Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content
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Not only scientists need sci-hub.
Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public.
When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub.
And "I'd really like to see paper X" is not my common case. Though it does occur when double checking that I've finally understood something correctly. My usual case is wrestling with a concept, or trying to put an number to something. I search, and I surf, and I find a paper that might have one helpful sentence in it, 10% chance. And I can check... for only $40! And again a minute later. Or sci-hub. And it's not just greatly reduced friction - those sentences found, are not infrequently, the difference between success and punting, or the lead to a better way of understanding and explaining something.
It's ironic that the American Chemical Society is working with Elsevier to make research literature less accessible to the public, while chemistry education research, describes chemistry education content, using words like "incoherent", and as leaving both students and teachers steeped in misconceptions.
[0]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1478644710864060...
It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it.
This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.
IIUC, pre-college has tended to blend in, or focus on, science journalism.
But I suggest there may be long-term potential to use research literature more extensively, and down towards primary school.
Parts of papers can be much more accessible than others. A delightful paragraph in some paper's introduction section. Some photo, or diagram. Some graph. Or parts of a survey paper, or of a 'context of these papers' column in a good journal. There's been work on using more papers, broadly and more shallowly, rather than diving on each. Doing that pre-college, will be tech sensitive.
Tech matters. Small-group collaboration tooling is important. Annotation of papers, by group and instructors, is helpful. Assorted stop-dead friction is amenable to tech fixes - "what does this mean?", "$40?!?", "what parts of this text might I be able to understand [without having to skim it all myself]?".
So perhaps picture some years out, a small group of middle school students, with AR NPC peer support, surfing a content blend, of educational, outreach, journalism, and research literature, with assorted tooling support.
For now, apropos sci-hub... If you think hitting paywalls is frustrating, picture the impact on STEM-retention at-risk students, with little experience, and very uncertain they are welcome here. Or you, now, surfing an HN comment, hearing of research literature being used to teach critical thinking to pre-service teachers, briefly intrigued, which might be gone in a moment, or become the seed a passion project - you google scholar, and... $40 to see more than a low-content abstract. Or sci-hub.
My fiancee is a doctor in charge of a covid ward at our hospital, and at one point this year I heard about some studies re:vitamin D on radiolab and told her about it. She found it interesting, but told me she didn't have access to one of the studies she wanted to read.
I introduced her to sci-hub and she was blown away. She uses it fairly frequently now.
The idea that government-funded health studies are inaccessible to doctors during a pandemic is patently absurd.
Sci-hub does a lot of good.
In other comments I saw the resonable demand to express support for Elbakyan. Recall that we discuss about the biggest free library of research works.
I tried this here: https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/enemies-of-...
Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols?
This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand the situation.
I did use SciHub myself this week to read a study that I needed -- not for an academic research problem or business operation, but to simply understand a health condition I personally suffer from.
Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded.
Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
What a time to be alive
Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
Now my buddy that worked on the CEPH storage backed at CERN would laugh at any of these numbers... but that's a different ballpark all together..
Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.
That said, complete re-check of 64 TB at 250 MB/s would take at least 71 hour. So ECC RAM definitely won't hurt.
I would gladly do this if a method would be available to load the torrent automatically and set which files are needed to be shared by a specific client.
I’m not intimately familiar with the interactions between libgen and sci hub but the wiki page for sci hub says it hasn’t been using libgen as a storage backend for a few years now.
So there's a monolithic torrent, but we still need to implement a way to search for and download one specific paper, in a decentralized way?
And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.
Yes.
Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.
This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
So it's mirrored, and the monolithic mirror is broken into chunks, but we still don't have a fully decentralized way of searching for and obtaining one specific paper?
Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them.
Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.
Instead of doing anything at all with SciHub, we should instead fight Elsevier. First blow should be on the basis that Elsevier is anti-competitive, by the logic that if wasn't there would be no reason for it to succeed at all.
