Hi all, I made this. I just received a notice from Zeit that they blocked it:
> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment: whereisscihub.now.sh
> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.
> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.
I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden attention.
While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit are not too happy about it.
The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].
Edit: I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once, and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access) journals: https://plaudit.pub/
Basically, if you post a link and know it links to illegal content, you are in violation of copyright law. If you do not know, you're not in violation, but upon being informed, you do know and have to take down the link.
In case of Sci-Hub, it would be reasonable to assume somebody who made a website with the purpose to link to the ever-changing Sci-Hub domain, that is ever changing because of copyright takedowns, then I'd think a court would find it reasonable for you to know you're linking to something violating somebody else's copyrights and thus are in violation of copyright law yourself, in EU jurisdictions at least.
I do know that the website hosts lots of illegal content. That said, I also know that many people use it just because it's so much more convenient, and who do are allowed to access the material: either because it's already Open Access, or because they're at an institution that has a subscription. See [0]:
> Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim.
Note also that the article you linked spoke about linking directly to photo's and articles, not to websites that host both infringing and non-infringing content. I presume Wikipedia wouldn't do that either, even though they do link to the homepage.
(And fun fact: some articles published by Elsevier actually do link to Sci-Hub versions of articles. Not really relevant to this, but still funny.)
Problem is that even when people who have valid licenses are using the site out of convenience, it's still illegal for Sci-Hub to host the content.
Sure it has some legal content too, but it has undeniably and openly a LOT of infringing content (bad faith), so I'd guess a judge would convict. Wikipedia may have some infringing content, but they hardly flaunt it and actually work to minimize such content (good faith).
We actually had a chat about that on Twitter :) That said, the site didn't really link to infringing material - just to the homepage of Sci-Hub. Technically, you could also append something to the URL to make you end up at a page with infringing content, but there was no explicit link to there from the site, and it can be used for non-infringing content as well.
Yes, I remember :) Absolutely ridiculous that displaying a link to a site that could be used for copyright infringement should itself be infringing. Especially in your case, considering you get the links straight from Wikidata. Did Zeit say if they received some kind of takedown notice, or are they acting on their own?
Linking to "illegal" content is also illegal in some EU country's. Guides or software to get around their censorship is also "illegal" and linking to "illegal" content is ofter attacked under this rule.
You think they would realise how absurd the whole thing is when then have to resort to censorship of censorship.
What you did is not illegal at all, but the law doesn't really matter anymore, so I guess you have fallen into the "pissing off powerful interests" category, which is just as bad as doing illegal stuff. You should consider putting this up as an onion at the least, is quite helpful for some of us. Kudos:)
Hey Vinnl, would it be alright if I dm you? I think there’s a way to create your service using Handshake.org such that it can’t be shutdown.
For context, Handshake is a new project aiming to create a distributed certificate authority and naming system. Domain names on Handshake are very difficult to shut down, so you could have a sci hub domain on Handshake that continuously tracks the sci hub servers. Users would be able to always access sci hub from the same domain in this case.
I don't think HN has DM functionality, but feel free to contact me on any platform.
In any case, feel free to take the source code and to deploy it elsewhere.
That said, it might be best to have Sci-Hub adopt Handshake directly? I think you might be able to get in touch with Alexandra Elbakyan, the person behind Sci-Hub, through its Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub
I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. Research papers through sci-hub only helps to make knowledge easily accessible. Humanity's progress depends on people who shared their knowledge, not by people who use it as a tool to rule and hold on to power.
It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.
Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and anonymous.
Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.
> It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain.
I think you have an misconception about how sci-hub works. Most of the content you can access trough sci-hub is not hosted by sci-hub, what happens when you request a fresh new paper is that your request is eventually served by a computer in the network of one of the universities with subscription to the journal which published that paper, using donated or stolen credentials of some high profile scientists if needed. Sci-hub already uses IPFS to cache some papers, it can not move to IPFS network because it is not a library of content like LibGen (which is often confused to) but an actual hub which decides how to serve your request in real time.
Sci-Hub only access is through a university network if it's the first time anyone has requested that article through Sci-Hub. It does cache the result on its own servers, though, so subsequent requests will be served from those.
(It used to cache them on LibGen, and I think it does still store them there, but I seem to recall it now uses its own servers as well.)
You’re right since digital content cannot be stolen, but it is well documented that some of the accounts are “used” via phishing, brute forcing and zero day exploits on the university/library’s platform, which is perhaps what GP meant.
Thanks for clarifying it, I didn't know that it uses stored credentials to serve. Still it will be nice if there is a decentralized network storing these papers in case those journals go away or out of business.
