Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
sci-hub.cc
sci-hub.cc
This is not mine - but looking at the code you should notice fairly quickly that it is somehow trivial. Note also that it may be necessary to change the URL if necessary.
Lastly it should be said that sci-hub does indeed need donations - it is essentially a one-woman project and she can always use some lawyer-funds...
Disclaimer: I made Bookmarkify
There's a great documentary about this extraordinary guy I assume most have already seen, but I'll post it again anyways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy
Though not an activist, he was another hacker prosecuted by the same team as Swartz, Jonathan James. He also committed suicide, at the age of 24. When he was 17 he spent six months in a federal corrections facility for hacking. Later, in 2007, he was connected to the TJX hack. He denied involvement but was friendly with some of the hackers who were involved and his past gave him little credibility. From his suicide note:
"The feds of course would see me as much more appealing target than Chris - if they could tie me to this case I'd be like Mitnick times 10 to them. I honestly, honestly had nothing to do with TJX. Unfortunately I don't picture the feds caring all too much. Read Agent Steal's guide to getting busted. The feds play dirty. Chris called me the other day. He was in jail and they let him out. That can only mean that he too is trying to pin this on me. So despite the fact that he and Albert are the most destructive, dangerous hackers the feds ever caught, they'll let them off easy because I'm a juicier target that would please the public more than two random fucks. C'est la vie.
I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control. Remember, it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether I win or lose, and sitting in jail for 20, 10, or even 5 years for a crime I didn't commit is not me winning. I die free."
The general estimates in the community is around $1.6 million a year to run. That's not cheap.
Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And lifted that ban after a number of humble petitions in Russian social media asking her to change her mind.
To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal. Like archive.org perhaps, or pubmed, or thepiratebay. Unfortunately, it is not.
But it's definitely a good thing we have it, anyway.
In any case, Sci-Hub is really "everything that is good about the internet" because it's a way to make scientific knowledge accessible anywhere to anyone, in a way that was never possible before. The benefit to scholars and students in poor countries is enormous.
And considering just how disgustingly parasitic the scientific publishers have become, Elbakyan is probably the closest to a XXIst century Robin Hood, much more so than the Piratebay founders, actually.
(I do not dispute the usefulness of SciHub, or the good that it’s doing for the netizens, or maybe for society in general. I’m just saying that it has this one thing against it, and that, for being a representative of everything that’s good, it’s pretty important.)
despite the fact that blocking people is "wrong", the good thing about the internet is that it's _allowed_! The internet isn't built on some moral/ethics - it shouldn't have one. It should remain something that anyone can get on, anyone can do anything on, and noone has the power to dictate behaviour.
https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive...
They also have multiple backups in other locations.
2. You submit novel research to the best journal you think will publish it.
3. The editor (the only person involved actually paid by the journal) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research.
4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to filibuster (this happens), your paper passes peer review.
5. Congratulations! The journal agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you must pay the journal. They do not pay you. You pay them. Color figures in the paper version nobody reads cost thousands extra.
6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, the journal sells your paper at exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free).
Taxes pay researchers to pay journals and taxes pay for university libraries to pay journals. Why on Earth do intelligent researchers (or taxpayers) put up with this crap? Being published in a good journal bumps up your impact factor and helps you win more grant money. If high impact factor journals go out of business because of piracy, others will just take their place.
In short, pirates screwing over journals doesn't hurt researchers in the least. Shaking up the parasitic journal biz is actually long overdue. Journals put in only a tiny percentage of the labor involved in putting a paper through peer-review, but they soak everyone involved for massive amounts of time and money. It's time they died.
1. You produce novel research.
2. You submit novel research to the best conference or workshop you think will publish it.
3. The editor (a volunteer) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research.
4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to reject (this supposedly happens, but is rare), your paper passes peer review.
5. Congratulations! The conference or workshop agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you generally must show up to the conference or workshop to present your work in person. This costs money (conference registration), and also travel cost and such. However, if you were going to the conference anyway, there is no added expenditure.
6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, ACM sells your paper at somewhat exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). However, at no cost to you, you are also explicitly allowed to post a "pre-print", identical to the published paper, on your personal/university website, where it will be promptly found by Google. However, the hosting is your own concern. (You can also upload the preprint to arXiv.)
It's a decent procedure. ACM also publishes journals, which do not require you to present anything in person. I do not know whether any author-borne costs are involved if you go that route.