Second blow should be a that any partially federal funded work would be required to be publicly available, or at least not derive any profit from discouraging public access.
Currently locking people out of information that is often funded with public money is not good for society. So having a small publication charge that can be covered in research is a good compromise to keep this work going on. Now the reward system of publication with impact factors and citations is indeed also entirely broken but that is another issue. But there is a lot more work that is thought of in the publication process. Yes peer reviewers are not paid, but finding the right reviewers, dealing with conflicts of interest, getting them to respond, and corresponding is not free. It takes time. And time is money. The more selective a journal is, the more they have to reject so those papers cost you time without a finished product. All of this does not cost the money that Elsevier reaps but it is not free.
Publishers only archive and index. The rest is done for free by scientists.
This could be done not for profit or government funded (disclosure I work for a non-profit journal publisher) almost none of the expenses of publication are taking in a PDF, archiving it and paywalling it. The expenses are in review, curation and copy editing. For us this expense is millions of dollars a year and is public information.
We already have a free tier of publication in repositories like arXiv. There is still value in curation, selection and facilitating peer review and that cost is non zero.
The PhD scientists we have reviewing your papers, dealing with correspondence and selecting referees for further review are indeed not working for free. If there were a lot of people that wanted to spend a lot of time a day doing that we would not have to pay publishers for anything.
I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of this journals for a better of the decade. I personally know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not do anything more than it.
Here are our financials it is public. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131...
Not you but just in general sometimes HN is hard if you post an observation or direct experience that is not in the hivemind. You get downvoted for things even though they are well reasoned and true. I personally don't care if journals get disrupted there are indeed a lot of problems. I work in tech, I will have another job tomorrow. I was just making the point that we don't just have free scientists doing work and then upload PDFs to the internet and charge for them. If that was the case we could have journals for a few hundred dollars a month rather than the 10s of millions we spend. I also too think we are honest, do good work, are thrifty, and provide a good service.
Elsevier has a 37% profit margin which is insane.
My personal gut feeling, when I see those very high margins, is that's it's a clear cut case of capitalism not working right. Occasionally margins are high because of innovation and the position is deserved, but not in most cases. Visa and Mastercard have long been in the top handful of most profitable businesses in the world, making basically all their money on interchange. As a result, if you want to accept payments in America, you're eating around 2.5% of the transaction cost right off the bat. You might think okay, but they provide something in return, right? Fraud protection and security and support and all these important things - what would we do without them, without paying that 2.5% tax? Turns out we'd do fine. The EU capped interchange for debit cards at 0.2% in 2015 and things have worked perfectly fine ever since. Other high margin businesses are clearly not benefitting the world (e.x. Philip Morris.) Patent trolls and Verisign are both fabulously profitable, and they add zero value. And even if you like those businesses, there's an even more compelling case for regulating away Elsevier in its entirety.
If you're looking deeper into a business's financials, gross margin can be a useful metric, but for the layman gross margins are usually used for misleading purposes. For example, gross margins can be easily Tweeted to make the point that "this evil business is making money hand over fist by selling xyz", or to indicate that a business is doing better than it actually is (Uber and WeWork, for example, have positive gross margins.)
If you want to know the number representing how much Walmart paid for that chair vs how much you paid, you want to know the "markup". Markup is the difference between the cost of something and the price it is sold for. Confusingly enough, this is represented in different ways in different industries: some represent it as a fixed amount, some as a percentage of the total cost, and some as a percentage of the selling price. If you buy widgets for $4 and sell them for $8, your markup is $4: either (8-4)/8 = 50% of selling price, or (8-4)/4 = 100% of cost.
Markup as a percentage of cost can range from several hundreds of percent (luxury goods) to ~15% (grocery stores.) Restaurants usually mark up food around 60% and drinks around 75%-400% (markup 300% of cost = $6 beer that cost $1.50.) "Keystone" pricing is when the markup is equal to the cost (meaning the ring on sale for $10k cost them $5k) - and is common in many industries including the jewelry industry, although fancier jewelers charge far more and budget sources charge less. Car dealerships, funny enough, have a lower markup than people might expect, between 2 and 5% of cost for economy base-model cars and 15% for high end cars. You can add in a few more % when you start to additional features to the car. (Dealerships these days often make most of their money through financing, service, accessories, warranties, and selling used cars.)
