US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub | Hacker News Reader

US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

torrentfreak.com

221 pointsstevemclaugh123 comments

As someone who works in academia (Europe) I understand that scientific papers need hosting and server space and such, but does it really help humanity that all advances will be behind very expensive pay walls? I would argue otherwise. The current trend is not sustainable nor favorable for anyone except parasitic publishers.

Edit: I understand the website was breaking the law, but this seems like symptom treating

Scientists need to try more "radical sharing"[1] as the member journalists of the ICIJ[2] did in order to report on the Panama and Paradise Papers.

Setting aside ego,etc. I would think result in faster real-world discoveries and applicitions for the good of all.

[1]https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-p...

[2]International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Don't forget the peer review and vetting process.

As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive. I've never heard of a research University unable to afford it. And if not for the fees we'd have no journals.

Maybe when we are post scarcity then it'd be free. But until then people's time is not unlimited and is worth something.

> Don't forget the peer review and vetting process.

The peer review often happens by unpaid peers, even for commercial journals. It's really not the dominating factor for costs.

> The peer review often happens by unpaid peers

Do you know of an example of paid reviews? This would seem like a big conflict of interest and I have not heard of any but predatory journals doing that.

Historically, a large cost was typesetting and print publication. However, print is used less and less in favor of online subscriptions and typesetting is mostly using the publisher's LaTeX style file.

The "value" provided by journals seems to be:

- communication with the editor (unpaid, mostly senior peer researcher)

- review (unpaid peer)

- software to manage submissions, reviews etc (commercial)

- proofreading for typos and some fine tuning for figures and layout (useful)

- prestige of having published in an important journal (very valuable for your career)

>As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive.

There are multiple universities spending millions upon millions (which could be used to further science), to buy subscriptions for all the journals. I know my university spends 10 mil euroes a year. And it's not only about pricing, it's the general trend of commercialising research which should benefint all of humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Pricing I know Elsevier is not the only one, but they are the frontrunner of parasitic behaviour.

Edit: Formatting

Who does this money go to? Does a percentage go back to the scientists who write the papers?

It depends... Do you consider 0% "a percentage"?

The publisher, essentially the researcher gives the rights to his paper in exchange for publishing. Then the publisher put the research behind a paywall and even the researcher who wrote it will have to pay.

> even the researcher who wrote it will have to pay.

Eh, pay for what? The author already has the article. Often-times, the agreement furthermore permits limited dissemination of the article by the author, possibly even on the author's web page.

Pay for color figures in print, for example (a few hundred per figure if I recall correctly).

Furthermore, you get an author's copy with watermarks with very limited dissemination rights. You don't get a copy of the journal issue unless you pay.

Also, this varies very much by discipline. Math research is pretty universally available on the arXiv, but chemistry or biology is not nearly as pervasive.

I think the only value-add is the prestige of a given journal. So, just brand.

The other comments are saying it's minimal publishing, peer review, and hosting costs. Oh and they spend a bunch on lawyers obviously.

> Don't forget the peer review and vetting process.

Which is almost universally done for free by the editorial/review panel for the given journal.

> As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive. I've never heard of a research University unable to afford it.

It would be nice if everyone had access to research, not just those who happen to work in organisations with deep enough pockets.

> And if not for the fees we'd have no journals.

Why?

> Maybe when we are post scarcity then it'd be free. But until then people's time is not unlimited and is worth something.

The people who put in the time (editorial board) and expertise (reviewers) aren't getting paid. If they're not getting paid then where is all the money going? Personally I think the value is in the bits that are currently all done for free, Im not sure what value the publishers really add.

Sounds like you should start your own free journal. That's the easiest and fastest way of getting these papers out for free.

Someone did. It's called Sci-Hub.

Sci-Hub is not a Journal itself. It is hosting other Journals' data. However https://www.plos.org/ does exist and it is a free to access Journal. Unfortunately it is pay to publish. I am unaware of any completely free Journal on both the reader and author end.

There a few. I published a paper in the Journal of Information Policy once, whose (small) expenses are covered by a grant, IIRC from libraries that would otherwise have to pay through a publisher. Very field specific, though.

Isn't that what the World Wide Web was designed to do, before the web app? Why not just publish online on a university site, or a site for your specialty?

Traditionally journals have required that the author transfer copyright of the paper to the journal upon publication. They no longer have the right to publish a copy on their own university site; some journals allow it, but many stipulate that the full text cannot be available without a paywall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...

