Sci-Bay: Google Scholar plus Sci-Hub

[0] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c...

[1] https://unpaywall.org/

+1, especially for the Onion site. Onion service supposed to be a primary mean to host uncensored websites instead of having to look for the latest domain name everyday, unfortunately it seems nobody cares about it. Most of the time I access it from my browser, the front-end proxy was malfunctioning, or the back-end Tor daemon has dead... Tor network itself do have capacity problem, but they could do much better than a broken front-end proxy... e.g. with Onion Balance.

I should also add that I am also working on a project to incentivising authors to make their work freely available: https://flockademic.com/

(More info here: https://medium.com/p/the-holy-grail-in-open-access-sharing-t... )

Does google generally block proxy servers?

> See you later

> Too much attention is a bad thing, Sci-Bay decides to stop service for a while. Sorry.

Apparently I was not wrong.

This could be developed as a browser plugin that would be much harder or almost impossible for Google to prevent. Well, a Firefox browser plugin, a Chrome browser plugin presumably they wouldn't allow.

> Don’t misuse our Services. For example, don’t interfere with our Services or try to access them using a method other than the interface and the instructions that we provide.

Despite this, there is scholar.py [0], which can extract files from Google Scholar, though it explicitly doesn't work around the rate limits.

[0] https://github.com/ckreibich/scholar.py

In a broad sense, there's only very weak analogy to music or film piracy in terms of the process of creative work. Everyone has already paid for scientists to do this science. Scientists and institutions have even paid the journals to publish their work in almost all cases, and they won't reap any reward if you read the work through the legitimate distribution channel. You only pay the publisher, not a starving researcher.

Personally, I'd feel very happy if someone read my papers by any means necessary. That was the whole point of writing them, setting aside the practical annoyance of simply trying to keep my career afloat.

Edit: The lifetime value of a single paper to the journal can actually be priced, since they started charging researchers for open access a few years ago (often in addition to other fees). This number is usually in the $2-5K range per paper, in my field.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/19/the-dark-rule-utilitari...

"So this is my argument that Sci-Hub can be ethical. Universalized it would destroy the system – but the system is bad and needs to be destroyed. And although this would break the law, a very slight amount of law-breaking might be a beneficial solution to inadequate equilibria that could be endorsed even when universalized."

There's no real ethical downside - allowing people who wouldn't normally have access to research helps to reduce inequality, and allows human progress to advance a lot quicker than if it weren't open. There are brilliant people of which have no access to research, who could - and would - more likely do something with it than not.

Given that we all pay for science, [0] from people in the lowest drudges of poverty, to people in the highest skyscrapers in New York, we should all have access to it. Imagine you paid taxes meant to improve roads in your area, but ended up going to a place hundreds of miles away from you. You'll never get to use these roads, and you'll be told you're unethical and unlawful if you even consider using them. It wouldn't be very fair, would it?

[0] https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/who_pays

So, you reading articles off of scihub and expanding on the contained work within directly benefits the author. Just make sure to cite the author if you yourself publish! (Which is actually much less difficult than you might think. Even a blog post can contribute to the field).

Leaving aside the societal merits, our incentives are to get published, then get read. Sci-hub helps with the latter, and doesn't harm anyone except the publishers (who most academics cordially dislike anyway).

Information is produced mostly on tax money, and even when it's not, it's based on tech and info developed on tax money, and all of that is based on millennia of science one way or another the global society produced. I believe it's fair to think I and every other person "own" all of the scientific information already anyways. Even if you don't believe in that, I can't see how the other option is to pour mostly taxpayer money into cancerous organisations that sell what they have not even helped produce.

Against, from a societal point of view: Sci-Hub is no longe-term solution, as it still depends on articles being published elsewhere. Furthermore, there is not yet a proper alternative to the traditional publisher's main contribution: credentialing of academics.

Against, from a point of view of the shareholders of the traditional publishers: if this leads to cancelled subscriptions, they lose money. A case could be made that Sci-Hub has contributed to e.g. most German university libraries cancelling their Elsevier subscriptions this year.

The movie industry has it's fair share of copyright protectionism (DRM is popular) and same goes for gaming.

Elsevier is worse. They get paid by scientists so they publish their papers. They get paid massive amounts of money by universities (sometimes even the same that paid the scientist) to be granted access to research. Research largely funded by tax money. Research results that had already been paid for to even be published there.

There is a very good article in the SlateStarCodex if you're interested in a more in-depth article on it.