Where Sci-Hub Is
whereisscihub.now.sh
whereisscihub.now.sh
> I am writing to let you know we have blocked your deployment: whereisscihub.now.sh
> This is because the deployment contained illegal content.
> Please let me know if this is not the case or if you have any questions.
I hadn't noticed it was on Hacker News, but that explains the sudden attention.
While I don't believe the site was illegal (it's just a link, after all, and proxied from Wikidata - so that would be illegal too?), I understand that Zeit are not too happy about it.
The source code to the website is at [0], if you want to run it yourself. That said, a recent Wikidata policy change resulted in the data not being great any more [1]. For now, I'd recommend just visiting the Wikipedia page on Sci-Hub to get a recent URL, or use an alternative [3].
Edit: I should also add that this was just an afternoon project I did once, and I should plug the main thing I'm working on in this area. I'm trying to remove the incentive for academics to publish in "top" (but closed access) journals: https://plaudit.pub/
[0] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/
[1] https://gitlab.com/Flockademic/whereisscihub/issues/9
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
[3] https://sci-hub.now.sh/ (though also hosted by Zeit)
I ended up removing the links because I didn’t want get into more legal trouble with Elsevier. More details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20606362
Basically, if you post a link and know it links to illegal content, you are in violation of copyright law. If you do not know, you're not in violation, but upon being informed, you do know and have to take down the link.
In case of Sci-Hub, it would be reasonable to assume somebody who made a website with the purpose to link to the ever-changing Sci-Hub domain, that is ever changing because of copyright takedowns, then I'd think a court would find it reasonable for you to know you're linking to something violating somebody else's copyrights and thus are in violation of copyright law yourself, in EU jurisdictions at least.
> Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim.
Note also that the article you linked spoke about linking directly to photo's and articles, not to websites that host both infringing and non-infringing content. I presume Wikipedia wouldn't do that either, even though they do link to the homepage.
(And fun fact: some articles published by Elsevier actually do link to Sci-Hub versions of articles. Not really relevant to this, but still funny.)
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...
Sure it has some legal content too, but it has undeniably and openly a LOT of infringing content (bad faith), so I'd guess a judge would convict. Wikipedia may have some infringing content, but they hardly flaunt it and actually work to minimize such content (good faith).
You think they would realise how absurd the whole thing is when then have to resort to censorship of censorship.
For context, Handshake is a new project aiming to create a distributed certificate authority and naming system. Domain names on Handshake are very difficult to shut down, so you could have a sci hub domain on Handshake that continuously tracks the sci hub servers. Users would be able to always access sci hub from the same domain in this case.
In any case, feel free to take the source code and to deploy it elsewhere.
That said, it might be best to have Sci-Hub adopt Handshake directly? I think you might be able to get in touch with Alexandra Elbakyan, the person behind Sci-Hub, through its Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub
It will be nicer if whole sci-hub is able to move to IPFS network and accessible through a domain. The problem is IPFS do not offer anonymity of the nodes hosting the content. So publisher can sue any of the nodes being part of the network providing a chunk of data. Even though they are not liable as intermediary, but now a days it's pretty hard to defend in court and like the default judgement in case of sci-hub will happen with the node owners.
Hopefully libp2p and IPFS, IPNS can provide some way to be performant and anonymous.
Indeed some countries like India, China, Russia will even punish intermediary for hosting such content (there is no Safe Harbor laws in these countries). In USA and other economies hiring a lawyer and getting access to legal remedy is so expensive that even with Safe harbor law, one cannot defend unless have deep pockets like google, facebook, microsoft etc.
It doesn't pro-actively replicate content, so it isn't like bit torrent where everyone is uploading.
Instead, it provides resilience, where the actual location of sci-hub could move around, but requesters could still get access to the content. The rest of the network acts to help with routing, but won't be serving data they haven't accessed themselves.
I understand hatred for academic publishers, however this argument makes no sense.
It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.
My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.
They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom.
Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against.
Have some perspective.
Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm
The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access.
The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs.
I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).
Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they choose to publish in these for-profit journals.
Do you know why?
When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ.
Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.
Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all.
Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't.
There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.
It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.
The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.
No, it really isn't. It sounds like you're saying you want someone else to pay for it. That's not free.
> When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.
Funded work is not free.
Funded information can be liberated.
Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free.
Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible".
The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible".
> Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.
That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.
Having the freedom to access information and information be8mg easily accessible are two different things. Those are the two things the above commenter was advocating for.
Should accessing information be free of cost? Of course, yes, as much as possible it should. That's why we have libraries.
Should creating information be free of cost? Of course not, that's just nonsense and the fact that you thought anyone would suggest that is rather telling.
Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished.
Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it no longer applies. It's obviously incompatible with free computing as we know it today. In order for copyright to be enforceable, computers that run unauthorized software must be made illegal. Otherwise, people will always be able to copy whatever data they want and there's little anyone can do about it.
Part of the social contract behind copyright is giving the public free access to the works of humanity after the protection expires. It's clear now that the copyright industry has no intention of ever letting these protections ever expire. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when the copyright holders refuse to keep up their end of the deal.
Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free.
Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt.
Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.
Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free.
If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free.
If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out.
edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."
In the context of freedom of information the opposite of free information is not funded information- it's censored, withheld, horded, etc.
You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.
It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town. Likewise it's my right to use information to liberate withheld information just as it would be my right to provide well digging tools to your parched neighbors.
The only difference is that I'm thinking of what is best for everyone and you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
Information is like the food in my example, not the "only water supply" in yours. Leibniz and Newton independently developed calculus, for example.
> you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.
It's not selfish to be compensated for your work. Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.
As far as I'm aware, authors get very little of the compensation for the work they're doing.
> Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.
Not if the established procedure for publishing is a journal.
As for journals, I understand the distaste academics have for these. This thread was about whether all published information should be free, not just journals.
Food is finite. When you buy material goods, you subtract from the seller's supply of goods and add to your own. It's impossible to create new goods out of nothing. Since there isn't enough for everyone, an economy naturally arises.
Information is infinite. Copying and transmitting data is not only trivial, it is natural. That's why people came up with ways to create artificial scarcity. The only cost associated with human knowledge and art is that of creating it. After it's created, information costs $0.
All data, all files on a computer, they're essentially just really big numbers that humanity happened to discover. Once the number is known, modern computers make it possible to copy and transmit it for almost $0. Paywalls? Only one person needs to pay in order to get copy and distribute it to everyone else.
Nobody is saying creators shouldn't be compensated. We're saying they need a new business model. It's the 21st century. You no longer need huge printing presses in order to make copies of something at scale. It's as easy as copy paste.
Published material is not infinite, nor is an author's time.
Information is infinite if you definite it to mean all information, but that is not the context here. The context here is published work.
Sci-Hub proves otherwise.
> nor is an author's time.
True.
I presume you must be getting something out of the arrangement, else why on earth do you continue?
We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]
Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]
However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.
Where exactly, what people and institutions?
Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.
They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).
It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.
My comment was in response to the parent who said 'knowledge should be free'
Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services".
The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer.
What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website.
In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines.
You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now)
If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.
Yes, I understand the hatred for academic publishers b/c they don't fund the research.
The comment above said 'knowledge should be free' and that is what I was responding to.
Sounds fair?
The vast majority of academic research is funded at least in part by tax payers either directly (grants, public universities or universities receiving public funds, etc) or indirectly (subsidies).
Even if research was "made possible by a grant from (private entity)", if it happened in a university, it most likely used university funds (from using rent-free space and equipment researchers can use, to staff and administration researchers rely on, etc)
I agree, I don't know why you think I don't. I said I understand why people don't like academic journals.
I think you have an misconception about how sci-hub works. Most of the content you can access trough sci-hub is not hosted by sci-hub, what happens when you request a fresh new paper is that your request is eventually served by a computer in the network of one of the universities with subscription to the journal which published that paper, using donated or stolen credentials of some high profile scientists if needed. Sci-hub already uses IPFS to cache some papers, it can not move to IPFS network because it is not a library of content like LibGen (which is often confused to) but an actual hub which decides how to serve your request in real time.
This research papers are anyways funded indirectly and authors of this paper are not really dependent on income from these papers, but the resulting data, experiments and experience they gained while working on it. Reading these papers is only a very small step to know something, but a necessary one.
(It used to cache them on LibGen, and I think it does still store them there, but I seem to recall it now uses its own servers as well.)
They used to have a .onion address, which I assumed would continue to be the most reliable way in, but it's been down for a long time. I'm surprised, it seems like Tor would be the best way to remain up and accessible.
If you Google "Piratebay", the first search result is a fake "thepirate-bay.org" (with a dash) but the Wikipedia article lists the right one.
Comparing this to DNS wasn't right, but at one point for Scihub the article listed the actual IP address of the server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sci-Hub&oldid=8...
However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that I could contribute to?
I don’t know if that makes you feel any better?
It's complicated, but places like Wiley and Elsevier take much more than they give.
Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.
Paying taxes is (at least in western countries where i know a tiny bit about academia) sufficient to support the authors.
