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

Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 391 posts

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#271

Post by qiqitori »

mkl wrote: post #245
twobitshifter wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there a torrent available? I thought I had heard that scihub is immortal because of torrented copies.

Only the existing bits. New publications wouldn't be included, so eventually the archive would become less relevant and stop being shared. There's significant cost for the required storage (currently 77TB according to andyxor's comment).

77TB (or 104 TB) sounds expensive, but many people reading this could buy that kind of storage with just one month's salary. (SeaGate IronWolf Pro 16 TB, currently $521 on Amazon)

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#272

Post by captn3m0 »

miguelmurca wrote: post #74
voldacar wrote: post #70

Seriously, why would you make your awesome website less useful for everyone because a court in India wants you to do something? Are you Indian? Does the Indian government have some kind of authority over you? Are you combing through the laws of India to make sure you are complying with all of them? When you're operating this kind of site, why even bother acknowledging the existence of Indian courts, or any court that…

Read the article! > The latest lawsuit, filed in India by three academic publishers, including Elsevier, asks the High Court of Delhi to block access to Sci-Hub throughout the country. While the case is pending, the court has instructed Sci-Hub to stop uploading papers to its database. The order is not unusual; what’s surprising is that Elbakyan has complied. She has a history of ignoring legal rulings, and the India…

Of specific note is this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#273

Post by jacobolus »

lmm wrote: post #267
jacobolus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true for most universities around the world. Only wealthy ones in first-world countries. All of my father’s academic colleagues in Mexico use Sci-Hub daily, and rely on it for access to literature. But beyond that, there are paywalled journals which Harvard does not subscribe to. There are journals which the University of California does not subscribe to. (Or pick your favorite university, and there will…

Are the people whose work will be disrupted people who the top-tier scientific community care about? As a working programmer I'd like to have access to scientific papers, but realistically no researcher is going to care whether I do. If the pain isn't being felt by top-tier researchers and top-tier universities, I doubt anyone will be able to change it.

> no researcher is going to care whether I [read their papers]

Researchers absolutely want people to read and use their work! That’s why they do it! Having some practical impact on people making things in industry is super gratifying to the researchers I know, much more than just having the same tiny circle of known collaborators read and cite each-other’s papers in theoretical or small-scale academic prototype work.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#274

Post by wolverine876 »

crumbshot wrote: post #137
martin1975 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

free is a flawed concept - energy and time went into publishing each paper meaning someone paid. If the authors want to give permission, then she ought to seek it for each paper she's put on her website or seek permission from whomever owns the copyright. Otherwise it's theft. And no amount of civil disobedience can justify theft.

It's copying, not theft. The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.

> It's copying, not theft.

> The latter deprives someone of an item ...

It's depriving people of money, which is not a trivial asset.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#275

Post by kzrdude »

ajb wrote: post #30

Given how beneficial sci-hub is, there ought to be some way that the scientific community can formally recognise this, as a way of legitimizing her cause. Some ways I can think of: * Get her elected as rector of a university. Contraversial figures are sometimes elected as Rector, at least in the UK, because students are the electorate. However for the same reason this isn't considered especially prestigious by people…

Honorary doctorate, maybe?

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#276

Post by freshhawk »

lmm wrote: post #267
jacobolus wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true for most universities around the world. Only wealthy ones in first-world countries. All of my father’s academic colleagues in Mexico use Sci-Hub daily, and rely on it for access to literature. But beyond that, there are paywalled journals which Harvard does not subscribe to. There are journals which the University of California does not subscribe to. (Or pick your favorite university, and there will…

Are the people whose work will be disrupted people who the top-tier scientific community care about? As a working programmer I'd like to have access to scientific papers, but realistically no researcher is going to care whether I do. If the pain isn't being felt by top-tier researchers and top-tier universities, I doubt anyone will be able to change it.

Yes. It includes many members of the top-tier scientific community.

For many of them, the reason we get the benefits of these top-tier people is because of sci-hub.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#277

Post by pjerem »

wolverine876 wrote: post #268
andyxor wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85M articles (77TB) http://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/ index for all the papers in these torrents (SQL db): https://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz also see https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...

But are they searchable, by users with little technical ability? Will they be updated with new papers if Sci-Hub shuts down?

Nope, but at least, they aren’t lost. They are just there, ready to be made available by the potential successor of Sci-Hub. That’s what matters.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#280

Post by danohuiginn »

ajb wrote: post #30

Given how beneficial sci-hub is, there ought to be some way that the scientific community can formally recognise this, as a way of legitimizing her cause. Some ways I can think of: * Get her elected as rector of a university. Contraversial figures are sometimes elected as Rector, at least in the UK, because students are the electorate. However for the same reason this isn't considered especially prestigious by people…

Book prefaces commonly acknowledge the libraries where the author has done research; sci-hub deserves to go there if they have been using it.

It's a shame Elbakyan hasn't written a paper about sci-hub that people can cite. Many software packages do that, to give academics an obvious way to cite them.

On nominations: the Nobel nomination process is very open (iirc, any relevant professor can make a nomination). For that reason it is also largely meaningless, but that doesn't stop many people boasting about it, and chunks of the media enabling them. So this is leaning a long way towards fake news, but is also something a single person could do.

Post reply on HN