That's changing, and many journals are moving to open-access policies, but it's slow, and the most prestigious journals often have the least incentive to grant authors published in them copyright of the work.

(There's something fucked up about authors transferring copyright of publicly-funded research to private entities: if the public funded it, shouldn't it be owned by the public in the first place, i.e. public-domain? And if it's public domain, then this whole issue goes away and neither the journal nor the author has the right to restrict access to the research. But this is one example of the capture of public goods by private entities. Hell, maybe this is why a good swath of America wants to de-fund science any chance it gets, when the result of their funding just gets captured by private entities.)

I agree, publicly funded research should be public domain, where the authors cannot legally transfer the copyright to the publishers like that. However, most Journals do offer a way to publish open access, and I bet they would push things that direction. They just cost thousands of dollars, that most of the time is not affordable.

The difference is the peer review. If something is published in Nature, you can reasonably trust that it is legitimate science, and not a random person with no real credentials. Its an interesting cycle. People publish their best work in a prestigious journal because it is the most prestigious and trusted. Thus perpetuating what goes where. And this is also perpetuated by the grant system itself, you need to publish in prestigious journals to get grants to fund further research. You don't get funding to self publish on a university page. (I am not saying I think this is right, just stating the facts behind it)

Yes but why couldn't peer review be organised by a not-for-profit group? Perhaps a society attached to your specialty could provide a panel?

It seems that the publisher's value is curating studies that have gone through this process. If you were to find a study through Sci-Hub would you know that it had gone through editorial/review panel? How do you know that the study is trustworthy?

Surely that's the work of the editorial board? Again, they are largely unpaid as far as Im aware.

This makes interesting reading if you're interested in how a free (or at least very low cost) journal can work https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

Peer review has little to no financial impact..

> Which is almost universally done for free by the editorial/review panel for the given journal.

Is there good data on this? (I mean, I guess there is, but would someone present it to ignoramuses such as myself? Thanks.)

I'm not aware of any, though I haven't really looked. My understanding is that peer review is done for free because it's understood that it's a necessary part of science. That is, you review other peoples papers for free because they'll do the same for you.

I guess that falls down a bit because I bet there is a very uneven distribution of peer review work, but it's a nice sentiment at least!

Remember that a lot of us don't work for research universities, and we can't afford $199 per paper just to read the details that are summarized in the abstract.

Also, many landmark papers are several decades old. A lot of time I just want to read the details of an influential paper just to see if I agree with how it is portrayed in popular culture. For example, I recently wanted to read the Dunning Kruger paper to see if it really says what people think it says. And, when James Damore cited research for his Google manifesto - I wanted to see if his conclusions held up.

I'm not sure how an average person can make informed judgments without access to these papers. Without Sci-Hub, we must just believe what is fed to us. Since its creation, Sci-Hub has become an essential part of my life.

Ditto for http://sci-hub.cc/. Another example: for those of us (just about everybody) concerned about our health, how do we access authoritative papers on pharamceutical drugs, nutrition, medical conditions etc., Or do we rely on some journalist's piece which is more often than not biased and patronizing? And the irony is that this is almost entirely tax-payer funded research.

I happen to live near a research university and while I'm not a student nobody seems to object to me wandering in and using the libraries there from time to time. But for most people the cost of accessing a journal article for casual interest is prohibitive, and not everyone has the funds or time to attend a university. The point of the web is to make knowledge available to everyone.

Be realistic, it costs more to read a single article on Nature or Science than it does to buy a book on the topic. That's bullshit.

> But for most people the cost of accessing a journal article for casual interest is prohibitive

And most people don't have access to the facilities to run proper research. R&D is not cheap.

As mentioned we live in a capitalistic society. Time is a scare resource, and the current journal editors are putting a price to their time.

If you have a passion for cheaper research papers, go ahead and compile papers & start your own free journal. That or help another free journal out.

> Be realistic, it costs more to read a single article on Nature or Science than it does to buy a book on the topic. That's bullshit.

Its total bullshit. I dont disagree. This might even be a great YC Startup opportunity :D. Until someone competes it'll continue being bullshit.

Community colleges like the one I work at can't afford the journal fees. One of my assignments involves reading several peer-reviewed articles on a narrow topic and writing an explanation of the research. Every semester I have students that struggle with finishing this assignment because the articles they need are inaccessible.

