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Comment by hycaria | Hacker News Reader

Here's an amusing anecdote that happened in my own veterinary school a few years ago.

An exchange student from south america came and used our (european and valid) school licence to mass-download veterinary papers (not sure if it was for use in his school or for piracy, the story doesn't tell). Our school also got IP-banned by publishers, even though they pay the rights to access them.

This is really crazy, I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.

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When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could get IP-banned. I'd read pretty much every published paper relating to a small subfield of Physics at this point, but still no more than 50 papers in all.

I think I just laughed it off and said I'd got no plans to scrape journals. I always thought it was a bit of institutional folklore and that maybe there had been threatening letters or something. I didn't realise they actually do go ahead with the IP-banning.

Yep, they do ! We actually learned about it in the same context "don't download too many papers, you can get us banned".

This is quite common. The publisher's terms and conditions or site license contract probably includes language asserting a right to cut off access for "excessive" (however they define that) or software-mediated downloading. They may require the school to identify and block the offending user before restoring access.

> I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.

whoa - all scientific publishers or just closed-access ones?

I read that as "downfall of scientific publishers [who are causing this kind of trouble]".

Still, would it be so bad?

The original purpose for html and www was to improve sharing of science papers. I can pretty easily imagine what the world would have to look like for all science papers to be self published and shared globally.

One possible alternative that seems easily viable would be to replace the network of independent publishers with a MediaWiki site that only allows posts from scientists. That could possibly also have a bot running around marking all articles with a peer review status. Talk pages would also make a great place to conduct such peer reviews.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more it seems like this could be a good open-source project.

The idea would be to translate everything on Sci-Hub from PDF to MediaWiki and convert all of the references to links. That could be tough, probably loaded with edge cases. If it works though, not only would Sci-Hub be hosting all the papers but this site could make them all easy to find/navigate. Seems like it'd be super fun to go spelunking through a network of related science papers in a similar way to diving Wikipedia.

As an open-source project, it would also be possible for anyone to re-host the site in case it gets blocked.

Yea, it would last about as long as a DMCA notice would be filed against you.

So don't distribute the actual papers? Even a complete citation graph with basic info (title, authors, abstract, doi) and a link to the publisher's canonical version would be a very useful tool.

Are there torrents or similar available of SciHub's collection?

The problem of replacing publishers isn't the CMS. It's the established review processes, the institutional knowledge and contacts, and the paid editors. Plus the self-perpetuing value of brands such as Nature and Science.

So incorporate public peer review into the public domain papers site, and have universities base tenure on number of 4/5-rated reviews of other's published work, and number of independent replications of published papers, rather than number of original papers published?

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