For example, a PhD thesis might be the full written-up version of 3-4 conference papers you'd have published in the course of your PhD, and then you might condense the important part of your thesis into a single journal paper afterwards, but this is only a vague example and there are many ways of skinning this cat. There are many examples of extremely short conference papers that have had a major impact in their field, and there are _millions_ of completely forgettable journal papers.
The above broadly holds for any of the scientific research disciplines with which I'm familiar.
Yes! As an author of many CS conference papers, a few CS journal papers, and a few papers in other related fields, piracy affects me. It has been entirely beneficial, and I completely support sci-hub.
Collaborators, other authors, and other researchers have been able to read and find my work more cheaply and easily than they otherwise would have. Some would not have paid to buy my papers sight unseen. Some can't afford to buy them. A larger audience is always good for me.
I have also never directly earned even a single cent from any published work of mine. No royalties, no copyright payments, no publisher payments, etc. And I've paid thousands to publishers over the years to publish my own work.
This also allows me to timestamp my results - say my paper gets rejected because the reviewers think it's a bad fit for the conference, or they didn't understand my point because my writing was bad, etc. Now I have to improve it and submit it to another conference. If someone else publishes similar results in the meantime, then I can always point to the preprint and say that I did it first ;)
We want and need to disseminate our results as much as possible and the paywalls are getting more and more in our way. You won't find many scientists who are against Sci-Hub - maybe a few at some unusually rich universities of some very rich countries that pay $500 for a color graphics and the $2500-$3000 fee per article for them that makes the publication "open access".
Poorer countries cannot afford the journal subscriptions either, because these can be exorbitantly high - so high, that even top universities have to limit access. I stumble almost daily over a journal to which my institute doesn't have access. Before the advent of Sci-Hub, we often had to ask colleagues abroad on mailing lists for (technically illegal!) copies of articles to be able to conduct our research.
1. Go to the university library in person. 2. Submit a order-and-copy request for that paper. 3. Return 2 days later unless there is a weekend in-between. 4. Print a non-searchable, non-zoomable (extremely annoying in CG where I work) copy because getting the PDF is forbidden due to legal issues.
Now combine this with the usual way to do related work research for your own paper: 1. Search relevant papers for your topic. 2. Check who else cited these paper and read those papers. 3. Complete this breadth-first-search until time runs out or the papers become too off-topic.
This (in my field) yields a stack of around 120 papers I would have to order that 2-day-print-copy for of which in turn 100 are most probably irrelevant and hence will not be part of my papers related work section. Note also that I would have to order each "layer" of the breadth-first search separately - each time taking 2 days. Compare that to a day of related work research with sci-hub.
Quite obviously I have never met a researcher who took the legal/official road ;)
As an academic, my main interest is that others are able to read my work. If piracy is how they obtain access, then that's fine by me.
More about the Impact Factor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca...
More about why intelligent people "put up" with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
An overview of some hopeful initiatives by people who aren't putting up with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving...
AAA (American Anthropological Association) sent out a reminder to its members recently. When someone publishes their own paper on ResearchGate or academia.edu, they are in violation of copyright (which they've signed over to the lovely scientific publisher). It's a mess.
https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors.
Only the readers pay for the journal subscription.
Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public.
In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year).
Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing.
That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.
Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV.
The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]).
[2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...
[3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...
The reason they are not replaced is for the same reason, stocktrading places can not simply be "replaced"- aka you cant open up a competing wall-street.
Ahem.
Well... They mostly facilitate the evaluation of the goods. The evaluation itself is still done by scientists and scholars that are not employed by the publishers.
You cant just open another marketplace at the same location, because that has you at a automatic disadvantage. You could however ruin the marketplaces reputation, trying to shift customers to yours. You can also, wrap the market-place as in- provide a vital layer they need to function, and thus turn them into a organella of a bigger market-place.
They had access to the Internet before the general public, they would have realized the ridiculousness of the journal model decades ago. You can't always be a victim.
I think it's because modern academia lacks the slack in the system that is necessary to solve these kinds of problems.
The only royalty check I've ever seen from research I did is for a chapter of a book, and it was less than a dollar. Royalties don't matter.
In practice, people cite unread papers pretty often. In some cases, the paper they cite doesn't even exist. http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-... gives an example of a non-existent paper which had been cited 215 times.
http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-cita... gives some more examples of citations for papers which don't exist.
The top rated answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-une... argues:
> When you cite a source, you are not actually claiming that you have read it. What you are actually doing is staking your professional reputation on that source containing the information that you claim that it contains.