If the barrier to accessibility is such a problem, why perpetuate it by throwing your students against that wall?

The journals' business model does suck, but you're delivering students to a paywalled garden to retrieve information on what amounts to a proprietary topic. You have the power to change this by redirecting the students' attention elsewhere, either by loosening requirements or changing topics to one with more accessible research...

They choose the topic. I'm fine with anything in biology, medicine, chemistry, and even some social science topics. Some of them run into trouble and others don't depending on what they choose.

I've considered removing the assignment a few times, but there's no skill more essential to success in science than the ability to synthesize different research articles into a coherent whole. I wouldn't feel like I was doing my job if I stopped assigning it.

The law doesn't operate by going back to first principles ("will it really help humanity?") in every case. We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept, and we evaluate each case by reference to the rules of copyright, without creating special exceptions all over the place.

Nor are any special exceptions necessary. Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals. Scientists and academics do so to cash in on the prestige of the "branded" for-pay journals. Given that they do this voluntarily, why should the law step in and ameliorate the collateral effects of their conduct?

Because most of the research is funded by tax dollars?

Is 'most' true? It may also matter whose tax dollars they were. Google isn't being helpful.

To be absolutely clear, I'm very much on the side of open publishing. I just want to be able to form a more accurate reasoning so that I can well explain it to others.

So? If the government funds contractors to e.g. clean government buildings, should the contractor automatically be subject to all sorts of considerations "in the public interest" just because it is being paid with tax dollars?

The government, as an economic actor, is entitled to attach whatever conditions it wants on its grants. The reason it doesn't attach conditions such as "you can't publish your results in <list of prestigious publications>" is because that would drive away the best and brightest applicants for the grants.

> If the government funds contractors to e.g. clean government buildings, should the contractor automatically be subject to all sorts of considerations "in the public interest" just because it is being paid with tax dollars?

IANAL, but that's actually true. For example, government contractors are required to have affirmative action programs. See, for example here: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

Government procurement requirements have been hugely important in regulating and advancing the state of many industries.

I completely agree with you, in principle. Though sometimes we have to reevaluate the system and a good way to do this is civil disobedience, which I consider what SciHub is doing.

>We've decided copyright is reasonable as a concept

I disagree here, I think copyright is a great idea, but more and more often, executed poorly.

>Absolutely nothing prevents scientists and academics from publishing in open-access journals

To some extent you are correct, but if you want your paper to be read and spread your knowledge this is the only way. And yes recognition and money is also a factor

As for your question, the law should absolutely step in, but just because it's the law doesn't mean it's right and it can't be corrected

Edit: formatting

In reality, quite a lot of factors prevent academics from publishing in open-access journals!

That that is what needs to be fixed.

You're basically arguing for the government nationalize the brand and goodwill of prestigious publications, presumably without compensating those journals for the taking.

This presents some pretty extreme view points as if they're perfectly reasonable.

I doubt you could find any member of the public who would say "Yes" if asked "Should research you paid for cost you money to read?".

No reasonable person would agree with the rules as they are if they were introduced today, we got here because it's not an election issue and special interests and lobbyists have distorted rules written centuries ago massively in their favour.

It's descriptive, not prescriptive. Rayiner isn't endorsing the law itself, he's just telling you how it operates. People often seem to have trouble distinguishing between positive statements ('this is how things work') and normative statements ('this is how things ought to work.')

I agree with you that the laws are corrupt and should be changed, but that's going to involve refactoring the entire legal system on different operating principles, which is a radical change. IT's important to understand that this isn't one bad decision by a court or something that can fixed with a patch. Are you up for such a gargantuan task?

We don't need to rewrite anything.

Instead, just start breaking laws that are corrupt, like copyrite laws, and eventually they will be unenforceable.

Laws only work because society mostly follows them. The ones that people DON'T follow, may as well not even exist.

This exactly. The law is a lot like the formal description of an algorithm that processes data. The courts and lawyers are the implementation, and the way in which people behave is the data being fed into the implementation. Overload even a good implementation and it will probably crash.

Careful with this. Having a number of laws people ignore can lead to situations where all of a sudden the existing power structure starts to enforce them arbitrarily (usually against political opponents and/or an 'out' grou p).

USC 2257 compliance comes to mind. With that on the books, a nebulous definition of what it means to be compliant and no precedent for interpretation, I'd hate to be in the adult industry when any administration decides to start enforcing it.

