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Comment by tbabej | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder how this is going to play out. For those who don't follow the current situation with Sci-Hub, Alexandra (the creator and likely the sole operator) of Sci-Hub shut down the part of the website ("the magical proxy") that is responsible for fetching the papers that were not previously retrieved. This was done to comply with the request of the Indian court, as described in the article.

As a result, any papers published in 2021 (and some of the rarer, older ones, that nobody tried to access in the past) are not retrievable by Sci-Hub. The user only gets to see a white screen.

This is meant to be a temporary measure, but it's been going on since December of last year (due to various court hearing delays), and the desperation in online communities like the r/scihub subreddit has been palpable [1,2].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/o2xb57/how_do_i_eve... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...

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I'm pessimistic. Long before sci-hub, library genesis and Alexandra there was ebook-club / library.nu and Smiley (its creator). When it closed it was described as the burning of the library of Alexandria. There were a lot of non-technical books on that site and it was amazing. Still, it lost the battle.

Ultimately, sci-hub will unfortunately get the same end. Until the Scientific society stops maintaining the leeches that are the scientific journals, nothing will change.

If sci-hub goes down it will significantly disrupt nearly every scientific researcher, in every field, all over the world. After getting used to a world where every paper is obtainable, it would be very difficult for people to go back.

I’m not really a scholar or academic per se, but the independent research I do (which involves skimming thousands of papers per year, 99% of which are irrelevant or useless) would be an order of magnitude harder without sci-hub. Most paywalled papers I just would never bother to read, unless I happened to be sitting in a university library or something.

For researchers in most universities almost every paper is obtainable without scihub.

This is not true for most universities around the world. Only wealthy ones in first-world countries. All of my father’s academic colleagues in Mexico use Sci-Hub daily, and rely on it for access to literature.

But beyond that, there are paywalled journals which Harvard does not subscribe to. There are journals which the University of California does not subscribe to. (Or pick your favorite university, and there will be some paywalled journals it does not subscribe to.) Almost all are on Sci-Hub.

Moreover, even in the USA/Europe, there are many researchers who are not affiliated with any university, and many laypeople who look up scientific literature from time to time. For instance a great many paywalled papers are directly relevant to working computer programmers, but not worth $35/paper + bureaucratic hassle to evaluate.

Are the people whose work will be disrupted people who the top-tier scientific community care about?

As a working programmer I'd like to have access to scientific papers, but realistically no researcher is going to care whether I do. If the pain isn't being felt by top-tier researchers and top-tier universities, I doubt anyone will be able to change it.

> no researcher is going to care whether I [read their papers]

Researchers absolutely want people to read and use their work! That’s why they do it! Having some practical impact on people making things in industry is super gratifying to the researchers I know, much more than just having the same tiny circle of known collaborators read and cite each-other’s papers in theoretical or small-scale academic prototype work.

Yes. It includes many members of the top-tier scientific community.

For many of them, the reason we get the benefits of these top-tier people is because of sci-hub.

It's obscene that scientific literature is walled away from the public.

Especially when the public often paid for said research at least in part.

Previously publishers did improve the papers and checked them. Those times are long gone and it is questionable what their purpose might be today.

IP law has long been abused to stifle development instead of protecting it. In this case it might stifle scientific research.

The Journal system is basically academic job protection for wealthier countries, but this factor is never talked about aloud, as it is a) unscientific and anti-enlightenment behavior and b) exposes the hypocrisy that is creating loads of competition for unskilled labor, while crippling the competition for mental labor.

So why not call the system what is? The guild of knowledge.

I still vividly remember when the eastern-block opened, and all those excellent Russian mathematicians who went into the west, were not recognized when it came to there degrees in europe. "The brightest minds of a generation work here" in the university brochure? Don't make me laugh.

Exactly! I had the opportunity to both work in the academic field in Mexico and study in the UK and the difference of resources is abysmal: Access to Scopus, access to Elsevier and other editorials is something most researchers in Mexico can only dream about.

I’m a researcher at a first world university. I used sci-hub to pirate my own papers cus we did not have a subscription to the journal anymore. I’m not paying $39 to read my own work!

As a researcher, I'm not sure why you didn't have a preprint copies as all other authors I have met did.

Wasn’t at home, don’t have them in my Dropbox.

I think they meant, why not upload then on arXiv.org

See https://arxiv.org/help/submit. That will make your paper easily accessible to all. And, of course, to yourself, wherever you are.

Wasn't allowed by the journal as it'd be considered prior publication. Used to be quite common in the medical field actually, COVID is slowly changing that luckily.

Does your institution's library not offer interlibrary loan?

Those aren't free in most libraries I've been to and don't apply to everything (don't quote me on this, but since journals are basically subscription services, their articles aren't actually owned by the library and they might not be able to loan them out further).

Interesting. I've never been a patron of a public library in the United States that charged patrons fees for ILL, and neither of the universities I've attended charged for it, either.

My own academic library where I work used to have a per-semester limit and charged for requests over it but we eliminated it for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was skewing our acquisition decisions. When we did charge, the cost was less than what you'd pay at a publisher's website.

It is true that some vendor content doesn't allow ILL, but it's in the minority. In 2009 the Information Delivery Services Project found around 15% of publishers do not permit ILL at all while 46% permit it with no restrictions. The rest are in-between, applying restrictions like no lending outside of the US or to commercial entities. https://idsproject.org/documents/IDS%20Project%20licensing.p...

