New Sci-Hub domain
sci-hub.ac
sci-hub.ac
You're probably better off installing the alternative in the Chrome web store (search sci-hub)[0]
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sci-hub-links/olcg...
And yes, it seems old domains are still working.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scihubs/jamkadfgfk...
But yeah back up domains are useful, I guess.
https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=%22sci-hub.ac%22%20site%3Ayco...
BTW, how does one distinguish a 'real' sci-hub domain from a spoof?
Choosing imagery for an audience like that could be a challenge.
Because it works. It delivers information and knowledge to those who need it.
Because information and knowledge are public goods. As CUNY/GC says, an "increasingly unpopular idea",1,2 but an absolutely correct one.
Because it democratises information.
Because much the world cannot afford to pay US/EU/JP/AU prices for content. Including many of those in the US/EU/JP/AU. And most certainly virtually all outside. Billions and billions of people.
Because the research is (often) publicly funded, conducted in public institutions, and meant for the public.
Because information and markets simply don't work. Deadweight losses from restricted access and perverse incentives for publication both taint the system.
Because much the content, EVERYTHING published before 1962, would have been public domain under the copyright law in force at the time, and much up through 1976 and the retrospective extensions of copyright it, and multiple subsequent copyright acts, have created.
Because 30% profit margins are excessive by any measure. Greed, in this case, is not good.
Because the interfaces to existing systems, a patchwork fragment of poorly administered, poorly designed, limited-access, and all partial systems are frankly far more tedious to navigate than Sci-Hub: Submit DOI or URL, get paper.
Because unaffiliated independent research is a thing.
Because the old regime is absolutely unsustainable. It will die. It is dying as we write this.
Because the roles of financing research and publication need not parallel the activity of accessing content. Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (1937, ), a paper which should be public domain today under the law in which it was created and published, and should have been by 1991 at the latest, but isn't, tells us why: transactions themselves have costs.
Because journals no longer serve a primary role as publishers of academic material, but as gatekeepers over academic professional advancement. This perpetrates multiple pathologies: papers don't advance knowledge, academics are blackmailed into the system, and access to knowledge is curtailed
Because what the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research".
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...
I use Sci-Hub extensively, it's one of a few of my go-to sources for information, which I'm using in large amounts (1000s of articles and books) for an area of large and broad scope.
Others includie BookZZ / Book4You and LibGen, both also democratising information in opposition to the copyright cartel.
The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and a number of largely special-purpose archives also serve my needs, but the simple truth is that a large and comprehensive archive is itself useful on account of reducing search and access frictions. As the US Library of Congress discovered when it became the largest book collection in the United States in the early 20th century, and hence a magnet for scholars. It might not have everything, but odds were good that it had any particular thing. Shoe-leather costs being somewhat higher for trekking between Cambridge, MA and DC in those days than navigating through websites is today.
What's truly pathetic is that oftentimes its the indices themselves which aren't online. I've been stymied repeatedly in trying to access old periodicals because there are no generally available indexes that don't require academic affiliation or on-site access.
The frustration de jour is in trying to find access to several works published between 1920 and the 2nd century AD, all out of copyright, but for which there appear to be no digital copies available.
Programmers are familiar with various charts of timings that they should be familar with. My own lookup time has just bumped from 2 minutes to 2-4 weeks, and that clock starting when I reach the ILL desk.
And since the question "but how will you pay for it" inevitably arises: Universal Content Syndication.
Treat information as the public good it is.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
However, academics do sometimes sell books. It is actually much closer to theft to download an academic book than an article because the money does go to the author.
The arguments for deadweight loss and equal access apply particularly to books.
Libgen also redirects you to sci-hub.bz if you search scientific article it doesn't have.
They collaborate, but different people are behind these projects.
For some reason, domains and TLDs seem to get shot out from under Sci-Hub periodically. I cannot possibly begin to imagine why.
The same reason why we encrypt traffic using TLS, even if it's "mundane" traffic like tweets.
Targeted attacks might be possible based on the file contents or using a side-channel to ID the downloader; meaning only specific targeted users would get the malicious files.
Either way, being able to hold Sci-Hub accountable as this source would be important.
How can you exclude that case that Alice does care where she gets the paper from, but she simply cannot afford it from the original source?
Or how can you exclude the possibility that Alice wants a version of the paper that does not embed a watermark that makes her or at least the setting (e.g. university, IP address) that she downloaded the paper from identifiable. I can witness myself that Elsevier embeds such information into paper downloads.
Click around the header, you can find a link to sci-hub.cc
Chrome gets through.
Source: I review papers (pretty irregularly) on Elsevier journals and my supervisor was/is editor of such journal.
Since the papers not being reviewed would include our own papers, that'll never work. Plus Prisoner's dilemma (or whatever theory I'm thinking of). Plus, they could be criticized for effectively "blocking cancer research" etc.
But still, it'd be nice to see what would happen.
Most journals nowadays do not even do basic linguistic editing but instead let the authors choose highly expensive services for it. They expect you to deliver a camera-ready copy based on their LaTeX or Word templates and then send it to final copy editing to India. (Source: My own experience with very nice and professional Indian copy-editors, and I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with sending articles to India for copy-editing, of course.)
So you got lucky, I know of people who had quite the opposite experience with India.
> and I would like to stress that there is nothing wrong with sending articles to India for copy-editing, of course.
Except for justifying ridiculous prices.
You're right that academia is full of perverse incentives that need to change, but it's not clear how we get from where we are now to the end of "publish-or-perish". There's a need for large-scale coordination and construction of alternatives with the support of funding agencies. Suggestions beyond "individuals will sacrifice their own career standing for the greater good" are what we need to gain the strength of those individuals who are not in the most idealistic portion of the research community.
This is a stop-gap that attenuates the problem until people discover some way of getting the actual solution.
The people with the money need to put their money where the public interest's mouth is. Certainly not where Elsevier's mouth is.
The biggest example has to do with the NIH "indirect rate". The system, incredibly, is set up so that the larger a proportion of an institute's funding comes from NIH, the more money per grant goes to the institution. "Indirect" refers to the fact that each grant comes with "direct costs" that go to the scientist and "indirect costs" that goes to the institute, and the "indirect rate" determines the amount, expressed as a percentage of grant direct costs, that goes to the institute. This dumb system results in institutes discouraging their own investigators from applying for non-NIH grants.
At my institute if you take a non-NIH grant you have to actually "pay back the difference" in lost funding for the institute that is caused by non-NIH grants lowering the institute's indirect rate.
The research must become more open, better reviewed, etc. But we can't just stop submitting our work.
I mean are you ready to decrease an impact of your discovery and opportunities for future work, just to make a statement?