It's very interesting to see historically high markups evaporating with direct-to-consumer sites like Aliexpress. But I've rambled enough in this comment already :)
Sci-Hub and arXiv both manage to be useful without peer-review (not everything these sites host is a pirate copy of a paywalled work), without being selective, and without copy editing. They archive and index, and each seems to do it much more cheaply than Elsevier.
The service Elsevier provides albeit at a high margin and predatory business tactics is more than just archiving and displaying a PDF. And Sci-Hub is stealing the extra value they provide by curation, and peer review facilitation. We might agree with it since they aren't a nice company but the costs of copy editing, curating and reviewing those papers is not being done by Sci-Hub they are just doing the cheapest part of the process by being a repository for paywalled papers. They aren't being more efficient publishers by getting the value add part for free. Someone has to pay for that part. And if Sci-Hub just hosted non pirated work that was not reviewed or copy-edited it would be just as laudable as arXiv.
SciHub seems to have value beyond any "anti-value" Elsevier has.
SciHub use is tortuous infringement in my country, this comment is in not way an endorsement of its use.
Yes there are many such repositories, but all are indexed e.g. by Google Scholar.
Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership.
We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
> But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances).
And to extend my thought from prior comment:
> Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
There are more than 20 already (more like 2000) when you start counting national/university-level preprint servers. As I said, Google Scholar already indexes all of these sites, with many nice features.
Personally I'm very fonf of exploring the two "citation light cones" emerging from one articles - those cited by the article (past) and those citing the article (future).
> Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
I think you're absolutely correct about this. But what I'm proposing (many repositories, indexed by search engines, together giving complete coverage) is exactly like that. A single archive, Sci-Hub style, is more like what Google is trying to do with AMP.
And also Netflix.
Federal agencies with research expenditures greater than than $100 million annually (which covers most federally funded research) are required to make publications they fund publicly available. This press release links to the executive order, which is still in force: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expandi....
The policy allows journals to generally have a one-year embargo, and agencies are allowed some latitude in how they implement the order, but most new federally funded research should become freely available on places like PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) after embargoes expire.
sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.
If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fraction of a fraction because there's 1) YouTube and 2) Spotify et al. You can listen to music all day with ads and not pay a cent, or you can pay a reasonable fee and get all the HQ music you can eat without ads. Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's another conversation.
Just trying to ban pirate sources is a wonderful dream for publishers for sure, but there's no way it can work. Scientific papers are just too easy to share, the need for them high, and the current pricing too insane for it to be otherwise.
I’m happy to say our daughters prognosis has improved greatly since she started this treatment. Without SciHub she might not still be with us.
When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer my dad poured over literally hundreds of medical papers to determine the best course of action. I believe he saved her life. Scihub was instrumental in that. I helped a little in checking and challenging his conclusions. I think it's unlikely she would have had as good an outcome if we'd just listened to the doctors.
My conclusion is if you want the best medical care be sure to do your own research and talk to many doctors about your findings and treatment options. Do not blindly trust the medical community. They are years behind the current state of knowledge in their field and just do not have the time and energy to spend per patient to get the best outcome.
I feel sort of sick remembering one meeting where they told us our daughter would get 24 hour nursing care covered by insurance if we got her a tracheotomy, what a weird carrot to dangle in front of a parent. I think they thought what they were suggesting was the best medical choice but a baby with a trach needs 24-hour care because it can’t even cry when the tube is in its throat.
Luckily I'm obstinate and finally saw a specialist who correctly identified it and treated it, but it's critically important to be very active in your own medical treatment. Get second (and third, and fourth..) opinions, raise lots of questions, push back (politely) against things that don't seem to make sense.
