Scientific research piracy site hit with $15M fine | Hacker News Reader

Scientific research piracy site hit with $15M fine

arstechnica.com

191 pointsmantesso51 comments

I cannot say how useful Alexandra's work has been for me. Apart from the fact that subscription prices to scientific journals have increased significantly in the last years, in the same period Italy has severely cut research funding. As a result, my department's library has had to cut a number of subscriptions to journals that are very important in my field. (The funny part is that since a few years the Italian government is evaluating universities according to the number of articles published by the staff, their citation count, and the prestige of the journal where these articles have been published...).

Without SciHub, my research and my work would have been made much more difficult. Thank you, Alexandra!

Why Elsevier would feel entitled to the copyright of publicly funded research is beyond anyone's guess.

This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of failure, and if it gets closed, there won't be anything else to replace it. Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows, research paper sites aren't something that the average Internet users care about.

Does sci hub offer a dump of all there papers on a torrent site?

Not that I know of but that would be logical.

Library Genesis is a caching backend for scihub. Scihub is a number of proxies, but already downloaded articles are not going anywhere in case of takedown.

Libgen offers torrent and usenet downloads.

The best way to help is by joining https://genofond.org/viewtopic.php?p=9000/ and working on mirrors, software and all kinds of related projects. Donations are great, but decentralization can't happen if no new members are joining the librarian community.

See "14. How do I upload papers to the Scientific Article section? Is it possible at all?" on how to upload articles you downloaded via scihub to libgen.

I get a cert revoked error when visiting that site in Chrome 58.0.3029.110 (64-bit)

It is signed by WoSign. Firefox is ok with it for now, but StartCom and WoSign are going to be removed eventually in favor of Let's Encrypt.

See https://security.googleblog.com/2016/10/distrusting-wosign-a...

Not removed in favour of Let's Encrypt, removed for them not being good CA's - but it doesn't `matter` because we now have Let's Encrypt

They probably feel entitled to that US copyright because the entire US system of laws around intellectual property have been manipulated to be strictly of benefit to large corporations and is thus only accidentally of benefit to others (such as authors, taxpayers who funded research). US voters are apparently OK with this, and businesses like Elsevier put a great deal of effort into protecting, extending and exploiting the result.

>US voters are apparently OK with this

US voters are impotent. Millions are about to be kicked off Medicare and Medicaid because of the signature of a man who repeatedly pledged over and over again that he would not ever cut them. Politics has become a metagame of tribal signaling with only a tenuous connection to actual policy.

> US voters are impotent. Millions are about to be kicked off Medicare and Medicaid because of the signature of a man who repeatedly pledged over and over again that he would not ever cut them. Politics has become a metagame of tribal signaling with only a tenuous connection to actual policy.

Voters are ignorant, not impotent.

They just don't care enough to stay informed with their other life responsibilities and/or pleasures. The dangers of slow strangulation in the form of bills like Republicare is something they simply don't care enough to track. It'll be fully felt around 2021-2022 and by the time people realize its a problem the Republicans will have control of the government for 6-8 years.

If people genuinely cared the prescription is still rather simple:

A) Organize voting blocs to end careers on the issue of gerrymandering to prevent statehouse control == Congress control.

B) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who lowers services below Obama-era levels.

C) Organize voting blocs to end the careers of anyone who violates Constitutional liberties.

I don't think reasonable people really want people in power who are willing to do those things, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Look at who's on the ticket. Look at their record. Look at their campaign funding. If you can convince yourself that voters have any real choice, then I admire your optimism.

> Look at who's on the ticket. Look at their record. Look at their campaign funding. If you can convince yourself that voters have any real choice, then I admire your optimism.

At the end of the day, grass roots change is possible if people are willing. The problem is, they just aren't right now because things seem to be "OK" and so they care more about tribal signaling.

If I genuinely thought it was hopeless, I'd seriously consider abandoning the US and living out my life elsewhere.

To bastardize Churchill (or whoever he was quoting), it's a horrible system, and it'd be the worst except for all the other governments I could move to.

Good God no.

Americans are the test bed for modern media and political manipulation strategies. What you guys invented are being exported around the world.

Stop putting your political compatriots down, and please read your political history with some empathy.

Post the cold war, the triumph of rationalism seemed to be entirely in reach. "religion is the opiate of the masses" was a common enough refrain, and we seemed to be on the verge of beating out all sorts of old superstitions and ideologies.

And then came the combination of mass media, evangelicism, and politics.

Over time people saw that the media allowed religious folk to reach out to target markets which were hitherto blocked from their reach, by the structural systems, checks and balances imposed by the strictures inherited from the Enlightenment.

With the revelations pouring in from psychology, and the significant improvements in advertising and marketing techniques, it became possible to target, poll, and build markets.

Startups use these tools today, and all the time. Theres no reason that the psychology for marketing an app should somehow prevent the marketing of a regressive, progressive, or authoritarian idea.

Details aside - the creation of that system worked as a proof of concept.

