A long time ago (even before Aaron Swartz), when I was still familiar with the active and rapidly growing filesharing community of the time, I vaguely remember reading about an effort by some of the "ebookers" to plant proxies in various universities' networks that would perform much the same function. I wonder what eventually became of it besides the large paper torrents that appeared, but I wouldn't be surprised if SciHub was related to that in some way. Back then, systems were far more open (as opposed to secured), and something like that was easier than it is today.
Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
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Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#142Is there a tarball of the data somewhere that one could download, redistribute and host somewhere (on the darknet, assumedly)?
There are occasional torrents, AFAIK. Hope you have 10tb of free space handy.
It is absolutely mind blowing to me that you can purchase that amount of storage with 20% to spare for around $500 these days. 12TB, $498 : http://www.amazon.com/Red-Desktop-Hard-Disk-Drive/dp/B00LO3K...
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
She? Is there someone publicly affiliated with the project?
Yes, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
It's amazing that retaliations following this initiative would make it close to impossible to do for anyone in the United States. Kudos to her.
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#144in memoriam: Aaron Swartz
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#145I am happy she is doing this. The price that paywalls are charging for accessing research papers is unacceptable: the money does not flow back to the researchers, nor to the institutions. Most of the paywalled research has been sponsored by taxpayer money and hence should be publicly accessible or at a very low "maintenance fee".
I work at a small academic database as a developer. We charge a pittance compared to what a lot of the larger players in this market do. And I'm conflicted. We are a registered non profit, and are actively losing money. Developer costs, of which there are only two. Building costs--I also shovel snow!, marketing costs, hosting costs, and much more. We have the workload where we would benefit from a staff 3 times the s…
This is a social sciences problem, not a large player vs small player problem. At Sage, which is one of the largest social science publishers, we also lose money on social science OA publishing. We've tried for years experimenting with different APC prices and have struggled to figure out how author pays will work in the social sciences. Shoot me an email (details in profile) if you want to chat about this stuff more. It's rare to find someone with experience doing social science OA publishing on HN!
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#146I didn't know that you could raid ships using a website(!). In all seriousness, the act of "sharing the collective knowledge of mankind publicly" isn't morally equivalent to attacking ships and killing people. We should stop using terms that are clearly propaganda created by the film and music industry to try to muddy the waters.
Some people have been using the word "freebooting" instead.
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#147Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#148While searching it goes to Google Scholar. Am I missing something?
They replace the links with their own, giving access to papers a plain Google Scholar search wouldn't.
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#149I didn't know that you could raid ships using a website(!). In all seriousness, the act of "sharing the collective knowledge of mankind publicly" isn't morally equivalent to attacking ships and killing people. We should stop using terms that are clearly propaganda created by the film and music industry to try to muddy the waters.
> We should stop using terms that are clearly propaganda
> created by the film and music industry to try to muddy
> the waters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation
It is similar to the way groups have reappropriated slurs like “slut,” “nigger,” or “queer."
Re: Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science
#150I've used sci-hub a few times. It's a little buggy and not every article can be accessed, but it works well enough to try when I'm not on campus. $30 to read a single article is ridiculous anyway and presents a barrier to scientists who don't have, can't afford, or don't want to pay for access. I hope sci-hub stays up and improves for some time.
Instead of paying the publishers, who contribute nothing to the work at all (remember they also charge us researchers hundreds of dollars just to get our work published), I'd rather donate the same $30 to sci-hub.
Another option: pay $5 to actual editors and designers, and $15 to reviewers. And save $10. Remember, the publisher typically doesn't even help with paper formatting, never mind copyediting.
Unpaid reviewers (who allegedly agree to work for some 'reputation' — BS, they're anonymous) delegate the actual scientific review to the least busy student of those capable to write a syntactic semblance of a positive review.
And then you're forced to pay $30 to have a chance to finally review it for yourself, as you're the only one interested in quality.
Please pay the reviewers, or everybody (in many applied areas at least) will self-publish in blogs and judge quality on HN votes. Like it has happened with most of software research.