This research papers are anyways funded indirectly and authors of this paper are not really dependent on income from these papers, but the resulting data, experiments and experience they gained while working on it. Reading these papers is only a very small step to know something, but a necessary one.
IPFS is actually a better fit for this than it might appear.
It doesn't pro-actively replicate content, so it isn't like bit torrent where everyone is uploading.
Instead, it provides resilience, where the actual location of sci-hub could move around, but requesters could still get access to the content. The rest of the network acts to help with routing, but won't be serving data they haven't accessed themselves.
I haven't been following gnunet.org for quite a while but I remember from years ago that it offers plausible deniability for nodes, aside from solid sounding review of their crypto.
> I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible.
I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense.
It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.
> It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.
My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.
Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author pays to submit their work, volunteers review it, the author does corrections, and then it might get published behind a pay wall. For any university research, the work itself is paid for mostly via government and private company grants.
The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access.
The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs.
I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).
A massive majority of the time it's because the name once held meaning and had a strong reputation. In plenty of cases this still holds, even if the pricing model has turned predatory. Plenty of people review for an article due to the prestige, and a journal can become well known for having quality reviewers.
When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ.
Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.
I'm a big fan of the Chesterson's Fence idea - maybe not applied slavishly, but as a general principle. And I have no idea where the journals came from. Nor do I have a suggestion for what to do about them. What I would be interested in reading about is any type of value that they bring to the process other than a name that was established long ago. I have yet to find much in the way that explains their current value for advancing academic knowledge.
Their value is very similar to that offered by Ivy League schools - prestige. The journals have the reputation for only publishing the highest quality, high impact papers. They act a filter.
Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all.
Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't.
There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.
All knowledge should not be free. The comment above mine wrote knowledge should be free and easily accessible. They are talking about all knowledge, not just academic journals, and that makes no sense.
It does make sense. You're just misreading what they said.
They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom.
Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against.
I'm simply countering disinformation spam with correct information.
Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm
This is the equivalent of “If you want this conversation to end, why don’t YOU stop talking?” You already know the solution to the problem you’re having, which is to either make better points or stop inviting more replies.
I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.
As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work.
We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]
Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]
However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.
The American Astronomical Society has taken a pretty powerful stance against the predatory journal publishing practice.
They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).
It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.
See eg the various initiatives against Elsevier's pricing practices with all/most German universities and a number of American universities refusing to pay Elsevier's fee/ransom.
Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.
You can check for yourself - on providing and dissemination, check Arxiv & Siblings. On institutions, check e.g., University of California, or search, e.g., "Elsevier's Paywall" using some internet search service to find names.
I was gladly surprised that a "low quality" (data/experiments were fine, but terrible copywriting) paper I wrote while in academia which I uploaded to Arxiv actually got some good amounts of citations ( and is even indexed by google scholar).
Having papers published in journals (especially prestigious ones like Nature) is how you attain status in the research community. Also most research institutions have some expectation that you will publish N papers a year on average (because it also enhances their status).
I'm a PhD student. To graduate, I need publications. The quality of my publications, and hence my possibility of graduation, is evaluated based on the reputation of the conferences I publish in. The same applies to a PhD graduate trying to get into a post-doc position, or a post-doc trying to get assistant professorship. For historical reasons, many of the reputable conferences are closed and ran by publishing houses that charge unfair money for them. We are trying to change that.
And if you approach Springer to try to publish something (e.g. a Book), and you have some draft of it online on your homepage or something - you'll be rejected outright. They won't publish unless they can monopolize it.
Information freedom radicalism is not in any way mutually exclusive with compensating creators.
Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free.
Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt.
Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.
I don't follow your argument: "information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free." You can't give something away for free by requiring compensation beforehand.
> Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.
Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free.
If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free.
If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out.
edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."
> The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author.
Food is finite. When you buy material goods, you subtract from the seller's supply of goods and add to your own. It's impossible to create new goods out of nothing. Since there isn't enough for everyone, an economy naturally arises.
Information is infinite. Copying and transmitting data is not only trivial, it is natural. That's why people came up with ways to create artificial scarcity. The only cost associated with human knowledge and art is that of creating it. After it's created, information costs $0.
All data, all files on a computer, they're essentially just really big numbers that humanity happened to discover. Once the number is known, modern computers make it possible to copy and transmit it for almost $0. Paywalls? Only one person needs to pay in order to get copy and distribute it to everyone else.
Nobody is saying creators shouldn't be compensated. We're saying they need a new business model. It's the 21st century. You no longer need huge printing presses in order to make copies of something at scale. It's as easy as copy paste.