Now people around the world realized that with a tv station, and the right kind of messaging, you too could beat back science and facts. You just needed to work on the right message.

Of course there were road blocks, but eventually America was able to create a strong conservative movement, and finally Fox news. "a place for the persecuted majority".

You can trace all your problems to this arrow, this realization that you could mass produce emotional agreement, curtail information, using TV and now social media.

That's fair. To be honest, if I lived in a country where police officers had a habit of being filmed murdering law-abiding citizens with impunity, cleaning up IP law wouldn't be real high on my to do list. I think we'll need to look to the EU to see any real movement on fixing this. If OA Journals become de rigeur there, we'll see similar shifts in North America.

If you have a few petabytes of disk handy, you can in fact torrent the lot.

http://libgen.io/repository_torrent/ http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/

Actually, for the torrents on the first link you just need 20.8 TiB. For the ones on the second link you need 49.6 TiB.

Buying a bunch of disk space isn't impossible. What I don't have is unlimited downloads.

Buy VPS hosting in a place with sane ISPs and unlimited data, then torrent at a responsible rate of like 1MB/s, max ~50 connections. It will take about 694 days to torrent the 60TB at that rate. If you can afford to pay for better bandwidth, say 10MB/s sustained 24/7, it will take only 2-3 months. BitTorrent being what it is, if enough of us torrent it, we should have all chunks between us much sooner than the estimated 2 years, so even when SciHub goes down, we'll be able to piece everything together.

It seems cloneable, scihub is backed by libgen which receives every proxied document and serve them as torrents (with stable availability). Also the files db is public. It's a bit large in total, something like 20TB for all files, 200MB db dump.

Still the sci hub proxy is indeed a single point of failure, but people could mirror the already stored part. I'd do it if I had a team.

Are the files categorized? While I can't mirror the whole thing, I'm more than willing to archive the categories that are relevant to my interests.

I think the single point of failure issue can be easily remedied if people could easily back specific parts of libgen/scihub.

I don't remember the db schema but it's highly possible there were domains/categories. I remember publisher/editor (which could be a nice filter).

There was a great post by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx about why the ruling class of the United States views copyright the way they do:

Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514611

A lot of academics I know point people to sci-hub!

For example, the American Psychological Association has been issuing take-down requests to academics who distribute final article PDFs on their sites. As a result, there's been a fair amount of activity on twitter telling people that they can get them there.

Why not just post the finalized version of the manuscript instead of the journal's typeset version? It's the same content, and most journals seem to be ok with this practice -- are preprint versions against APA's copyright policy in some way?

Preprints are fine to post, and that's definitely what some people are pushing for. There's a good article on how some psychologists have responded here: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49670/....

Because of sci-hub, scientists such as myself no longer need anything more than food, an internet connection and some shelter to do first class theoretical work. It cannot be emphasized enough how much of a boon this is for scientists who don't have good journal access, which is the majority of scientists.

In creating it, Elbakyan has probably done far more for humanity than Musk will do in his life, and I am a massive fan of Musk. If it goes down, it will be a tragedy for our species.

The 2nd time in a week I need the wisdom of Pravin Lal in a thread about free information?

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

Who or what is Pravin Lal?

A fictional character in a 1999 sci-fi strategy game Alpha Centauri. It has some quite memorable quotes about technology and society.

Time for you to enter the punishment sphere, citizen!

What the academic publishing industry calls "theft", the world calls "research".

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...

Thank you, Alexandra, for your library.

The second great library of Alexandr(i)a.

Her name is most apt.

I'm hoping it doesn't burn.

Reminds me of:

Sci-Hub As Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience

http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effect...

Nice. Submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14632603

The web site is being hostile by thrusting this message upon me: "Your browser is blocking some features of this website. Please follow the instructions at [...] to unblock these."

Does the author not believe in the civil disobedience of ad-blocking?

Looks like this comes from a wordpress plugin (The Champ), I don't think the author knows that blocking JavaScript triggers this

Another reminder to donate. Thanks, Alexandra!

If history tells us anything another Sci-Hub or more powerful reiteration will surface and will eventually "win." You can't contain ideas.

How many people used sci hub to this day ? how many donated ?

150K persons donating 10$ (even though the fine basis is debatable)..

...is $1.5M.

Maybe we were a million users ?

Elsevier is from the Netherlands, not the USA.

This is the kind of thing that should be massively mirrored in onion links.

It is.

I think that you can download the 10s of terabytes using the torrent files found here: http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/

Elsevier is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

I had access through my job and through university to Elsevier and other paywalled repositories.

I avoid papers found in "ScienceDirect", not because of some moral position, but I found often that their abstract does no seem so useful for me. Oftentime there are lot of jargon and it is hard to figure out what is new and what take home points there are. The reader may get the impression that they try hard to oversell their stuff.

I even prefer some free publishers who have a much lower reputation like Indawi.

I have a different but still related problem with IEEE: On every subject it seems there are tons of papers, so it is difficult to appreciate the relative value of each paper.

I have no problem with Nature and some other paywalled publishers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com