Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
51–60 of 160 posts
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#52I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic. If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, s…
> In writing a publication ...
And then the reviewer says "you should compare this to papers X, Y, and Z", each of which costs $35+ for a non-subscriber to read.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#53I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…
There is another solution - interlibrary loan. While it takes longer, you can often get papers for free or for a flat nominal cost. The local college ILL service will make a copy of any article in the world for $10 for the general public. The public library where I used to live would make ILL copies for free.
It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#54Does anybody know how to find the corresponding torrents for the papers that sci-hub has fetched? Is there some sort of prefix I can punch into torrentz.eu?
i think scihub uses various proxies in multiple universities to fetch the articles.
I think the question was whether we can easily mass-download the papers from Scihub.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#55Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
Why is that important? I would be just as happy with an API that allows downloading articles one at a time.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#56I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…
> If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read.
It's not quite that dire. DeepDyve [1], which is kind of like Spotify for academic journals, provides online access to 12 million articles from 10000 peer reviewed journals. You can buy access in blocks of 5 articles for $20, or unlimited for $40/month ($30/month if you buy a year at a time). They also have free 5 minute previews so if you are not on one of the unlimited plans you can get some idea if you want to buy a particular article or not.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#57I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventi…
I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation.
One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations.
I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#58Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
What you describe is available through libgens scimag section, and I believe they're affiliated.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#59Does Sci-Hub practice what it preaches? Do they provide a means of downloading their entire repository of research papers either via torrent or SFTP? Because if the entire repository isn't available to everyone, then how can we be sure that once they get raided those papers aren't lost forever?
SCi-Hub used hacked or shared university account to abuse the university proxies to get content. For big research institutions, it's an annoyance. To small colleges and university library it is a major headache that can get the whole university locked out from resources the library is paying dearly for.
Source: My partner is a librarian at a smaller university, this happens every few months and they lose access to major online platforms for days if not longer every time.
Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? I like the idea, but I think the situation is not that simple. Although you make a good point that piracy of one thing may be dissimilar to piracy of another thing, both acts are still considered piracy. That is why I asked a question about generic piracy.
> So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? its not free. taxpayers have paid for it (and are not getting it for aforementioned reasons)
Some papers were written by self-employed people or by corporate employees. Is it okay for these papers to be restricted?