> “It was really disgusting to read they ask me to accept their EFF Pioneer award ‘on behalf of Sci-Hub’,” Elbakyan said in response two weeks before the awards were officially announced.
> “Why did not they want to give the award to me directly? Sci-Hub is my sole creation; it is not an organization and never had any team. In 1998 they awarded Torvalds, not Linux,” she added.
Definitely understandable, especially considering that the DOJ/FBI were investigating her directly.
Yeah, but this reason to hesitate (they didn't want to get in trouble for directly endorsing her) is the same reason why it was important to directly endorse her. I'm glad they made the right choice.
YSK : Scihub hasn't added any new papers since the trials began (2020) . If any one wants new papers there are alternatives such as the nexus project , there is a working bot on telegram that I use from time to time
No new papers since 2020? :( Maybe because of that I didn't find a paper I wanted to read.
How does the nexus project work? I dont use telgram and dont want to download an app or create an account for one paper. Is it possible to access the nexus project thru the web and just simple download from there instead? Or is there any other web sites like sci-hub on the web that have newer papers than 2020?
This doesn't seem to be true. A quick search on their home page shows a bunch of articles from 2021 and 2022. I caught a few 404s and messaged Alexandra, she says this is some bug and she'll look into this.
Even if Scihub will never add any new paper again, it will remain extremely useful, because it contains a large number of older papers that are very difficult to obtain from any other source.
For the new papers, a significant percentage can be found as preprints in arxiv or the like, or are published in open-access journals, so the difficulty in obtaining them is typically less than for older papers that are still important.
Moreover, even if I pay a non-negligible amount of money for the access at certain journals, I frequently prefer to search for their articles on Scihub, because I can get them so much faster, without wasting time with logins or with searching for articles in the wrong place, because they were published elsewhere.
She was so secretive for so long, it's crazy she's waving to us on that page. This interviewer flew to Kazakhstan to meet her and wasn't even sure she'd show up:
She probably lost any hope to live free and resigned herself to be forever hunted like a criminal by US administration and its international stooges. At least she's safe in Russia
Is this some of autonomic response? She is facing civil trial for violating copyright. The CIA isn't going to rendition her for that. And she has no intention of leaving Kazakhstan. She comes across as being mildly autistic and acts completely unconcerned with legal issues.
Aaron Swartz died of "civil trial for violating copyright". Not so sure about CIA rendition, but "sovereign"* countries would extradite her to obey the Empire.
Since 2017 she's pursuing her research in Russian universities (although she maybe partially doing it remotely)
https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra
Aaron didn't just violate copyright, he personally exfiltrated the documents that he was hosting without permission. He was on the hook for criminal hacking charges while also suicidally depressed. It was tragic, but not the same thing.
This URL won't load for me, anything specific about it? I simply get secure connection failed, authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
I work for a Uni and remember back in the day compromised accounts ripping publisher content via our proxy. Enough that we wound up removing the proxy and forcing internal access.
A lot of the reason that Sci-Hub content has stalled in more recent users is security around accounts (MFA, SAML etc).
The reason there is still a lot of warnings floating around about using Sci-Hub is the threat that publishers hold over Unis in terms of licensing and the users understanding the threat to their accounts/personal data.
The method of getting the papers was bad, even if the reasoning was good.
Copyrights and Patents were never intended for use by corporations.
How can I claim this?! When both copyrights and patents were invented the longest 'corporate charter' a company could hold was 6 months in total.
Patents and Copyrights were designed to aid fledgling businesses in America compete against the behemoth industrial machines of England, Spain, France, and Europe in general. Companies in those countries were expansionist and simply bought out any serious competition.
Our country's founders didn't want that system taking hold of American economics, so invented protections against such things occurring here.
Remove the copyrights and patents from ANY multinational corporation. If it's not an American-ONLY based company -where money isn't shipped wholesale overseas- then they can no longer enjoy patents or copyrights in America.
I think you and GP are agreeing. GP says that they want to return to that initial form of copyright because they do not agree with how World Police US is operating.
Isn’t it her own project? In that case, someone could easily just do their own version. What she built has lasted (so far) and has been helpful to countless academics and students.
My question though is how she’s being a selfish crackpot? Feels like the goal of Sci hub isn’t really selfish from my point of view.
Well the quote if this piece. Scihub is definetly not only her. All the people sharing access to research are what made it what it is. Her closing the access to all of russia because she got insulted over having a parasitic wasp named in her honor was petty and showed how brittle scihub is as a service.
Honestly, I think this is a bad idea in the long run. The EFF is the most vocal critic of DRM in the public sphere by far (the FSF barely registers).
Now the MPA and copyright holders can dismiss their testimony out of hand for being that group that gave an award to a copyright infringer. Not that the MPA or John Deere would’ve respected the EFF anyway, but I’m sure it’s going to be mentioned in future court cases as a way to discredit the arguments.
I care far more about the availability of scientific publications than about producers putting DRM on their own products.