I would alter this slightly to "have a trusted advocate do research and talk to many doctors". The person with the life threatening diagnosis may not be in the right frame of mind to advocate for the best treatment. Should you ever find yourself in the hospital, having a capable ally alongside you can make a world of difference.
Could I connect you with some journalists? My contact info is in my profile.
SciHub gave me access to valuable information that helped me understand my condition and the right questions to ask my doctor next week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yval98eOyZc
http://minikanren.org/workshop/2020/minikanren-2020-paper10....
Anybody who wants to take it down is declaring war on the sick and disabled. Shut down Elsevier instead because they're an organization of long corrupt middlemen.
There's a company that is not public but working in this space, I cannot recall it's name. They use NLP to diagnose patient condition by ingesting raw information/text from medical books/papers. You describe how you feel and any other information that you have in an article, and it gives out possible conditions and prescription.
AFAIK, they still recommended that you go to the doctor, but you could use it as an extra to check the diagnosis yourself.
But their point was they have all the data coming out in new papers, and the system studies it constantly and is always kept up.
We read about a surgery that could potentially help our daughter, which the head of neurosurgery declined to do. We then said we’d take her to another children’s hospital (it turns out our insurance actually wouldn’t have covered that, but we didn’t know we were bluffing) and he begrudgingly agreed to perform the surgery. Had to get the expert who is a professor at Washington University to give a second opinion recommending surgery before it happened.
Most of the doctors really didn’t like my wife, there are notes about her obstinance in our daughters file. But our daughter is doing well, and I’m glad I married someone so doggedly persistent.
Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero.
Because according to EBM nothing exists and nothing works unless it's proven with a big RCT.
Yes, it's ridiculous. Especially as in your case.
RCT: randomized controlled trial?
Were the other four too lazy/orthodox to read the papers you're referencing? Or they read the papers and still thought it wasn't a good idea? I'm going to presume that the former is the case, unfortunately.
The way we think about it is a doctor has what, 15 minutes (if that) to spare thinking about our daughter languishing in the NICU. My wife spent literally all day, all night, ruminating and worrying about her. I had just started a new job, (I was unemployed when she was born!) and honestly poured myself into that position, maybe as a way to avoid living at the hospital (I’m not proud of it but that’s what happened). But it is weird we had to get the pulmonologist to prescribe a medication that’s something the neurologist should probably be prescribing.
I have personal experience with this as a patient and a family member of physicians. I wish I didn't know what docs say and think about their patients. It's a really unfortunate characteristic of the US medical system.
There could be any number of reasons; without more details, I think it's quite a leap to immediately assume they're "lazy/orthodox to read the papers".
I get why it happens: they have to deal directly with patients who 99% of the time are not research capable and if they claim to be research capable what they really mean is that they've been sharing conspiracy theories on facebook. Doctors build defense mechanisms against the nonsense (authoritative tone, dismissive attitude) that grate on academic sensibilities. They can be slow to come around but eventually they usually do.
As the doctors cycled out though it sort of reverted to the mean, back to the authoritarian stance you expect from doctors, since NICU doctors were constantly rotating out.
I think you’re absolutely correct about having dozens of other patients. My wife wrote a long email, that was forwarded to the doctors, citing various articles with links to the medical journals and the doctors couldn’t thank her enough for it. It wasn’t until that happened that someone prescribed the medication for her.
For instance, I have a background in biochemical engineering, my fiancée is a cancer surgeon, 4 cousins are doctors, and another 3 cousins married doctors. Yet the entire family collectively believes in homeopathy, unani medicine (Greek medicine) and other hogwash like cupping therapy, save for a select few. The last time I visited one of my relatives, they were ingesting some ayurvedic (Indian medicine) concoction that was later found to contain arsenic. One of my friends is daughter to two doctors, yet her Dad (a former Indian Army doctor, so not the run-of-the-mill kind) still spouted nonsense on Facebook like "burning Turmeric powder and inhaling it would prevent COVID".