I don't recall a paper ever being retracted because it cited a background paper which doesn't exist.
And to think that royalty is usually associated with crowns and gold and jewels and such ...
"I remember once, when the money baskey was empty, Dad told Mother that "a royalty was due." I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn't wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a "royalty" could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life."
The vast majority of scientists never receive any of these prizes. A lot work in fields where no such prizes exists.
Its in just about everyone's interests for for-profit academic publishers to collapse. If Sci-Hub can help bring this about, it will be a historic victory for the open internet.
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why...
https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commerci...
How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?
1. Reputation. Journals are a provider, mainly, of a note saying "this paper is worth reading". This reputation is calculated largely by how much the papers they publish get cited later on. Due to the speed of iterations of science (how long it takes for a published paper to be used in more work, and then that new work to be published) it takes a long time to get past this.
2. Organised peer review. Despite the reviewers working for free, it's still not a free process. There's a great twitter thread about this from someone at peerJ (founder?) but I can't find a link now.
Getting more and more common is to pay the publisher and have the work made openly available, or at least to deposit the work in an institutional repository.
[disclaimer, I work in the science & publishing area for Digital Science, but on analysis of data not the publishing itself]
Each individual researcher wants their work published in as high-impact paper as possible. Individually fighting against the very publisher you want to publish your work with is harmful to your career and will accomplish exactly nothing.
It takes a critical mass of researchers, acting in coordinated way, for the attempt to change things not be suicidal.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
I'm not really easily angered, but Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, the other scientific publishers) are really despicable, earning above-market returns on equity off the labour of (publicly funded) scientists, then spending some of that money to make it harder to access the (publicly funded) research.
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Read the longest section of the Wikipedia entry on Elsevier ("Criticism"), and weep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...
I've been researching the industry for quite a while, and have written up the vicious cycle that keeps this in place in some more detail here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
Publishers require expensive subscriptions from academic universities to be able to read their published papers.
So actually it goes the other way around. Academics have to pay to read papers, and to write papers.
Scihub does not steal a dime from any original contributor. They actually save money from them.
Authors in general get no money for publications. In a weird setup of today authors get benefits from publications of prestige, career, hiring help and other scientists get curation / peer review benefits.
If current publication system went away completely and quickly it would be a minor shock to the system, but IMO easy to survive as a replacement curation system would emerge (from conferences, arxiv style, etc.)
We are trying to fight this by making our own open source journals, but it will take decades to replace to old, well-established journals if it happens at all. Until then, if you don't publish in a sizable number of firewalled/copyrighted top journals, your career will end at the postdoc level.
However, the researchers (at least in STEM) often publish these "in-progress" drafts that are very close to the final articles on their website or wherever.
[0] - https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub/status/731467465973174273?ref_sr...
It's somewhat rarer for a 'product' such as Sci-hub to show up multiple times, but considering that the HN crowd is pretty proud about Sci-hub's existence and will readily strike up a conversation about the Evil Publisher Empire, it's not so strange to see it on top.
Regardless, Sci-Hub launched in 2011 and has been frequently discussed in the media since then.
Do you think the same calculation is applicable to the HN user base? Seems like the relevant inputs are:
* New active users per month (instead of 4M born per year)
* Frequency that a link hits the HN top, assuming a high percentage of active HN users will subsequently forever know about the link
* Total number of times the link hit the top as a proxy for longevity of popularity
A piece I'd written a year or so back on why Sci-Hub is such a compelling option for academic and independent researchers. It's been picked up by a number of OA sites in the past few months.
As for Internet research gems, I'd also like to note a self-created resource that could use love, the Online Etymology Dictionary, produced by Douglas Harper. Unlike Sci-Hub, this is original work largely created to support Harper's own etymological explorations. I've found it tremendously useful, and very much in the spirit of the original web (of which it is very much a part).
We think journals make a lot of sense and that the problem is that journals don't control the toolchain.
I notice there's a lot of interest on HN around this subject from time to time. If you work with a journal and want to get in touch or have questions feel free to write me at rwalsh [at] scholasticahq.com
When somebody requests an article, Sci-hub will try and see if it already has it. If not, it will attempt to use some of the donated credentials to gain access, download it and store it for further download requests.
I'm neutral on the matter, but there are some obvious paths of recourse for publishers who don't want people sharing their credentials.
(Disclaimer: I work for Crossref, which is an organisation in the scholarly publishing space.)