The thing I'm against is the government telling me that I can't strip DRM. But I think it's everybody's right to wrap their creations in a puzzle; it's just cheating to get the cops to hit me with a stick if I try to solve that puzzle, or try to tell anyone else how to solve it.
The EFF endorses piracy? This is like the internet archive library giving unlimited access to books without authorization for "emergency access" during covid.
Generally, almost nobody cares about IP infringement, but in the case of academic papers it's even worse. Even the authors and the peer reviewers of the work don't care about it 99% of the time. They don't see a single cent from the publication that's charging you $1000 per month to access their work.
Scihub saves you from finding the email address of one of the authors and waiting for a reply for your request for a copy of the paper.
I'd be surprised and disappointed if a party like the EFF would be against free access to scientific knowledge. That includes educational books on the Internet Archive.
It's important to have both running in parallel. The more that Sci-Hub becomes normalized, the more people wonder why it's illegal in the first place. When you have a pirate site which the content creators themselves endorse and use, it really serves to highlight how broken the existing academic IP system is.
> It's possible to support and encourage free access to scientific knowledge while not supporting IP infringement.
Not even theoretically. IP is the concept that people should be prevented from reading things without negotiating with the people who own them. So "free access" quite obviously requires that future "scientific knowledge" be excluded from IP protection, and that people who already own "scientific knowledge" be compelled and/or bribed into relinquishing their ownership.
And to expand, those options would also require the government to define what is "scientific knowledge" and what is not. Or else, I could just call my paper a satire and Elsevier could become a publisher of satires.
I don't think so. You can support free access to knowledge through means other than IP infringement. For example, advocating for open access policies. Many publishers agreements allow authors to post a version of the same publication on their personal website. Making that process easier and indexing those results to make it easier to find freely available versions of published work is another way to encourage access.
It seems I did misunderstand. In that case, my answer would be that I think you can support both IP infringement and free and open access to scientific knowledge even if that is not my personal position.
I don’t think anyone would argue you can’t do both. But it does seem that people in this thread are arguing that you can further free and and open access knowledge more effectively by disregarding the potential copyright infringement. If someone feels that by disregarding the potential lawlessness, they are able to do more good overall, would you consider it unreasonable for that person to support a project like scihub?
I don’t think it’s “dictating morality” in so far as “seeing the big picture”. If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you? I mean I can understand self-preservation but what else? The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.
> If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you?
This is assuming that spreading knowledge as effectively as possible is the only goal. Even if you take a utilitarian approach to ethics, I doubt anyone has this as their only goal.
> The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.
I think what is and isn't related to morality is at least somewhat subjective.
Legality and ethics are often disjoint, and for many people Sci-Hub is pretty clearly a case where piracy is the ethical thing to do.
My personal opinion is this: tax dollars pay for a huge proportion of the research that is then reviewed by volunteers (whose pay also comes out of taxes) and then published in journals that charge insane prices to host a PDF of this taxpayer-funded research. Sci-Hub takes this publicly-funded research and makes it available to the public like it always should have been.
At least in the US, all government-funded research will be required to be freely available immediately starting in 2026. It's unclear what the overall impact will be. Certainly this access is a good thing, but it's unclear how publishers will respond.
It's possible authors might be forced to pay publishing fees for open access, which would then inflate grant budgets (since this only applies to government research, this means the taxpayer is footing the bill). They may choose to be open access by default, in which case, another source of revenue will be necessary. Part of the challenge is that for many academics, it's necessary for advancement to publish in prestigious venues which are not always open access.
I can't figure out why in 2023 running a journal costs very much money at all. The authors are paid by someone else, the peer reviewers are paid by someone else, and an online-only journal would be completely acceptable today. What other overhead do these publications have?
Limiting to online-only journals (which is already the case with many journals), there's still editors, administrative staff, and hosting costs. I'm sure many would argue (and I would agree) that this shouldn't require exorbitant sums of money.
However, some money is still required and I'm not sure where this would come from aside from funds collected from either authors or consumers (institutional or otherwise). I'm not saying the model we have is the only possible model, just that I don't think there's an obvious alternative that solves all the various aspects of the problem.
I’ve had colleagues who have published in high impact journals ask me to grab a copy of their own work from scihub since they couldn’t access it themselves. Of course, they have the manuscripts themselves but they just wanted the published format.
Endorsement is not the same as performance. I endorse peoples' right to use drugs or put obscene bumper stickers on their car. Doesn't mean I do the same.
I make all my research outputs publicly accessible wherever legally possible. Any of my published work that is behind a publisher paywall is also available for free and should be pretty easy to find. I personally disapprove of Sci-Hub's approach of piracy, but I can understand the utility. I also believe I'm likely in the minority here.
> “Why did not they want to give the award to me directly? Sci-Hub is my sole creation; it is not an organization and never had any team. In 1998 they awarded Torvalds, not Linux,” she added.
Definitely understandable, especially considering that the DOJ/FBI were investigating her directly.