It's easy to understand, after all this, why doctors tend to be generally skeptical of laymen bringing them some new "breakthrough". Not much to do with personality than with what they see as a daily occurrence. Of course, one way to sift the chaff away from the grain would be to demand that patients bring in scientifically published papers, at which point most patients would scoff at you for not supporting their viewpoint.
This kind of bullshit is too prevalent around here, sadly. And telling that ayurveda is pseudoscience instantly makes you "anti-national" and what not.
The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that moved.
Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and precluded any kind of pirate culture.
But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen, the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of momentum for moment.
Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted) the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.
This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to review papers, but one battle at a time.
Edit: Actually I usually sent emails even when we did have a hard copy but no online access. Just because I couldn't be bothered to find the physical copy
If a paper becomes prominent and many people want to read it, is it reasonable for the authors to be inundated with hundreds of requests for a copy?
What is the point of journals if we rely on word of mouth interactions to share information?
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
Microsoft office is ~$1000, which is 2x higher than average month salary in Thailand/Vietnam.
A CD album is $10(?), which is equivalent to 10 meals. A cassette is $3, which is 3 meals.
Pirate is the only way to access these things. It's a pricing problem.
Maybe I'm just older and have less free time, but public trackers seem less and less useful every year. And private trackers have a huge barrier to entry.
Maybe, but part of the reason content creators will keep getting screwed is that there’s no way to pay them equitably with $5/mo subscriptions. Prices would have to rise. So it seems that the market alternative to piracy is gross exploitation.
I don't accept as a given that my $10 a month subscription that I use to stream as few hours of music can't be fairly split with the publisher and the creator.
I can write a song, make a movie, and take photographs all from a pocket computer and publish globally instantly.
I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and politics the same way:
XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it should be more efficient and productive, people should choose it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest without coercion or propaganda. But, of course, that never happens.
(I'm also not sure that awesome == efficient + productive, but that's a different issue).
if awesome = neither effective nor productive then we're going to get mass starvation and mass death, or at the very least feudalism, and that doesn't sound nice
I know of no competitive natural system that's more wasteful than its competitors
laisez faire is no way to solve the tragedy of the commons
A monopoly is MAGLIGNANT FUCKING TERATOMA!
Excuse my emphasis and emotion, but that's the best analogy I can come up with.
Unless of course you want an economic or dictionary definition, but I don't think that's what you were asking.
Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level researcher who haven't used scihub.
We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please stop pushing humanity to backward direction.
Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink?
0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1321494146989907969?r...
If they aren't centered in the news like they are constantly, I'm not sure that they wouldn't just fade away to competitors.
Really?
It’s legit, just not via official distribution channels.
Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating content and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that Twitter HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy. They are not beholden to their users or any other oversight.
> Counterfeit goods are goods, including digital goods, that are promoted, sold, or otherwise distributed using a trademark or brand that is identical to, or substantially indistinguishable from, the registered trademark or brand of another, without authorization from the trademark or brand owner. Counterfeit goods attempt to deceive consumers into believing the counterfeit is a genuine product of the brand owner, or to represent themselves as faux, replicas or imitations of the genuine product.
An unauthorized copy simply isn't counterfeit unless it is promoted as official. There's a legit copyright argument, but Twitter's rules (correctly) don't apply unless the copyrighted material is on Twitter.
> Anyhow, another case of Twitter capriciously moderating content and quelling free speech. The worst part though is that Twitter HQ sets the policy to whatever suits their fancy.
The suppression of speech is the symptom here, not the root problem. I doubt Twitter is doing this because they have an axe to grind against SciHub. Likely, an executive got a call from the journals and then told the moderation teams to figure out how to ban them.
I think the root issue is that tech/media companies are becoming a bit of a shadow-government where people with influence can shut down their competitors. And the journals probably feel they were entirely justified in "lobbying" Twitter, since SciHub is violating their copyright.
