriminals and cyberwarriors, who are probably still sitting on the usernames and passwords or, more likely, the information they grabbed before the passwords were changed. Experts estimate that we’ve seen 1% of the information Wikileaks and the Russians have purloined over the years.
>https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/04/03/publishing-in...
Dead Comment
Elbakyan's project really is a shining beacon of anti-capitalist action, against our broken system where a small number of private companies control access to what should be communal resources, solely to enrich themselves.
The scientific journal racket is all but capitalism. It's largely rentism disseminated and fostered by entrenched state and institutional interests and status quo. These publisher's devised a scheme where they not only force highly-educated and trained specialists to produce cutting-edge work for free but also afterwards demand high fees for them to access that same work.
And “communal resources”? What if a private institution publishes a paper? You have a right to access that free as well? All public ally funded research is already available for free.
Jim Crow and segregation were also "the law" at some point.
Unjust laws must be fought and overcome.
https://thewire.in/education/du-photocopy-casehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service_s...
Relevant quote:
Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act, 1957 permits students and educational institutions to copy portions from any work for research and educational purpose
OpenAccess for a higher charge is becoming a norm though. Some positives. Mathematics community has done a good job at making many open access journals. Biology has only a few: eLife being the most prominent.
[1] https://www.authorea.com/
[2] https://www.pubpub.org/
https://gist.github.com/usmanity/4522840
"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?"
Meanwhile, Relx currently has a market cap of £33 bn, and revenue of £8 bn, when it is essentially providing the service of pdf publishing to its unpaid authors and editors.
Arron and Alexandra are extremely brave, and it is Relx and other companies that are taking my property when my tax money is spent to generate research that they then want to charge millions of dollars for others to access.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
Why is this not a solution?
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).