How might we help her?
Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
11–20 of 391 posts
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#12Ms. Elbakyan attacked me rather hysterically on Twitter when she learned of an article¹ on my site that describes several methods to acquire free copies of scientific articles, including Sci-Hub. I tried to get her to tell me why she thought it was terrible of me to mention any non-Sci-Hub pathways, but her replies made less sense with each iteration. So I think that Sci-Hub has been a valuable resource, but I have concerns about its stability.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#13> The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France.
I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#14How might we help her?
Legal gofundme.
Congress people or local representatives.
Talk about it.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#15> The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development.
Scientists should put Scihub in the acknowledgements section of their papers. As in "this research would not have been possible without Scihub".
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#16> The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development.
Publishing papers in journals isn't about scientific development, it's about publish-persish. The issue is the journals suck-in the papers and then walled-garden them like they were their original research when they are simply the publisher.
Academia needs to throw away for-profit journal publishers and leave it with social co-ops and nonprofits.
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#17The article is blocked behind a subscription prompt for me, but it's implemented in a silly way that's trivially by-passable. It's just some js code that checks if you've scrolled past a limit and scrolls you back to the top if so. Anything that removes js from the content defeats it, including Firefox's built-in Reader View.
most paywalls are bypassed with * {overflow: auto; position: relative; }
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#18> The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development.
Scientists should put Scihub in the acknowledgements section of their papers. As in "this research would not have been possible without Scihub".
That is a genius hack. ("Genius" might be redundant.)
Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#19Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?
#20> The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. In Austria the providers do block it, but it's still reachable via the *.st TLD. Not sure if that's an official sci-hub page or not, but it works.
It is blocked in the UK, but only using the usual 'good enough' quasi-voluntary measures that cover the bigger ISPs. It's accessible through my more hacker-friendly home broadband. Hilariously, it's also available through JANET, the British universities' networking system. So essentially every student and researcher in the country has access from work...
The bigger question is: Why promote or condone the gating of view access to published research at all? It's not okay.