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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to measure the negative impact on a French science. Not sure how much though.

I would expect there to be basically none. Most of the journals that people are after their university still pays for access for. Failing that, they email the author and get a copy directly. And if that isn't possible, there are a few people with wider ranging interests or wider ranging technical skills who know about sci-hub and libgen, and they will pass out the new domain name as necessary. Or even convince the department's IT to use a non-French DNS provider as the DHCP setting.

Sci-hub and LibGen are services that those of us outside a university or at something besides rich research universities depend on more.

You still can't compare the ease of an access. It is like Google+click to read the article vs emailing authors for every article you want to read. At least that would decrease reading efficiency of the related research, at most - reduce the coverage of the studied material, just because it would require substantial amount of time, compared to direct click. That, in turn, might reduce the percentage of ideas that came during reading others' articles. Think of Sci-Hub as a hypertext engine for science. You copy DOI, you press the Enter, and you are reading an article.

Recently quite a few countries in the EU (including Germany), along with the University of California, have cancelled their contracts with Elsevier et al. France has not yet joined the rebellion.

Just speculation, but maybe this is a pre-emptive strike? Probably the courts would be less inclined to support the publishers if they sued to block these services only after they entered into conflict (with the universities)?

I think it's even simpler than that: the universities and research facilities don't use the three main commercial ISPs and won't have any kind of block.

Not true. Most people I know of or personally in academia in Germany and other countries rely on scihub. It's an incredibly valuable resource.

I'm a few years out of date, then, and I'm glad to hear that the situation has changed.

Unpaywall is also a great method of finding alternative, freely-accessible versions of an article online: https://unpaywall.org/

I would expect using scihub to be more convenient than any other option except direct google scholar PDF results. I have access to my uni's resources and journal subscriptions, yet I don't know how to use them (and frankly I don't see the point). It's extremely likely that circumventing a DNS block is less of a hassle than the procedure to access paywalled articles in a large majority of institutions.

Probably none, people without much IT skills who need those sites will ask their co-workers on how to access them and they will get help.

Also impact on use of Tor.

Probably some negative impact. Sci-hub is the primary and in some case only way to access paywalled papers at master and undergrad level. I’m not sure how PhD students get access to them but if it through libraries this is bad for them as the opening days and hours of such institutions is limited. Even more so which strikes which sometimes close a library for weeks.

You can typically get any paper your university library has a subscription to via the libraries online portal or if you are in the university network already at the undergraduate and masters level. If some journal is not available at the library you can request an interlibrary „loan“ which just means that someone at another library will copy the article and send it to you, typically for free.

I know a lot of researchers and they can access maybe 90% of the papers they want through subscriptions and for the rest the likely use Sci-hub.

(I have never heard anyone in research who thinks that pay walled journals is a good thing.)

As an researcher I typically only encounter a paywall when I‘m not logged into my institutes VPN. In the rare cases I want to read something the university is not subscribed to, Scihub is indeed a good solution. Open access just moves the cost of publishing to research groups and disincentives proper peer review, because the journal’s revernue is tied to how many paper it publishes. See for example the 15+ Frontiers in ... Journals, which are just barely not predatory and basically publish anything with a pulse. A mix of preprint severs like arxiv and (much later) journal publication seem like a good compromise.

Journals don't incentivize proper peer review, open access or otherwise. Peer review is just something that professors and their assistants are expected to do as part of their research. Which means it's usually paid for by the public, ultimately.

I have been registered as a student in 5 French universities and I can tell you that even if I can get "any" paper if I can enter a library (which is a joke in itself), sci-hub is 10 times more convient than the bureaucracy involved. The only time I requested a book from the stock, the librarian didn't even give it to me pretexting it was lost... probably because did like me as I had an unopened sandwich in hand.

Well as I said at least in Germany the universities have a web portal through which you can access pretty much any article you want electronically. The workflow for a student of medicine is something like:

- Search for an article on PubMed in the university library portal

- Get a list of results

- Download the article as pdf from the publishers website

Additionally many journals are accessible just by navigating to the publishers website (science, nature, physics journals, ieee journals) depending on which university vpn you are logged into. This covers most use cases, I am sorry to hear it’s not the same in France.

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