My uni doesn't have access to some language journals, and sometimes I just want to check a single paper to see if it's worth it. Also many paywalls don't allowed to you get one paper, or if they do the price is extortionate.
Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
101–110 of 265 posts
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#102Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read, guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming "ohmygodyes". From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public good. It certainly seems like l…
Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing th…
I don't know what field you are talking about, but in physics only about 95% of papers I want to read are published on arXiv, including older ones. I assume most researchers occasionally read something from scihub or subscription services.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#103The total collection is 54.54 TiB, with 690 torrents as of writing. For preservation purposes, I put magnet links to all the torrents here: https://pastebin.com/zTAqS7wz So, even if the torrents go away, the magnet links should still be usable. (Edited: fixed link)
???? This is obviously equal to 54,000 datasets of 1 gigabytes each, which I would say is a pretty large dataset to publish along with a paper, so it's hard for me to even imagine 54 thousand such 1-gigabyte datasets. A one gigabyte PDF is astronomical in size, PDF's are usually far far shorter. So why is this so large? Aren't they just PDF's, basically? And usually just a few pages? Excuse my ignorance. I'm very sur…
There’s dozens of millions of articles total, not thousands.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#104We need more sci-hub
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't be fined. You'd be arrested and charged criminally, and likely spend the rest of your life in jail. The public does not understand and would happily hang you for being one of those evil hackers. The person who tells them you belong there would be a $1000/hour professional witness. Infinite-term copyright builds dynasties. They do not take kindly to competition. Stay safe.
In most counties you would not go to prison at all. Even in the US, you wouldn't get more than 10 years max.
Ironic, isn’t it - taxpayers money first goes towards funding a major fraction of the research, and then towards “hanging the evil hackers” to ensure the taxpaying public (the evil hackers included) never accesses what they paid for.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
???? This is obviously equal to 54,000 datasets of 1 gigabytes each, which I would say is a pretty large dataset to publish along with a paper, so it's hard for me to even imagine 54 thousand such 1-gigabyte datasets. A one gigabyte PDF is astronomical in size, PDF's are usually far far shorter. So why is this so large? Aren't they just PDF's, basically? And usually just a few pages? Excuse my ignorance. I'm very sur…
There’s dozens of millions of articles total, not thousands.
wow. I didn't know there were a grand total of dozens of millions of journal articles published total worldwide. My guess would have been hundreds of thousands at most. These are journal articles, not high school book reports, right? I'm astounded at the number you quote.
For example there are about 10,000 papers submitted per month to all of arxiv[1] - which is a huge number. That totals 132k per year or so. For there to be "dozens of millions" of journal articles, that would mean arxiv has just 0.83% of them. Given the very low bar to publishing on arXiv I would think if you compared the number of arxiv articles as a percentage of all pubished journal articles, it would be a lot more than 0.83%! So the "dozens of millions" of journal articles is extremely astounding to me.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?
There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanatio…
Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed.
While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience.
I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers).
Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#108Not being in a scientific field, one of the previous times this came up I asked if any of the working scientists felt like SciHub had positively impacted their work: exposing them to more papers than they would have read, guiding them in different ways, etc. and the answer was a pretty overwhelming "ohmygodyes". From the outside, it's very difficult to see this as anything but a public good. It certainly seems like l…
I don't know how I would have been able to write my first paper without SciHub. My lab didn't have subscriptions, they just decided to stop paying.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference. I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.
Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?
When I review an article, I do it for free. If it's short, I do it fast. If it's long and complicated, I notify whoever is requesting it that I need that-many-weeks for that. If they agree, great; if not, they will have no problems finding another reviewer.
Re: Sci Hub repository torrents of scientific papers
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s dozens of millions of articles total, not thousands.
wow. I didn't know there were a grand total of dozens of millions of journal articles published total worldwide. My guess would have been hundreds of thousands at most. These are journal articles, not high school book reports, right? I'm astounded at the number you quote. For example there are about 10,000 papers submitted per month to all of arxiv[1] - which is a huge number. That totals 132k per year or so. For the…
arXiv only handles a small corner of scientific publications, so 0.83% doesn't sound out of whack. Most folks in biology or chemistry aren't on there, for example.
A Nature study from 2014 (http://blogs.nature.com/news/2014/05/global-scientific-outpu...) pegs the number of papers published between 1980 and 2012, with at least one citation, at 38 million. So, 69 million publications including uncited ones and ones from outside this time range actually sounds like an underestimate - that is, the 69 million paper archive is probably missing a fair number of articles.