If you want to go beyond that: reach out / blog / tweet / etc about papers that peek your interest. If someone else wrote about a paper of mine, I'd be over the moon!
This is not true. Your ISP can in theory route the requested address to whatever they want. In the Netherlands TPB is blocked and my ISP returns a 200 status code which shows their blocking landing page. Other ISPs give a 30x redirect to their domain.
Basically the ISP can do a man in the middle attack.
There's still very much a distinction between (self-)publishing on the arXiv and publishing in a 'real' journal/conference within the academic community, and I think it comes down to two factors:
1. The arXiv moderation process has a much lower bar; you see some pretty rubbish papers (often from large tech companies) make their way onto the arXiv which would never be published in a 'real' journal; ultimately this isn't a shortcoming (the arXiv has had a monumental impact on academia), but rather that the arXiv isn't trying to be a peer-reviewed journal.
2. Visibility/'impact' is lower on the arXiv; there are ~14k submissions per month, so inevitably the signal to noise ratio is low.
I feel what we really need is for a few universities to put the many millions they spend on annual subscriptions into some kind of endowment to pay for proper editorial boards for a peer-reviewed arXiv instead, open access, perhaps with a token fee for submission (or a slightly higher academic affiliation bar). I think if two or three big universities from each of the US/UK/Europe suddenly made this change we would see the death of academic publishing in months.
[1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...
[4] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/05/20/gitwikxiv-follow-up-a-...
[8] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer...
Essentially it's 'Reddit + Patreon for research'.
I agree with @xvilka that there is lots of room for innovation and exploration, but even in the more traditional setting there is some movement coming from the smaller realities. It seems to me that the big publisher monopoly, which at least in my field is completely unjustified, is the bigger obstacle.
[1] https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ [2] https://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/ [3] https://jep.math.cnrs.fr/index.php/JEP/ [4] https://www.elibm.org/series?q=se:2204 [5] https://intlpress.com/index.php [6] https://aif.centre-mersenne.org/
The large number of submissions is indeed a problem for other fields (I think mostly computer science?). I'm not sure what the best solution is for that. A voting system (where you see a mix of new and popular submissions), together with some content filtering, can help the reader. However, this would probably lead to some important papers getting burried.
That said, both are incredible resources for academics, researchers, students or even folks just wanting to read up on a subject in more depth than Wikipedia has.
Speaking of which, Scholar should really be showing DOIs on their search results. That is, the DOI should appear as a top-level clickable link from every result entry. I've tried to suggest many things like this to Scholar over the years, but to no avail... Like Google in general. Just a feature request into the void.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200225000142/https://whereissci...
So not exactly useful if this one is blocked, heh.
Or is it some joke going over my head?
Source: have research publications, always happy when someone reaches out
https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/whereisscihub.now.sh
Sending HugOps to everyone at Zeit trying to keep 99.99% uptime for now.sh at a time like this
Edit: I didn’t know Sci-Hub was illegal.
> You shall not... (b) use the Service in any unlawful manner (including without limitation in violation of any data, privacy or export control laws
> This TOS shall be governed by the laws of the State of California without regard to the principles of conflicts of law.
I had made a fork of this to show it working on zeit now 2.0 with 'stale-while-revalidate' so that it only update once every minute. But obviously I took that fork down once I saw this comment.
> Dear customer, Due to a warning in accordance with Section 81 (1a) UrhG / preliminary injunction / court decision, access to this website had to be blocked.
Tracing route to unavailable.for.legal.reasons [212.166.122.119] over a maximum of 30 hops:
I find it odd that the warning message is from Magenta (T-Mobile) when A1 is my ISP. A1 is a private company which has fairly recently taken over the role of "main" ISP in Austria, which means, as I understand it, that all traffic in Austria flows through their pipes. What I don't get is why Magenta is providing the blocking (or how, if it's not DNS).
Actually you often pay a couple thousand dollars as a publishing fee to get your paper in the journal after review. I'm sure it's not necessarily like that in every journal, but the bigger ones do it that way. So basically pay them to take your content, pay them to view their content, and do labor for them by reviewing papers for free.
Sci-Hub (/scimag/) has been located at the same IP address for at least three years, and neither domain names (DNS) nor onion addresses (TOR) are required to access it.
If you have the disk space and bandwidth, I would strongly encourage you to participate in this torrent seeding effort: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...
The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps.
For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those.
If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have.
As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0...
As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it.
Nobody actually uses this status code, despite it being an official spec. I'd like to think the dev or dev ops person who configured this server used the status code as a minor protest. The spec authors would be proud.
I wonder if they had hobbyists in mind when they built that site.