Man, you are obnoxious. Do you understand that we authors of these damn papers get fuckall from their publication? The publication industry is an extortion racket.
I said above I understand the hatred for academic journals. This thread is about whether all knowledge by otherwise uncompensated creators should be available for free.
I don't fear paywalls. I create, fund, and advocate for circumvention tools because withholding something of value that is instantly copyable and virtually free to share is morally abhorrent.
It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town. Likewise it's my right to use information to liberate withheld information just as it would be my right to provide well digging tools to your parched neighbors.
The only difference is that I'm thinking of what is best for everyone and you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
> It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town
Information is like the food in my example, not the "only water supply" in yours. Leibniz and Newton independently developed calculus, for example.
> you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
It's not selfish to be compensated for your work. Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.
Author compensation depends on the author and their ability to strike a good deal for themselves, just like the rest of us when we apply for jobs, they do it per piece of work.
As for journals, I understand the distaste academics have for these. This thread was about whether all published information should be free, not just journals.
The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even patent revenues.
Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services".
The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer.
What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website.
In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines.
You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity.
There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now)
If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.
If my tax payer money helped fund the research, I better get access to it. Similarly, if my tuition money helped fund it, then I better get access to it as well. Or even, if my actual time helped fund the research (e.g. I am a student involved in the research) then I better get access to it, too.
Sounds fair?
The vast majority of academic research is funded at least in part by tax payers either directly (grants, public universities or universities receiving public funds, etc) or indirectly (subsidies).
Even if research was "made possible by a grant from (private entity)", if it happened in a university, it most likely used university funds (from using rent-free space and equipment researchers can use, to staff and administration researchers rely on, etc)
And how exactly do publishers contribute to said work? Research is done by researchers; papers are written by researchers; and papers are reviewed by other researchers for free...
Of course there's development costs to publications. It doesn't follow that we thus must lock publications behind paywalls or clutter them with ads.
It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.
The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.
You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty.
Funded information can be liberated.
Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free.
Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
> You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty.
Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible".
The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible".
> Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.
Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished.
Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it no longer applies. It's obviously incompatible with free computing as we know it today. In order for copyright to be enforceable, computers that run unauthorized software must be made illegal. Otherwise, people will always be able to copy whatever data they want and there's little anyone can do about it.
Part of the social contract behind copyright is giving the public free access to the works of humanity after the protection expires. It's clear now that the copyright industry has no intention of ever letting these protections ever expire. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when the copyright holders refuse to keep up their end of the deal.
> Sounds a lot like communism, where everything is free and you don't need to worry about working.
Communism implies an economy. When it comes to data, there is nothing to economize. It's abundant, there's more than enough for everyone.
The only reason the internet isn't a post-scarcity society is we still have laws like copyright holding us back.
> Oops, now nobody is working and there is no stuff!
Pretty weird seeing this argument on Hacker News of all places. Lots of developers work for no financial reward, myself included. Scratching one's own itch is a hacker tradition and it disproves the notion that nobody would create anything if it wasn't for copyright.
>Sounds a lot like communism, where everything is free and you don't need to worry
I think you are unaware of how stupid that sounds, maybe go and read what communism is/was or stop commenting when you have no idea and you learn things from Star Trek.
FYI people were/are working in communism and things are not free (so 100% comment you had there)
I don't know what to tell you. You're just plain wrong.
Having the freedom to access information and information be8mg easily accessible are two different things. Those are the two things the above commenter was advocating for.
Should accessing information be free of cost? Of course, yes, as much as possible it should. That's why we have libraries.
Should creating information be free of cost? Of course not, that's just nonsense and the fact that you thought anyone would suggest that is rather telling.
They used to have a .onion address, which I assumed would continue to be the most reliable way in, but it's been down for a long time. I'm surprised, it seems like Tor would be the best way to remain up and accessible.
Wikidata, actually, which Wikipedia unfortunately does not yet use as a data source. But yeah, also a Wikimedia project, and also maintained by volunteers.
Instead of googling for the site, I google for the site's Wikipedia article ("schihub wiki") which usually has an up-to-date link to the site in the sidebar, whereas Google is forced to censor their results.
If you Google "Piratebay", the first search result is a fake "thepirate-bay.org" (with a dash) but the Wikipedia article lists the right one.
Sci-Hub is such a marvelous resource. I like to read research papers for fun sometimes but I'm, let's put it gently, no scientist. So it'd be a huge waste of money for me to pay the steep prices of scientific journal subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per month where I understand at most 75% of it.