Here it's around 8€ per unit for national ILL and 17-38€ for international (depends on the system it goes through and may be even higher in special cases). You can also get copies of articles for a bit less, but that's not always available.

None of that is unreasonably expensive, but I can see it adding up quickly if you need to order like half of the things in your references (which might happen if your institution isn't subscribed to one of the bigger journals in your field).

If your peers thing that you need to cite the paper X because is relevant for the theme, you need to obtain it and pay for it. To decide to ignore parts of knowledge because you don't like its distribution mode is not an option.

The result will be less science, slower science and independent scientists being pushed out of the road. They would try to recruit them later under the ridiculous 'citizen scientists' category ('missionary scientists' would be an even better term), but this is what we have. Every single people trying to break monopolies or introduce changes for the benefit of the entire humanity in the past two decades has been laminated as a public warning for newcomers.

> If your peers thing that you need to cite the paper X because is relevant for the theme, you need to obtain it and pay for it.

Let's rephrase that:

"If you can't afford the journal subscriptions that allow you to access all of the papers your peers think are relevant for you to cite, then you shouldn't release your research at all."

Whose world ends up with "less science", again?

Don't have much hope for the legal system on the subcontinent. Indian, Pakistani, Deshi courts are all legendary slow. It's nearly impossible to win against concerted, deliberate extension, and delay tactic against somebody who has more money to write legal letters than you.

Unlike the GB legal system, from which they branched out, they never got the reformation wave circa 1960-1970 when UK was trying to root out the most outrageous flaws of English law.

There was a now legendary legal dispute over land near either Multan, or Kohat, can't remember exactly, which began in 19th century, outlasted 6, or 7 generations, and ended just few years ago.

I would be surprised if Kohat wasn’t under FCR when that began

I'm very confused, why would she ever have to comply with orders of an Indian (or indeed, US) court if she resides in Europe?

It's explained in the original article.

She doesn’t have to comply with the Indian court order. She chose to because she thinks she has a chance of winning the case. To her, a court ruling that SciHub is legal under Indian law would be a huge win. Obeying the court order increases the odds the court will rule in her favour. It is a calculated risk on her part.

She did not have to, but she voluntarily chose to, in order to have a shot of winning this case. If she didn't comply with the court's orders, I assume the chances of winning would plummet. From the article:

> One reason is that Elbakyan believes she has a shot at winning the case, and her odds might improve if she plays by the rules. “I want the Indian court to finally support free access to science,” she said. If that happened, it would mark a significant victory for Sci-Hub, with reverberations likely beyond India. Victory remains a longshot, but Elbakyan thinks it’s worth the hassle and expense. She didn’t even bother to contest the two lawsuits in the United States.

Can third parties (especially foreigners) finance legal battles in India? Can we donate?

You can donate to her directly.

There is no hard restriction on how lawyers are paid . Judges may limit something in some specific cases etc, also they have paperwork to do for any foreign income for tax purposes. That's not unusal in many countries.

There maybe optics problem occasionally if local issue gets international funding it can undermine support etc, here the other party copyright holders are also international and she /libgen is also not local, so perhaps not as much a problem her funding comes globally

It's explained in the article. She thinks there is a chance to win the case in India which would be a useful publicity stunt and therefore complies with the court order.

> win the case in India which would be a useful publicity stunt

It isn't just about publicity, it is also about legal precedent.

In the English common law system, a judge is allowed to cite not just precedent from within their own country's legal system, but also precedent from courts in foreign common law jurisdictions. Foreign courts are not binding precedent, but a judge is allowed to say they are persuaded by the foreign court's reasoning. The propriety of citing foreign court judgements has become rather controversial in the US, but in England and other common law jurisdictions it is an accepted practice which few question.

I doubt a legal precedent from India is going to persuade the courts of developed countries like UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Even though most of those are technically allowed to consider Indian court decisions (as a fellow common law jurisdiction), they rarely give Indian courts much heed in practice. But it may be much more influential with the courts of developing countries in Africa and elsewhere. That's what Elbakyan is trying to do, win a case in India and then use that as a springboard to winning cases in other countries too.

And a digital safe haven in India would be pretty huge, and if it spreads to African nations that could open up more DNS registrars at the very least.

It would also be a good way for China and Russia to allow scihub to operate from their countries, just to send a big F#@% you to US (ACS) and Netherlands (Elsevier) who have been especially violent against sci-hub.

She doesn't, but many people really really want to change this. See this discussion from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662701

The topic of borders and the Internet is a really weird one in general. Somehow the very same people who would like Alexandra to flout any laws will jump up and down and yell "Google should be forced to do what my country tells it". Personally I find this baffling.

You can recognise some laws are good for everyone and some as unethical - it's not an invalid position. For example (on an extreme end), I believe murder being illegal is right, but pot possession being illegal is not. In the less extreme middle, (and more contentious) I believe antitrust laws used against google are sometimes good and restrictions on access to / use of publicly funded research is not.

Everyone loves an underdog.

Those are completely different situations. Google should obey countries they earn money from. Sci-Hub doesn’t make money.

You should comply with the laws of the country your operating in, yes. Google has different versions of its offerings for different countries, as it should be. She changed scihub for everyone, though, not just Indians, that's the difference.

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