I'm asking because a friend of mine who's enrolled in 2 colleges, just downloaded the same scholarly PDF (one that's also available through sci-hub) with 2 different college credentials and they had the same sha256sum.
Then when he tried it through sci-hub, he also got the same sha256sum.
Sorry if my disclaimer wasn't clear. I was just pointing out affiliation as standard on HN.
We do keep logs for a period of time, but the library administration's policy is to only investigate them when a publisher contacts us with a claim of abuse (we do not proactively monitor for unusual activity, although we do take steps like limiting the number of concurrent sessions per user and blacklisting IP addresses/ranges with a history of suspicious activity).
The publisher generally supplies examples of timestamps and URLs that were part of the alleged abuse. We use that information to identify the "abusing" user in the log.
Usually there is pretty clear evidence that the user is not conducting legitimate personal research (e.g. the user is a freshman early childhood education major at the local rural branch campus, but they're downloading thousands of chemistry papers from an IP address in China or Russia). Typically the user does not seem like an information freedom warrior, or even to have a clue what is going on, so it seems most likely the credentials were phished.
These cases may or may not be phishing. When corporations are hacked for their user credentials, those databases sometimes end up in dark web markets. It would be easy to extract email addresses with .edu domains ... so if a student used their university address for some service and reused the password, there's your login.
Moral of the story: Encourage students to use a password manager and 2FA.
As for geographic location, academics tend to travel a lot. Last I heard (from reading the court docs in Elsevier's lawsuit against Sci-Hub), they stopped using proxy connections a few years ago. They just log in using stored credentials, grab an auth token that lasts X minutes/hours, and download articles from whatever IP is convenient.
Storing the documents on Sci-hub controlled machines also makes sure that repeated requests don't actually hit the publishers, which significantly lowers what would otherwise be suspiciously high traffic.
The great thing about Sci-Hub, and a not-inconsequential element of its success, is that it is very nearly universal. Content is simply available in the archive in a tremendous number of cases. And is directly referenceable by DOI (or, when it's working, direct search).
The size of an archive matters as it reduces search costs across archives (this is a reason why archives tend to "a single max-size dump" dynamics). If you look at lists of the world's largest libraries, for example, it's pretty much the U.S. Library of Congress, and ... everything else. Even at the university library level, the largest collections tend to be fairly uniform at about 15-20 million volumes (Harvard, University of California, etc.).
The fact that a scholar can go to one such institution and have access to their entire archive is a compelling advantage. Shoe-leather adds up when you're crossing provincial or national borders.
Similar dynamics drove the adoption of single scholarly languages -- Greek, Latin, Arabic, Latin (again), French, German, and (in a battle with German and Russian) English following the 2nd world war, given that works had to be translated only to one language (English) rather than mulitiple.
Similar arguments, compounded by the insane costs of scribe and codex formation, applied in the pre-print era.
They're still only limited to openly available articles ("green" open access), but might be a solution for those not willing to use a solution of dubious legality, or for whom perhaps their institution blocks it or something.
But yeah, I'm not trying to trivialise what a great resource Sci-Hub can be for those who need it.
edit: Before someone suggests IPFS: IPFS is not suitable. a) it is not anonymous and b) it duplicates everything for its block storage so you have to have twice the space...
She should have had access to that literature without all this.
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199234257.003.0007
I find this the easiest interface. It allows me to search using standard search engines (PubMed, Google Scholar etc) the duck into sci-hub as required.
http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/
Anyone have the current link?
Good luck extracting much of anything useful out of older PDFs though.
I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but the last-modified dates on those torrents span a range of 3 years ago to this month.
The torrents of 100,000 are broken into 1000-paper zip archives that can be downloaded individually, so it's pretty manageable if you want to just check out a random sampling of the papers.
I would love to see somebody do some kind of massive scale analysis of the papers, but just extracting plain text from all those PDFs is a pretty herculean task considering that many would need to be OCRed, and others end up pretty garbled / misformated with pdftotext and the like.
поиск временно недоступен. пожалуйста, используйте DOI или прямые ссылки search temporarily unavailable, please use DOI or direct links If you're using Google chrome, you can install Sci-Hub extension to use search.
To do this: Download the extension and unpack it. You get the "Sci-Hub" folder with code. Open Chrome and navigate to chrome://extensions, or just open the menu -> settings -> extensions. Check the developer mode in upper right.[...]
But again, for most people's usage, it's completely unnecessary. Paste DOI -> get pdf works without any 'extensions' necessary.