EDIT: For those not familiar, Oink was a torrenting site but what distinguished it from the tons of other sites was how highly curated it was. High quality audio, proper grouping and genres, and best of all you could request anything that was missing and the community would magically add it.
Side-stepping the politics and legality for a moment, I find it interesting how this is a very natural example of the fault-tolerant design of networks.
A 'DOI' is a resource locator. There's a 'fault' in the network in that some people cannot locate the resource when providing the DOI. Sci-hub has sprung up to route around this fault, and provide people with the resource.
Practically, there are real people making decisions who are involved in this process, but on an abstract level it feels like this is somehow inevitable? It feels like an emergent behavior from any sufficiently advanced network, and any attempt to stop it seems futile.
Does this happen in realtime? I read that sci-hub sometimes uses credentials from legitimate users, but in that case they would be easily identified.
So, perhaps someone with access submits papers on request? And if so, what about watermarking?
years ago i recommended to scihub that they should use https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia but they weren't too concerned.
http://sci-hub.cc/10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b06335
It's already passed peer review, but the final version will be tidied up with additional editing and will have e.g. the line-by-line numbering stripped out. I see sci-hub versions of papers from months ago, or older, that never update to the final edition. The content doesn't differ much but the final version may have better-placed figures, corrected typos, and other minor improvements.
I consider it a heresy that some sites (fuck ResearchGate, Academia.edu) consider it fine to alter the PDFs. Document integrity should be the holy grail. Files should be final and never get touched. If they are, they are different.
Different versions of a paper should have different DOIs. A DOI is fundamentally quite abstract, and there is no reason that an object-appropriate versioning scheme can't be laid on top. Figshare, for example, uses a versioning system where there is a single DOI referring to the overall artefact (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037) and a versioned-by-suffix DOI referring to a specific version (e.g. 10.6084/m9.figshare.2066037.v16). That works really well IMO.
arXiv:1707.08475 [stat.ML] (or arXiv:1707.08475v1 [stat.ML] for this version)
sci-hub is not like it, but it's more curated that tbp. You can enter a paper's URL or DOI and it'll take you right to it.
I think there is curation that should be build on top of it, especially if the concept of "review" could be moved to an online system.