Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Sci-Hub Is

whereisscihub.now.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 185 posts

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#91

Post by covertlibrarian »

As we can see by the fact the above URL is currently not working, there's a high risk associated with the centralized nature of sci-hub. It's already been the target of a major court case in the US and the only reason it's still running is because the site and it's founder (Alexandra Elbakyan) are outside of the court's jurisdiction. But there's still a chance it could disappear one day, and what sort of impact would that have on the productivity of researchers, many of which will be unable to access the articles they need?

If you have the disk space and bandwidth, I would strongly encourage you to participate in this torrent seeding effort: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...

The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.

For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those.

If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have.

As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...

As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#92

Post by matheusmoreira »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #59
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Funded information can be liberated. Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free. Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider…

> You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible". The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible". > Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonab…

> That is the whole point of copyright

Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished.

Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it no longer applies. It's obviously incompatible with free computing as we know it today. In order for copyright to be enforceable, computers that run unauthorized software must be made illegal. Otherwise, people will always be able to copy whatever data they want and there's little anyone can do about it.

Part of the social contract behind copyright is giving the public free access to the works of humanity after the protection expires. It's clear now that the copyright industry has no intention of ever letting these protections ever expire. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when the copyright holders refuse to keep up their end of the deal.

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#93

Post by rapnie »

dragonsh wrote: post #18

I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. Research papers through sci-hub only helps to make knowledge easily accessible. Humanity's progress depends on people who shared their knowledge, not by people who use it as a tool to rule and hold on to power. It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity…

There is also science-fair, which is based on Dat. I don't know about its status.

http://sciencefair-app.com/

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#94

Post by 3xblah »

"Where Sci-Hub Is"

Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required to access it.

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#96

Post by unityByFreedom »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #89
unityByFreedom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author. You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.

> The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author. Food is finite. When you buy material goods, you subtract from the seller's supply of goods and add to your own. It's impossible to create new goods out of nothing. Since there isn't enough for everyone, an economy naturally arises. Information is infinite. Copying and transmitting data is not only trivi…

> Information is infinite

Published material is not infinite, nor is an author's time.

Information is infinite if you definite it to mean all information, but that is not the context here. The context here is published work.

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#97

Post by r-w »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #64
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense. You're just misreading what they said. They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom. Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what…

Please don't reply to every one of my comments with the same points, you are spamming.

This is the equivalent of “If you want this conversation to end, why don’t YOU stop talking?” You already know the solution to the problem you’re having, which is to either make better points or stop inviting more replies.

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#98

Post by unityByFreedom »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #92
unityByFreedom wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty. Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible". The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible". > Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonab…

> That is the whole point of copyright Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished. Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it…

[flagged]

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#99

Post by matsemann »

boshomi wrote: post #68

webarchive URL (orignal shows http 451): http://web.archive.org/web/20200225000142/https://whereissci...

> HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

So not exactly useful if this one is blocked, heh.

Or is it some joke going over my head?

Re: Where Sci-Hub Is

#100

Post by dionyziz »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #43
dragonsh wrote: post #18

I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. Research papers through sci-hub only helps to make knowledge easily accessible. Humanity's progress depends on people who shared their knowledge, not by people who use it as a tool to rule and hold on to power. It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity…

> I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible. I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense. It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.

I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.
Post reply on HN