In case anybody else doesn't recognize this, it's the law stating that porn producers must maintain proof-of-age documentation of their performers (at least that's what I think it means). Something like that anyway.

> I doubt you could find any member of the public who would say "Yes" if asked "Should research you paid for cost you money to read?".

Isn't that a claim that the public may have against the researchers, rather than against journals? A journal is merely _offering_ a publishing service, and the public may, if they deem that service unacceptable, demand of the researchers that they do not use it.

> and the public may, if they deem that service unacceptable, demand of the researchers that they do not use it.

Many hiring requirements for researchers is that they have a published paper in X journal. Usually these journals are run by Elsevier, who takes copyright from the researchers. Are suggesting that the public lobby universities to change their hiring practices? (In which case you had better have a good alternative, otherwise you'll most likely be laughed off)

Anyway, your putting the burden on the public feels like just another way of saying "Someone else should do it". You're a member of the public, have you set up anything to demand that researchers not publish in certain journals?

There is no rule (lobbied-for or otherwise) that says that publishers can put publicly-funded research behind a paywall. That they can is simply a result of the fact that all creative works are copyrightable, and people are free to publish copyrighted work on freely-negotiated terms.

If you asked the public "should there be a special law excluding scientific articles from copyright protection," I suspect most people would say "no." Sometimes the public agrees with the general principles of a law, but disagrees with specific applications. In those cases, we give precedence to the legal principles, not the public's opinion on a specific situation.

The US is a corrupt country, the laws are written figuratively or sometimes literally by corporations with the intent on profiting from them.

Given that, it is unsurprising that the laws do not represent the interests of the common person.

Individual scientists don't have a right to screen over the future.

There is a nice combo of fatalistic, libertarianesque schadenfreude. Only the most politically and financially stable scientists can afford to publish in non-impact-factor journals.

You know. Open access just means paid for by the researcher. Not everyone has that kind of money..

There is a non-insignificant amount of work to take a paper from submission to publication. It's hard to determine the exact value / cost of that work, but article publication fees (and subscription fees!) is one way that work is paid for. So while I am sympathetic to your argument, one could then say that "rich" researchers should (based on an arbitrarily chosen morality) pay for open access, and the "poor" ones should go to low APC, subscription journals... I am not sure I like this argument either.

Now, researchers are slowly getting new tools where that cost is accounted for in other ways. I.e. The Winnower, biorxiv, etc. Whether one day one of those, or a future invention will replace academic journals, only time will tell.

You're right that copyright law does not need a special case here. Rather, taxpayer-funded research grants should come with the requirement that all findings will be published open access. If you want to publish in Nature, go get your own research money. Scientists should not have complete personal ownership over subsidized research that they conduct.

I never understood the argument of “we’ll block this website that host papers because we need revenue to host those papers”. I mean, if you want papers to be hosted just leave people to host them... There might be other arguments and I don’t really find most of them valid as well, but the one about hosting costs just sounds ... absurd

> scientific papers need hosting and server space and such

The cost of such things is trivial. A typical article is <<1GB. The cost of storing a GB is about 10 cents at today's prices. If you charged each author $1 to publish a paper you would cover the costs with a 90% profit margin.

I don't want to be that guy, but nothing here seems outlandish. A website is actively violating US law, didn't show up to defend itself, and now facing an injunction. The same happens for foreign entities that do not comply with US law.

I'll be interested to see how far this goes, and if any ISPs start blocking the site. With the whole Net Neutrality debate, I'm curious to see if the ISPs change their stance when they start getting ordered to block sites.

The blocking of the site by ISPs and search engines is the bad part, IMO. Other than that, it seems pretty standard.

And it's kind of dumb, because they could just get a new domain name, like many of the other torrent sites do. It's effectively worthless.

I grew up in a country where certain websites (you know, like adult sites) are blocked, I'm not comparing this to that exactly, but isn't it strange to be told that your ISP is hereby not allowed to provide you access to a website? Especially when nobody unanimously agrees that it's a bad thing? (I'm not here to argue the ethics/morality of it, but pointing out that it has proponents on both sides)

I mean, I know blocking some content is the norm in many countries (lots of European countries do it for various purposes (nazi content, child porn, etc, that are almost unanimously considered 'bad')). Isn't this a drastic new step for the US? (again, I don't exactly keep up with this, but this seems new to me)

Dane here. Our ISPs blocked a lot of sites and claimed they were all cp, but when the list (or partial they wouldn't comment) got leaked on wikileaks it turned out to be also a bunch of gay sites as well as a dutch company selling trucks for warehouses - not exactly dressed, but also not CP.