However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that I could contribute to?
Scientists don’t get paid anything regardless of whether or not you pay a subscription/article fee to the science journals. The best thing to do to benefit scientists (usually) is to spread awareness of their work, as that is the main currency in academia that determines career advancement and future fundraising. Ideally you’re promoting it to other academics (so that they generate trackable citations), but general publicity also helps.
Paying taxes is (at least in western countries where i know a tiny bit about academia) sufficient to support the authors.
If you want to go beyond that: reach out / blog / tweet / etc about papers that peek your interest.
If someone else wrote about a paper of mine, I'd be over the moon!
Those teams receive nothing from publishing either, other than CV credit and occasionally, a copy of the journal. Many of them put their pre-prints on academia.edu and often will email it to you if you ask.
It's complicated, but places like Wiley and Elsevier take much more than they give.
It’s not an answer to your question, but when you pay JSTOR or whomever, none of that goes back to the scientists. It’s not like royalties for an author.
Yes, don't feel bad, we'd never see it anyway. I agree with the proposals of the others, rather write an email to the corresponding author or a blog post about it.
Do not feel bad. You are the benefit. More precisely, your education is. We should try to maximize people's potential and share knowledge with everyone, who wants to learn, instead of hiding it behind paywalls.
Off-topic: I think it would be awesome to have a browser extension that collected HTTP codes as achievements, and you get a pretty little badge every time you run into a new code.
executing `curl -v https://whereisscihub.now.sh` shows an x-now-id header, which means that the request has reached Zeit Now servers and it's Zeit Inc who blocked it.
Same result here in Brazil. An HTTP status code implies the domain name was properly resolved to the IP of the HTTP server. The page must have been removed by the host.
> An HTTP status code implies the domain name was properly resolved to the IP of the HTTP server.
This is not true. Your ISP can in theory route the requested address to whatever they want. In the Netherlands TPB is blocked and my ISP returns a 200 status code which shows their blocking landing page. Other ISPs give a 30x redirect to their domain.
Basically the ISP can do a man in the middle attack.
The sooner academic publishers die the better—not a very original thought, I'm aware.
There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community, and I think it comes down to two factors:
1. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.
2. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.
I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access, perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic publishing in months.
Just an arXiv with peer-review is not enough. There is a lot of room for innovation and improvement. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. Check out the last[4] article in that series. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[5] and MIT's PubPub[6] (it is the open source[7]). See also GitXiv[8]. See also the Publishing Reform[9] project. Moreover, there is quite an interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[10].
There are experiments also in terms of peer reviewed open access journals that work as arxiv overlays. In mathematics we have discrete analysis [1] and sigma [2] (at least) which are quite good. Some journals started moving to a fully free open access model, e.g. JEP [3], Documenta Mathematica [4], Acta Mathematica [5] and Annales IF [6] (again at least).
I agree with @xvilka that there is lots of room for innovation and exploration, but even in the more traditional setting there is some movement coming from the smaller realities. It seems to me that the big publisher monopoly, which at least in my field is completely unjustified, is the bigger obstacle.
We plan to take a cut of the crowdfunded transactions, like Patreon or Kickstarter does. We could also show academia-relevant ads on the sidebar. We will never paywall content on our platform.
This covers a lot of what we're building at OpenReview.net. Obviously we still long way to go, but we already have some of the major AI/ML conferences using our platform to accept submissions, perform paper matching, and host peer-review forums.
At least in astrophysics, the standard is to let your paper go through peer review first, then post the paper once accepted. In the arXiv comments, you then put "Accepted by <journal>". Besides offering the papers for free, the arXiv is the main "news feed" that astronomers use (much more convenient than having to check all the different journals). Imo this system works quite well. There's indeed papers posted that are not yet peer-reviewed, but these you read with a more skeptical view.
The large number of submissions is indeed a problem for other fields (I think mostly computer science?). I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. A voting system (where you see a mix of new and popular submissions), together with some content filtering, can help the reader. However, this would probably lead to some important papers getting burried.
I'm not convinced they are fully useless. Eg even an anti-vax person will understand that academic publishing has some solidness, even if they think it's'the establishment'. Explaining to a layman what arxiv does and how solid or not solid science on the site is is a lot more difficult.
In libgen, you can search for stuff and find books/docs that match the query, but unfortunately that appears to not be possible on sci-hub, which is inconvenient.
That said, both are incredible resources for academics, researchers, students or even folks just wanting to read up on a subject in more depth than Wikipedia has.