This isn't new, businesses have always made private agreements to screw each other, and the only reason we don't have smoke-filled back rooms these day is people don't smoke much. What's new is that big information / infrastructure / financial platforms are a far more influential feature of the modern political economy.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/counterfeit-g...
Nevertheless, the account itself is not distributing either fake products or copyrighted products (one could argue the service which uses Twitter for comms, violates copyrights, but not the Twitter handle itself.)
I mean, why not ban the accounts for all accused criminals? There should be a firewall between the content of the Twitter account and the entity(ies) behind the accounts.
I really loathe how they are deciding what is permissible to say (as well as determining what IRL actions are non-grata and affect status of the a Twitter account. (We don’t like what we heard second hand that person said or did, so we’ll suspend or terminate account).
I don't think there's any reason to expect Twitter to honor the right to free speech as described in the US constitution as they aren't associated with the US federal or any US state government. Any management of content on the site will be done only to the extent that it benefits Twitter monetarily.
In my opinion, there's no good reason to expect anything different.
It’s become the miss “Goody Two Shoes” bully network, unfortunately.
And make no mistake, people are trying to have her killed.
"Elbakyan may be working with Russian military intelligence. The story says she may have been stealing US military secrets from defense contractors"
I just copy/pasted this horseshit from Elsevier’s website right now.
Let's provide her with the support and strength to win this war.
"Sci-hub", Elbakyan A. et al
is definitely an academic trend I'd support :)
https://www.elsevier.com/connect/allegations-linking-sci-hub...
And how is sci-hub connected to that?
Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub.
scihub.org/donate/ looks scam.
https://sci-hub.tech/donation/ at least has the same bitcoin address as sci-hub.do, but as for PayPal et al... ???
SciHub.org was formed in 2008 and has 50 employees per CrunchBase.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/science-hub
Real organization, coincidentally a very similar domain and area of work.
(Currently redirects to https://sci-hub.41610.org/)
are the only working domains that have been linked from the official Twitter, VK, or FB accounts.
All other URLs should be considered unofficial or scams.
To be sure try searching for some random paywalled academic paper on their site
The issue here isn't that the users of scihub are being defrauded by thinking they're ordering Prada and instead getting knockoffs.
Not saying I endorse scihub BTW, just that the excuse given doesn't jive at all with reality.
So, maybe the situation is quite analog: The paper you download is actually more or less the same as the original, but you haven't paid the rights holder, so it's counterfeit.
It's like I bought a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags and, for some reason, decided to sell them off for a fraction of a price. If you bought one from me, you'd buy an original bag, not a counterfeit one.
What a shame there aren't more decentralised services like email, the web and Usenet (which is now pretty much dead).
Twitter can do pretty much what it wants to who it wants, and they don't have to give a reason.
Maybe you get banned due to an algorithm mistake. Or an individual contracted by Twitter who doesn't like what you said. Or maybe they misunderstand what you said due to cultural differences.
I found my time on Twitter was fighting against a US-biased culture, and what I consider friendly banter with friends can be misconstrued as abuse by some random moderator or algorithm.
Only assholes decide unilaterally for other adults what they're allowed to see and read.
Stop using twitter.
It's only going to get worse if you keep using social media. Delete your accounts while you can.
I stopped using it. If they Can Block the president then fuck them,,, One way to stop twitter and facebook is for the 75 million people that voted for president trump to stop using twitter and facebook...
My point wasn't that xeroxing books is good or bad, just that coming up with arguments against it is easy and so is for research paper piracy. Having worked for a while in research, I absolutely condone what sci-hub does and used it many times.
Yeah and not able to use google about his own work.. The debate is pretty clearly explained everywhere.
That said I have, more controversially, the same opinion about movie piracy. In general don't understand how you can feel good defending Goliath vs David. (The cinema industry never earnt so much money so far, at least pre-covid).