So I wouldn't trust the integrity of any system which we are being denied information about.

It is pretty abnormal for the US, but not unheard of.

The problem is, that mostly the only ones impacted are the people who were committing copyright infringement and they are a very small minority of the total population, poorly funded, and not a viable voting bloc.

It is going to be a tough battle. However, we have alternative means to reach the site.

Strange? Yes, it's strange that the first amendment be ignored by the courts themselves when ordering such a clearly unconstitutional injunction. It basically boils down to the government telling ISPs and other sites what legal text they can and cannot write on their sites. I cannot think of a clearer, more direct violation of the first amendment.

Article I Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to establish copyright. That puts it on equal footing to the First Amendment, and being more specific than the First Amendment gives it precedence.

This is the key takeaway from the article. As much as I agree that researches deserve fair compensation for their work; I also believe gate-keeping academic knowledge is also wrong. It's not surprising that the US legal system found against Sci-hub. Issuing the legally binding statement, that blocking a site by ISP and search engine level, is the real problem. It sets a very tenuous precedent.

How do researchers get paid under the current system? My understanding is that the journals do not pay the scientists that produce the articles. Am I mistaken in this?

You're not mistaken - journals don't pay researchers or reviewers. If they did, I'd be significantly less upset by their practices. As is, they get their product (papers) and their skilled labor (reviews) for free.

Elsevier had a 36% profit margin last year, which is a pretty clear signal that they don't face sincere costs or competition.

They are paid ether by their respective universities/institutions/companies and/or they pay themselves from the grant money they were awarded for a specific project.

But the key point is that they're not paid by the publisher for the publication, they're paid to produce the publication by others. The publisher is just gets it for (basically) free and then profits off the fees.

In fact, you may very well also be paying to get your research published. They get you coming and going.

Are we counting only monetary payments? I'm assuming there is some benefit that is given to the scientist for publishing, especially in cases where the scientist pay to publish. It isn't likely at all a simple relationship between two parties, but I doubt that the scientists are being irrational by using a publisher.

Sure, but how does paying the publisher enter into this? The scientist may well be happy to have their paper shared freely after publication, since they receive no reward from the publisher. Scientists are only being irrational if they have choice in the matter. If they are forced to publish by the community / university, they may well resent being forced to use such publishers.

Researchers don't receive a cut of the journal access fees. They generally have to pay thousands of dollars to publish in a journal in the first place.

Their library also has to pay thousands to subscribe to this journal.

> As much as I agree that researches deserve fair compensation for their work

Researchers don't get paid by journals for their submissions. In fact, it's usually exactly the opposite: most of the big ones have submission fees.

This is why I don't really have any sympathy for the publishers affected by Sci-Hub, when at the same I strenuously oppose software/game piracy. I just don't see what service they provide: they don't pay the researchers, they don't pay the peer reviewers, and they don't validate the papers beyond basic copy-editing and typesetting. They're just useless middlemen who provide no utility. I'll be spitting on their grave when we finally get rid of them.

Thanks for the clarification. I agree with what you're saying; paywalls need to go away especially for valuable scientific research/findings.

Why they don't start publishing in Sci-Hub directly instead?

Right now the main barrier is the prestige that comes with some of the bigger journals, but that's a shallow moat. Honestly, it could happen soon. There have been stories recently about people presenting at scientific conferences, asking the room "raise your hand if you think Sci-Hub is doing something wrong", and getting no response. Everyone knows that the current model is indefensible.

It's also a first amendment violation. Do US ISPs currently actively block any websites? US ISPs do have mandatory monitoring, which means you can get to child porn sites, but you immediately get reported for it.

Yes, yes, we all understand that Scihub is thumbing the nose at copyright. On the other hand, how is the nation served by scientific journals held behind excessive paywalls? What Elsevier are really doing is using public resources to keep their income going. That can't be correct either.

"immoral but not illegal" as usual

Don't get me started. I just got off the phone discussing tenure requirements with the chair of a very bad department at a 4-year school in the Southern US. The criterion is a certain number of publications.

Student performance at that institution is so terrible that you either use pay-to-publish journals (can't call them predatory, if you publish there you are the customer, not the prey) or you use Elsevier's bottom-of-barrel publish-anything journals.

