It gives you access to a lot of books as well. For example, all the apress.com books that you can get in ebook format through the site.
Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
131–140 of 166 posts
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#132Earlier 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.
>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.
Ahem.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This? http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/ I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but the last-modified dates on those torrents span a range of 3 years ago to this month.
Yes, that's the one! Those numbers refer to the number of papers in each torrent, so each one contains 100,000 papers giving a current total of 66+ million.
The torrents of 100,000 are broken into 1000-paper zip archives that can be downloaded individually, so it's pretty manageable if you want to just check out a random sampling of the papers.
I would love to see somebody do some kind of massive scale analysis of the papers, but just extracting plain text from all those PDFs is a pretty herculean task considering that many would need to be OCRed, and others end up pretty garbled / misformated with pdftotext and the like.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#134Sci-Hub represents everything that is good about the internet.
Well, not really. Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And…
Can something be done to clone/distribute it?
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#135ELI5: 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.
I can't tell you how many times I've spent hours tracking down the source of a quote only to find that either the "quote" is really just a paraphrase of someone's work that someone else mistook for a quote or that the "quote" from source A is really in source B but is actually source B quoting source C
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
All websites have founders and personality. Since you mention the PirateBay, they were a team with a rather snarky sense of humour. Archive.org is run by a foundation. There are always people and there's always legal responsibility. In any case, Sci-Hub is really "everything that is good about the internet" because it's a way to make scientific knowledge accessible anywhere to anyone, in a way that was never possible…
There is something wrong with a service when access to it is conditional on the opinion about its founder voiced by some part of the population of a country. I can’t but feel that it goes against the spirit of freedom and empowerment that _is_ everything that’s good about the internet. (I do not dispute the usefulness of SciHub, or the good that it’s doing for the netizens, or maybe for society in general. I’m just s…
You have to trust someone at some point, even if it's just yourself. You can simplify and decentralize the trust network but you can't eliminate it.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will neither admit nor deny supplying my credentials to Sci-hub.
I don't think you'll have to. Both hidden and conspicuous watermarks are common in trade book PDF downloads. RIAA members poisoned the Bit Torrent well. I'm neutral on the matter, but there are some obvious paths of recourse for publishers who don't want people sharing their credentials. (Disclaimer: I work for Crossref, which is an organisation in the scholarly publishing space.)
Nah, that doesn't work for academic papers. You usually access them anonymously anyway through your institution (which has a subscription). So even if they watermark (and I don't think they do), they can only watermark the institution.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you'll have to. Both hidden and conspicuous watermarks are common in trade book PDF downloads. RIAA members poisoned the Bit Torrent well. I'm neutral on the matter, but there are some obvious paths of recourse for publishers who don't want people sharing their credentials. (Disclaimer: I work for Crossref, which is an organisation in the scholarly publishing space.)
Does only Crossref do this? I'm asking because a friend of mine who's enrolled in 2 colleges, just downloaded the same scholarly PDF (one that's also available through sci-hub) with 2 different college credentials and they had the same sha256sum. Then when he tried it through sci-hub, he also got the same sha256sum.
Crossref doesn't do anything at all in relation to SciHub or watermarking PDFs. We don't host content. (I'm happy to talk about what we do do, but it's off-topic)
Sorry if my disclaimer wasn't clear. I was just pointing out affiliation as standard on HN.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you'll have to. Both hidden and conspicuous watermarks are common in trade book PDF downloads. RIAA members poisoned the Bit Torrent well. I'm neutral on the matter, but there are some obvious paths of recourse for publishers who don't want people sharing their credentials. (Disclaimer: I work for Crossref, which is an organisation in the scholarly publishing space.)
Nah, that doesn't work for academic papers. You usually access them anonymously anyway through your institution (which has a subscription). So even if they watermark (and I don't think they do), they can only watermark the institution.
There are plenty of instances of big-name publishers sending nastygrams to whole institutions and/or cutting them off for perceived abuse.
Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This? http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/ I'm not sure what the numbers mean, but the last-modified dates on those torrents span a range of 3 years ago to this month.
Yes, that's the one! Those numbers refer to the number of papers in each torrent, so each one contains 100,000 papers giving a current total of 66+ million. The torrents of 100,000 are broken into 1000-paper zip archives that can be downloaded individually, so it's pretty manageable if you want to just check out a random sampling of the papers. I would love to see somebody do some kind of massive scale analysis of th…