Alexandra challenges this publicly by sending a bunch of randomized small "slices" of the db to be hashed.
Bob publicly broadcasts the requested hashes, and Alexandra publicly claims they all match. (Also, assume the hash-checker is publicly available and anyone who dares can use it to check their own copy of the db and verify Bob's hashes.)
If this is the extent of Bob's network activity, can Bob get in trouble in the U.S.?
Being federated means posts on Scihub can be seen on other mastodon instances. This allows Scihub to allow a select few users to join their instance without limiting visibility of their content as it can still be seen and interacted with through another mastodon instance.
As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that disregards and breaches copyright.
If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer areas (Trump), you shouldn’t be surprised when they do the same for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub).
It scares me that these big tech companies are becoming arbitrators for what many people see. The worst part is that it is allowing the US oligarchy to further influence the rest of the world too.
Social media also needs to be completely reformed so moderation policy and enforcement isn't up to a small collection of individuals living in the United States.
I find both to be an abuse of power by Twitter. Sec. 230 protects Twitter from being accountable for content produced by its users. At the same time, it wants to engage in political activism at an organizational level.
Twitter wants to be the all-powerful Editor-in-chief with power to censor the world's headlines. But, they also want to be unaccountable for the content produced by its platform. That is blatantly hypocritical.
A corporate entity with pure profit motives and without the people's mandate, should not have the power to control speech without accountability.
Twitter banning Trump/conservatives= good. Twitter banning people I dont like= Bad.
BLM violent protests= good. Trump violent protests = bad.
HKers assaulting the parliament= good. Americans doing the same= bad.
Assange exposing conservatives=good. Assange exposing democrats= jail the bastard.
The horseshoe model is more alive than never before.
In the case of Sci-Hub what part of the ToS do they violate? The message cites counterfeiting, which doesn't seem to apply (unless that's a translation issue?). And if Piracy is a violation of their terms then why are there plenty of piracy torrent websites with Twitter presences still [2]? At least apply it evenly.
[1] https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1266267447838949378 https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1323868590047744000
[2] Not linking directly, just search for the pirate bay, eztv, or any other torrent site. There are at least one or more handles claiming to be them.
At the end of the day Twitter moderates its own service, which is just their managers and random team members. Twitter sets the rules and can find any justification to ban whoever they want. Do you really think Twitter constrains themselves by their rules? I don't, they will change those rules if they want.
As a major source of information, is that what you want? Is getting bogged down in ToS details really the important issue here?
If we yell at Twitter and demand them to ban certain content, they are also going to exercise that power when it serves their interests too. You can't have it both ways.
My main concern is about even application of their policies across the board. If they say something is against their ToS and want to ban it, fine, that's on them. But apply that same thing to everyone. I don't like banning one piracy site but not another. Or banning random folks but not the President. I understand why it happens, just feels more wrong to me than any singular policy decision.
In my opinion: Should they ban misinformation? Yes. Should they ban piracy? I want to say no, but if I am really thinking about it they probably should when actually compared with the other things I say yes to. Makes me wonder what kind of ethics theory there is around these kinds of situations. Probably some good reading out there. Anyone know of any good things to read on the subject?
but the solution isn't screaming at Twitter. The solution is using our freedom of speech and expression to start creating and supporting other services. I know that's hard, but at least in your personal life, try to use ActivityPub services and encourage everyone else to do so. Set up a Mastodon and Pleroma server and give invites to all your friends.
Now I have done this and on my personal server, like 20+ friends have created accounts and to day .. only one still uses them. It will take time, and really only you can take care of yourself.
Also, long-from blog. Follow any friends that blog with and RSS reader. Encourage everyone else to use an RSS reader. Why the hell are we using Twitter when you can follow the blogs and news sites with RSS? You can see which news sites have new articles, rather that letting Facebook and Twitter decide the order and type of information your receive.
Ungated media such as Usenet of various moderation-free zones online also fail.