This is the game you have to play to keep the income going, and Elsevier enables it, now with the help of the State Department, on the backs of the taxpayer.

I agree. However, what seems strange to me is the blanket order against all the entities that weren't present in court: ISPS, Search Engines, Web Hosting providers, Domain Registrars and Registries[1].

I'm not a lawyer, but it appears that the lawsuit started off as ACS vs. John Does Sci-Hub/Alexandra Elbakyan, and ended as ACS vs. every ISP out there.

Just seems strange to file a verdict against ISPs, without providing them the chance of being a defendant, or at the very least part of the lawsuit. Not that most of them would care about blocking a website, but on principle it seems odd.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/images/acsorder.pdf

ISP level blocking seems inherently objectionable.

I agree that "trying to get injunctions against sites breaking US law" is mundane regardless of whether one agrees with the law, but that's not really my concern here. Generally pursuit of actors outside US jurisdiction is either abandoned or done in partnership with foreign governments (e.g. trade secrets theft). What's deeply alarming is the movement towards a UK-style system of ISP blocks against objectionable foreign content.

This is the icky part:

* by appearing in the US court defenders would put themselves into the court's jurisdiction. It is a virtual certainty that the defendants will lose.

* by not appearing in the US court the defendants would get a default judgement against them. A third party might claim that a court ordering ISP blocking becomes a kangaroo court, but that third party has no standing in the case and unless for some strange reason a judge decides to do more than just follow a default procedure whatever is asked in the lawsuit would be granted to the plaintiff.

Edit: In theory, a plaintiff can ask as a part of a relief to make a defendant walk around a block for three hours, making donkey noises and if a defendant does not show up it may very well end up being awarded as a part of a default judgement. By appearing, the defendant most likely can get this part of the remedy tossed but at the same time by appearing the defendant would place itself into court's jurisdiction.

So it is a no win case for a defendant.

>A website is actively violating US law, didn't show up to defend itself,

Presuming, of course, that the US has jurisdiction over the whole internet.

Thankfully there's TOR and other methods to get around this. I disagree completely with the courts. Long live Sci-Hub

The worrying thing is that now there's a single point of failure: Elbakyan. She has the power to cut off anyone she wants to, and she did it in the past to some Russian university that dared criticize her.

I guess anyone who wants to take on the legal risk is welcome to start up their own version hosted on IPFS.

Do your part and start mirroring parts of it! http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/

Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space.

What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this?

I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.

Looking at the dates on the file list, I suspect not, and that the way you keep up to date is to keep adding the new torrents as they come out.

Since torrents are immutable it makes sense... would otherwise be a pain to update.

I'll add the most recent. Thanks.

Be aware that this is huge: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Library_Genesis

I will have to spin up some spare drives and it's going to take a while. I'll do the SciMag, though it will take a few months to synch it all. I've got spare driver and will actually end up needing to set them in a new box. I've been meaning to do this project for a while but lacked a good reason.

Thanks.

Have fun and thanks!

That's pretty funny, at least if their criticism was that Sci-Hub shouldn't exist.

That was really catty.

Story time: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/elbakyan-pulls-sci-hub-ru...

No there isn't - anyone can pirate the pirated stuff off of sci hub.

I fail to see how the injunction is not a violation of the first amendment right of search engines and ISPs to display any legal content they want--and we are talking about legal content here (links). It is clearly improper under DMCA, but it seems to me such injunctions are simply unconstitutional, DMCA or not. Anyone care to explain the twisted logic of the court here?

First, the Court sees Sci-Hub as essentially hosting the copyrighted materials. From the order in ACS v. Does:

> ...Sci-Hub has copied elements—and, in many cases, the entirety of—those works, and that Sci-Hub has distributed those works by allowing individuals to download the works from its website, all in violation of the Copyright Act.

But to entertain your argument of First Amendment protections, linking to infringing documents is pretty clearly incitement of imminent lawless action as established in Brandenburg.

This is not going to do anything. Libgen.io or https://libgen.pw/ if scihub is down.

I wonder what are the challenges against implementing an open "near-full-automated" journal?

- anyone can submit a paper. which is stored in the yet to be reviewed section.

- only users with confirmed university affilation / users that published more than X papers can opt in to become a reviewer.

- a reviewer is randomly selected to receive a review offer [in his indicated field] which he can accept or decline.

- the user and the reviewer are than linked together anonymously and their correspondance is stored to be published with the paper under review section.

