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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: It's Sci-Hub FUD.

Is there any basis in fact to what's alleged in the article? Forking over your university login credentials to scihub seems like a very bad idea indeed. OTOH, presumably they must have amassed almost the entire corpus (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5832410/) by some such means...

I think they do use "donated" credentials in the background, but the article makes it sound like people would be phished into handing over their logins, which is not the case at all.

Probably someone contributed their credentials because they (rightfully IMO) felt the cause was justified.

Later the uni found out, asked questions and the person just lied they were 'tricked'. Uni makes a police report and the police just takes it at face value.

Yes this sounds very likely.

Why would anyone need to hand over their credentials to sci hub if it weren't for this purpose? Neither the BBC nor the police present any evidence of this "phishing" that I can see.

If I still had access to my university creds I'd totally give them to sci hub. They're doing God's work.

I don't know how sci-hub works but there have been private versions of it for decades and that's how they worked, but that always occured in somewhat trusted circles.

There wasn’t really an equivalent of Sci-Hub and LibGen until the last decade or so. I was a member of previous filesharing communities popular among Eastern Europeans unable to afford academic literature, but there wasn’t all that much available in pirated form, because it required time-consuming scanning or making a request to someone who might download it for you. It was only when people like Aaron Schwartz and the Sci-Hub team managed to mass-download articles from JSTOR and other paywalls, that finally academics got access to most of what they were looking for.

There was, privately, as I said. Private web servers that proxied through other people's credentials that gave direct access to the catalogues. You'd use them exactly the same way as Sci-Hub.

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