The only thing that worries me about SciHub is the fact that according to her Wikipedia article, the founder shows the exact symptoms of a freedom fighter turned Putin's mouthpiece, similar to Assange etc. I have a problem with academic freedom being preached from hotel rooms paid for by the most repressive, warmongering and manipulative regime in Europe.
Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
71–80 of 166 posts
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#72Sci-Hub's an important player in the transition to Open Access. Note, however, that many papers are already available elsewhere (e.g. ArXiv), legally. You can use the OAButton [1] or Unpaywall [2] extensions if you hit a paywall to find a free version. They're not perfect, and solve a problem that shouldn't exist, but it's nice that they're there. [1] https://openaccessbutton.org/ [2] http://unpaywall.org/
Yes, many papers are available ... somewhere ... if you know precisely where to look for them and find them. 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 red…
Yes, and it's great that people can use Sci-Hub for that. That said, for papers that are legally available, OAButton and Unpaywall exactly aim to solve the problem of having to know where to look for them and find them.
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.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#73ELI5: I'm not from academia so please help me understand. Are researchers who publish these [firewalled/copyrighted] papers likely to lose out on their earnings if this is 'open-sourced'? I'm honestly asking as I try to think through the whole 'open-source' paradigm and how it fits in a (mostly) capitalist, libertarian world. Thanks!
Researchers want you to pirate their paper as often as possible. You can only cite papers you've read, after all. 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.
"You can only cite papers you've read, after all."
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.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#74ELI5: I'm not from academia so please help me understand. Are researchers who publish these [firewalled/copyrighted] papers likely to lose out on their earnings if this is 'open-sourced'? I'm honestly asking as I try to think through the whole 'open-source' paradigm and how it fits in a (mostly) capitalist, libertarian world. Thanks!
1. You produce novel research. 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 pe…
Even though I'm not a researcher (yet; still doing my undergrad), this infuriates me to no end. I'd be glad to help any movement that attempts to break this by volunteering code and time.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#75For heavy users (like me) I suggest using one of many "implementations" of a auto-scihub bookmark here: https://github.com/nfahlgren/scihub_bookmark It is a great addition to an otherwise clean tor-browser... 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 do…
I think the donations are mostly for running the infrastructure - I don't think she's doing much in terms of hiring lawyers. Rather, she's just ignoring the outcomes of US court cases (being based in Kazakhstan or Russia).
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#76Is there a way to download the whole archive? People can do cool stuff like visualization etc. on it.
Yes, but it's huge. At one time you could torrent it piece by piece but now the link appears broken...
http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/
Anyone have the current link?
Good luck extracting much of anything useful out of older PDFs though.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, that makes it clearer for me (non-academic) to understand. It does astound me how much control the 'journals' have over the academic research world!
They basically work as a "neutral" refree and communication medium between competing groups and meta groups (universitys) and create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce. 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.
> create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce
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.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#78How can I help? Coding, money, infrastructure?
There's a "donate" link at the bottom.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#79Sci-hub is great! I'm a researcher and use it multiple times a week. I wonder how it works - any insights?
In my understanding, some people have donated their academic login credentials, effectively giving Sci-hub access to their institution's subscriptions. 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.
storage relying on libgen, which I think has 200TB of data or more.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#80Just wondering, what if I use this way to obtain papers for my thesis? Do I have to worry about it?
Well, you might want to worry about citing sources that your readers might not be able to read. Otherwise, it's mostly the same risks you get when using e.g. the Pirate Bay. That's if you use the site, by the way, regardless of if you use them for your thesis.