There's an inherent cconflict between complete freedom of access -- a sort of full-body local contact or intimacy, and and of distance, time, and/or scale.
Distribution and scale presume a gating function somewhere. The only remaining question is what the channel biases for.
My consumption of information is so much better now that I have had to seek out reliable sources.
Contrast that with Trump who has been very clearly violating twitter TOS on a daily basis.
How has Trump violated Twitter's TOS on a daily basis? It feels like every policy that has been put up is typically put up specifically for Trump.
I don't see how people can post photos of Kathy Griffin showing a decapitated Trump head as being kosher, or CNN's Como saying violent protest is constitutionally protected, and claim Trump is violating TOS. It's hypocrisy.
These examples don't appear to be hypocritical to me on the surface, but I am certainly open to more information. Many people are not happy with Kathy Griffin doing that, on both sides. And I am honestly not sure how Cuomo saying that violates anything, could you explain? Or point me in the direction of it? I had not heard about it. If it does violate their ToS, then he should have received a suspension or at least warning too.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/civic-int... https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/2020-elec...
If Russian authorities call another dubious election in favor of Putin, do we just accept that now and ban any dissenting opinions?
I mean after all their authorities have set the official narrative, isn't anything else misinformation now?
Twitter is US based but they purposefully operate in a multi-national manner serving users across the world, so it's easy to argue that there is some responsibility.
If Twitter wants to play arbitrator and set that expectation to the international community, what happens when they don't remove "misinformation" in other countries?
I don't know whether Sci-hub has violated Twitter ToS (on the platform) but it doesn't surprise me that Twitter would want to distance itself from an organization that is committed to breaking the law. A more dramatic/extreme example would be whether we would think it is ok for other illegal organisations/services (e.g terrorists) to be on Twitter if they weren't breaking ToS on the platform, I suspect many would say no.
On Trump, it wouldn't surprise me if he broke Twitter ToS on the platform but you would have to admit that his ban would involve greyer interpretation of his tweets than a black-white ban of a service that aims to break the law.
And I say this as a big support of sci-hub too.
Generally speaking delete Facebook/Twitter/etc, I did and it has been a big improvement to my life.
These are people not some principled institutions.
Download the web app from http://gen.lib.rus.ec/code/libgen_legacy_catalog_20190831.ra...
Download the database from http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/
I would be unable to mirror LibGen and Sci-Hub with what is currently available. I would be ECSTATIC to be proven wrong.
https://vk.com/sci_hub?w=wall-36928352_5896
Obvious global accessibility conerns are obvious.
Moreover, most academic research in the US is government funded, so citizens deserve access to publications.
It would run off our mobile devices and PC sort of like bitorrent.
I am aware of webtorrent (web based torrenting p2p) for videos and such but still nothing in production.
IMHO, the next person that comes up with a highly scalable, decentralized, widely distributed mesh network of devices to securely transfer files between peers will not be a rich man but he would be a hero, I personally would donate a large chunk of money just to keep it afloat for others.
Sort of like a "public funded public utility" software.
It's also available on mobile [2].
youtube: https://joinpeertube.org/
The fediverse checks many of the boxes you mentioned. While I personally enjoy using it, it still lacks usability for many people, I think.
instagram: https://pixelfed.org/
blogger: https://write.as/
soundcloud: https://funkwhale.audio/
At the end of the day, though, the Fediverse is just like any other social network - most people join because their friends or people they know have.
If your content gets censored it would be archived on the fallback fediverse, therefore neutralizing their ban hammer?
Really, I'd be happy with a way to seamlessly follow friends / public figures that are on FANG + Twitter, even if it's a one way road.
https://www.cnet.com/news/joe-bidens-pro-riaa-pro-fbi-tech-v...
http://techrights.org/2020/11/09/biden-riaa-and-mpaa/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dem-vp-pick-bidens-tech-policy-...
https://apnews.com/article/technology-50e69e921c6699a3edbd73...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/21/big-techs-stealth-push-to-in...
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jo...