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Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

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Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#21

Post by aw3c2 »

d33 wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ipfs.io/

Yeah, the thing is that SciHub controls the information now and it's up to them how they secure against failure they are. All in all, if we were to adopt IPFS, who would download all the terabytes of papers? Who and how would index them?

If they used ipfs as backend, everyone could sync and serve whatever parts they deem important. At least if I understand it correctly. ipfs is way too complicated for me.

I would much prefer an anonymous network anyways.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#22

Post by aw3c2 »

d33 wrote: post #3

One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single point of failure then. Right no…

It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help.

You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#23

Post by tschuy »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #5

The one thing I've not seen mentioned yet in the Sci-Hub discussions is that the national level academic ISPs seem to have put a very effective domain and IP address block on SciHub. I've tested this both from UK and Scandinavian university networks I have access to, and none of the SciHub domains nor the direct IPs are accessible. Can anyone in the US or rest of Europe with university access test this? It's certainl…

Not blocked here in France.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#24

Post by Blahah »

Loic wrote: post #18
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #5

The one thing I've not seen mentioned yet in the Sci-Hub discussions is that the national level academic ISPs seem to have put a very effective domain and IP address block on SciHub. I've tested this both from UK and Scandinavian university networks I have access to, and none of the SciHub domains nor the direct IPs are accessible. Can anyone in the US or rest of Europe with university access test this? It's certainl…

DTU (Chemical Engineering) has not blocked the access to http://sci-hub.cc . Maybe you can check if you can resolve the domain with an open DNS server like 8.8.8.8 from Google and then access it from your university network.

http://sci-hub.cc/ works in the UK

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#25

Post by semi-extrinsic »

Blahah wrote: post #24
Loic wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DTU (Chemical Engineering) has not blocked the access to http://sci-hub.cc . Maybe you can check if you can resolve the domain with an open DNS server like 8.8.8.8 from Google and then access it from your university network.

http://sci-hub.cc/ works in the UK

This is from Cambridge? Eduroam or uni ethernet?

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#26

Post by petra »

aw3c2 wrote: post #22
d33 wrote: post #3

One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single point of failure then. Right no…

It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#27

Post by aninhumer »

petra wrote: post #26
aw3c2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.

Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#28

Post by margotic »

andrewfromx wrote: post #4

even Lars Ulrich regrets the side he took in 1999 "I wish that I was more...you know, I felt kind of ambushed by the whole thing because I didn't really know enough about what we were getting ourselves into when we jumped. [...] We didn't know enough about the kind of grassroots thing, and what had been going on the last couple of months in the country as this whole new phenomenon was going on. We were just so stuck…

I think you're misreading that, particularly since he also said: "In retrospect, I'm proud of what we did, I really felt sideswiped on that one."

That, plus the end of your quote, makes it pretty clear that he is PROUD to have sued Napster and been shitty to every pirate.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#29

Post by rmchugh »

Comparing sci hub to napster is a bit misleading. Elseviers customers are not individual scientists, they're university libraries who pay huge sums to get massive bundles of journal licenses. I have an extremely hard time imagining university libraries cancelling their deals with Elsevier and instead telling their users to check SciHub. What it might result in is slowed growth as new customers feel less pressure from their users to purchase licenses as those users can already access the articles. So, a problem for Elsevier, but very unlikely to be its death knell or a cause for it to change its business model.
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