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You might be right, although it's worth considering that the bandwidth required for sharing scientific papers is orders of magnitude less than that needed for audio or video.

It's not there yet, but you can chime in and contribute (I'd appreciate code reviews, pull requests and so on...)

Have a look at https://github.com/ecausarano/heron and let me know :)

The issue is that unlike music, the market for research papers isn't anywhere nearly as widespread, so average people don't have any incentive to seed research papers, whereas they do have an incentive to share blockbuster movies and music albums.

What incentive do people have to share?

"I'll get kicked off the private tracker with all the good stuff if my seed ratio drops too low."

I don't think the average person would be using a private tracker.