It's not really acting as a search engine, no. You can use Scholar for that, find the DOI, and paste it into sci-hub.
Speaking of which, Scholar should really be showing DOIs on their search results. That is, the DOI should appear as a top-level clickable link from every result entry. I've tried to suggest many things like this to Scholar over the years, but to no avail... Like Google in general. Just a feature request into the void.
They would never display it. It's basically the same reason why they won't show a complete url anymore, the more time you spend on Google the more money they get.
PSA for those looking for access to research papers. If it's hard to find via scihub/libgen, you can also email the authors. No researchers want their work to be inaccessible, they just need to publish in journals for visibility/prestige.
Source: have research publications, always happy when someone reaches out
The page was using zeit 1.0 before, which means it was a container and not a serverless function. (I know you know Rauchg, just explaining for other people). This container was actually failing because of rate limiting by wikidata causing an unhandled promise failure.
I had made a fork of this to show it working on zeit now 2.0 with 'stale-while-revalidate' so that it only update once every minute. But obviously I took that fork down once I saw this comment.
Pulling domain names from a Wikipedia article doesn't violate any laws. That's literally all the page did. It just checked the sci-hub Wikipedia article and reposted the latest domain listed. But it's their site/company, so whatever.
> Dear customer,
Due to a warning in accordance with Section 81 (1a) UrhG / preliminary injunction / court decision, access to this website had to be blocked.
I've tried various VPNs over the years but they add considerable latency to my already latency-laden LTE connection, which is only very briefly fun for the nostalgic 90s feeling.
Unfortunately doesn't help. Windows tracert also displays a funny message:
Tracing route to unavailable.for.legal.reasons [212.166.122.119]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
I find it odd that the warning message is from Magenta (T-Mobile) when A1 is my ISP. A1 is a private company which has fairly recently taken over the role of "main" ISP in Austria, which means, as I understand it, that all traffic in Austria flows through their pipes. What I don't get is why Magenta is providing the blocking (or how, if it's not DNS).
As academics, your institution is paying publishers to get access to journal (and you may loose access to electronic versions if the institution stops paying contrary to paper versions), you write papers for free, you review papers for free, you are part of the editorial board of the journal for free (or some crumbs for travelling to a conference), as an editor you spend most of your life managing people for a really small stipend compared to the time spent. People still do it because they believe it is useful. But current openaccess solutions that cost sometimes $5,000 are not a solution either. In both options the publishers is making the money and the researchers or their institution have to pay... There are legitimate concerns about scihub from some librarians as it doesn't allow a correct attribution of funds to ressources that are needed by researchers and there are some concerns of researchers credentials being stolen and shared (willingly and not) by scihub but also less reputable actors. University libraries are struggling with credentials reuse as they are the ones that get punished by the publishers with ban of ips or full institutions and harder contracts negotiations. Talking about those negotiations, they are all confidential, despite often using state or federal funds there is no way to know how much, what and how these secret deals are negotiated. So we still don't have a good solution. Preprints are useful, but we had already too many publications to skim through and the fact that anybody can publish anything with no filters makes finding meaningful information much harder....
Actually you often pay a couple thousand dollars as a publishing fee to get your paper in the journal after review. I'm sure it's not necessarily like that in every journal, but the bigger ones do it that way. So basically pay them to take your content, pay them to view their content, and do labor for them by reviewing papers for free.
True, but it is the case only in some high end tabloid-like journals, not more regular ones (at least in my field). Unless of course you ask for their openaccess option, then they charge thousands for CC-BY-NC-ND and sometimes more for CC-BY...
Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required to access it.
As we can see by the fact the above URL is currently not working, there's a high risk associated with the centralized nature of sci-hub. It's already been the target of a major court case in the US and the only reason it's still running is because the site and it's founder (Alexandra Elbakyan) are outside of the court's jurisdiction. But there's still a chance it could disappear one day, and what sort of impact would that have on the productivity of researchers, many of which will be unable to access the articles they need?
The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.
For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those.
If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have.
As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...
As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.
Which comes from the dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, wherein society goes awry to the point of publicly funding the destruction of valuable information. It's also the temperature paper (books) burns at.
Nobody actually uses this status code, despite it being an official spec. I'd like to think the dev or dev ops person who configured this server used the status code as a minor protest. The spec authors would be proud.
> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment: whereisscihub.now.sh
> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.
> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.
I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden attention.
While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit are not too happy about it.
The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].
Edit: I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once, and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access) journals: https://plaudit.pub/
[0] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/
[1] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/issues/9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
[3] https://sci-hub.now.sh/ (though also hosted by Zeit)