21–30 of 92 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We went through this with MP3, record industry claimed every download was costing them money, that is was the end of the world as we know it, they would wither and die without copyright protection, while at the same time, more people were listening to more music, and look where we are now...
Didn't iTunes store used to be DRM free? (I never actually had any apple device so I'm not sure)
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...
All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library genesis project and made available as torrents. Currently there are just over 80 million articles included in these torrents. The total size of the archive is around 70TB. The link above also refers to the library genesis books collection, which is 33TB.
This effort has seen tremendous interest in recent weeks; the books collection (libgen) is now widely replicated, but around a third of the scimag articles collection (i.e. those from sci-hub) has only 1-2 reliable seeders and needs more before it can be considered safely backed up. If you have the resources available, I would encourage you to consider assisting. Previous discussion of this project is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222
Looking forward, the next step is to find a suitable way of providing accessible, truly decentralized access, without relying on a single point of failure (i.e. a web interface). Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism, but there are many ways this could be done. This is a challenging but important problem to solve; with the data available, there is now an opportunity for developers to address the access issues. There may come a day when the sci-hub website goes offline, and it would be good if a fallback is already in place at that point.
Aaron Swartz may no longer be with us, but his spirit lives on. It's now up to us to carry on the fight for which he paid so dearly.
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked). Publishers don't…
Using Sci-Hub is still faster and easier than logging into the university VPN or web proxy (which breaks HTTPS sites).
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It's hard to imagine how a legal service could be better than Sci-hub. You could make it as good as sci-hub, but how could you make it easier than "paste DOI -> PDF is downloaded" ? Steam beats video game piracy because video game piracy requires shit like having a torrent client or having a friend who has a copy already. Video game piracy was never as easy as sci-hub.
Just make it _as good_. Add legitimacy at the same level of convenience and you win.
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked). Publishers don't…
The current business model of publishers is predatory and harms science more than it helps, but I see self publishing and private open source initiatives as equally problematic. The definitive long-term solution, in my view, is a centralized public repository, like the Library of Congress. Call it the Federal Scientific Repository or the National Research Papers Database. It would be funded by Congress, or the LoC, a…
Without a Sci-Hub-like option, the political pressure on government (and likely: university) archives to not provide free-to-the-public services will likely continue. Only the continued persistence of a truly free option, in flagrant violation of an unjust and immoral legal environment, can break down that wall.
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I don't use sci-hub, but the framing "Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads" presumes something: it presumes that without sci-hub, ASA journals would have thousands of more downloads. This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist. As I don't use it I can't…
>This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist. There was that study in EU that said piracy actually helped the game industry. There is also what the author was commenting, sci-hub is easier to use than the legal alternative. We go tour researchers stuck in bureaucracies, t…
Those aren't lost sales. Nobody sane would pay $40 or so for a 20 pages paper. Even if Scihub didn't exist. Publishers know nobody pays that. There are other options free for academic, such as subscriptions universities pay for or inter-library loans. Non-academic clients may try asking somebody who has a subscription access for a given paper (I know I did provide paper PDFs a few times when asked). Publishers don't…
The current business model of publishers is predatory and harms science more than it helps, but I see self publishing and private open source initiatives as equally problematic. The definitive long-term solution, in my view, is a centralized public repository, like the Library of Congress. Call it the Federal Scientific Repository or the National Research Papers Database. It would be funded by Congress, or the LoC, a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just make it _as good_. Add legitimacy at the same level of convenience and you win.
I'd pay $10 a month if addition to pasting a doi -> pdf, that I could also search backward and forward along citations. I'd love to be able to download a paper and everything it references.