- after that the reviewer makes a decision.

- when enough reviewers have made their decision, the paper is marked as rejected, or moved to the published section according to a majority rule.

- if the paper failed,the user then can choose to either:

   * (modify the paper = optional) and resubmit

   * keep the paper public but indicate it failed the 
     review process

   * delete the paper

- if the paper gets published,trusted users of the site can then leave feedback (through the UI) to indicate:

  * whether they could reproduce the results or not:
  this might help alert the author if there are unclear 
  parts in thier methodology description.

  *  if the paper was helpful/intresting to them.

  *  add community questions under the paper, which can 
      be answered by the author / or a trusted user.

- authors can edit their work to correct in anytime they want [ allowing a faster correction of mistakes] , change history is kept to prevent abuse.

from a programming point of view it doesn't seem that hard to do. so what are the relevant obstacles?

So a StackOverflow model for papers? Haven't a few people been attempting that in some of the open access projects?

Problem with journals is not technological, but a coordination one (same as with p-value).

If every scientist "defects" to open-access journal - everyone is better of. But if only a handful do that they will lose impact factor and will take a hit to their career.

Addition: This is commonly known as Nash Equilibrium[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

I have been following this judge, Leonie Brinkema for about twenty years. Her court and rulings are interesting and amusing. It seems to me like she lets a lot of nonsense fly to rule in favor of her personal beliefs or patrons or whatever they may be. I think I have caught her applying different rules at times. This might be an abusive technical default judgment, considering the actual value of the works and other issues like process service shenanigans that are common with these judgments.

I would love to hear what her rationale for this dollar amount is. After watching her for so long, the "airplane" level of "unbelievable bs" in her transcripts and rulings makes me want to wager the answer is among: they're my friends; I like this type of plaintiff; this is the order they presented and I simply signed it without consideration or review.

Maybe they need to block sci-hub so scientists finally wake up and do something. I mean everyone i know loves sci-hub because it feels like a real upgrade for searching the literature. A lot of ppl will be mad if it is closed down.

The science community needs to come up with some kind of intermediate measures since open access publishing is not really catching up. For example, there could be laws that prevent publishers from withholding the copyrights from the authors, so the authors can always upload their papers and their commentaries for free elsewhere (i 'm sure someone will make a nice website for that - we already have arxiv &bioarxiv). Universities can continue paying their subscriptions to the journals , but blocking the right to free access to publicly-funded works is highly unethical.

Today is Alexandra Elbakyan's birthday. Not a good time to receive bad news

Free publicity is hardly bad news ;)

Ok IPFS fans, here's your chance.

Can you build a better boat?

It is not obvious to me that the judge intended to order worldwide ISPs unaffiliated with sci-hub to block all traffic to sci-hub. Seems still to be referring to sci-hub's ISP.

The reference to search engines is odd, though. Hypothetically, a search engine indexes documents from that court case, and the documents name the address of the outlaw website. Does that violate the order?

Do articles that are published in journals meet some sort of specification? If you find a study that was published in a journal do you automatically find it more credible than a random article you find on the internet? If so, what has the journal done to achieve that credibility.

The way I see it, the value academic journals provide is to verify that the study is from a reputable source. It's not the distribution of the articles that you are paying for, it is the curation.

Something like Sci-Hub would not be able to exist without the publications first verifying that the studies are legitimate.

I know very little about the world of academic publishing, so I'm not sure if my take on this situation is totally off.

This sounds like the perfect use case for IPFS.

I support Scihub and all efforts to make the body of human knowledge and scientific research freely available to all humans... especially if any of the research has been funded by taxpayer dollars.

I believe that at most, these journals should enjoy a limited copyright that expires after a short time (1-10 years?) after which the papers should be freely available.

That being said, this is disappointing to me:

> Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court. As a result, a default was entered against the site.

This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge.

Here is a bonus article from Priceonomics I'm a big fan of (that I'm sure has been shared here before) about why paywalled science is Bullshit:

https://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-beh...

>This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge.

You somehow think this would have been the correct platform to do that? While being a target of a copyright-infringement lawsuit?

Government research grants need to require that papers produced are available online for free. This would rapidly change the academic publishing situation.

many funding bodies do. but what to do about older papers?

Maybe a law reducing the length of copyright on academic papers to a few years.

actually thats not a good idea. A paper may already take 1+ year to go from experiment to publication, it should be open for everyone to read immediately to be most useful - science moves fast.

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