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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

I am no scientist, and I have no access to paywalled platforms and publications. So Sci-Hub is my only available option, and it is increadibly valuable when it comes to doing research on a specific topic. - I can remember the old days of the internet, pre-wikipedia, when encyclopedias were a paid thing. And I did not have the means to subscribe to them. And I remember the days of the internet pre sci-hub, where a layman had no access to publications. Those were sad days. We should not go back to those days. Everyone should support efforts that are towards the vision of shared knowledge, accessible by anyone. Especially in a world where misinformation is spreading like a virus.

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Not to take away from Sci-Hub, but even without institutional access, there are often alternatives:

- more and more research institutes have a public repository of articles.

- plenty of authors put their own (preprints of) papers on their personal website, a preprint server like arxiv, or researchgate.

- lastly, you can mail an author and request a preprint. Not all will reply, but plenty will be happy that someone noticed their work and send a copy.

CiteSeerˣ is a great resource for CS papers: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index

Imagine if every citation contained a URL: "Email author to request a preprint". Authors often include email addresses in papers or at least an affiliated instution. Their contact information is usually public. Aside from people who have been graduate students not many doing research are going to understand that this is possible. Never have I seen a citations service that makes users aware of it. There must be reasons they dont.

Those take effort and time (hours or days) to make them work. Sci-Hub type solutions are the only way to make this work at scale.

Oh definitely it takes more effort than Sci-Hub. Should've mentioned that in the post.

For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess.

That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience.

Mailing works as a last resort option.

Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.

> That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience.

That's a fraction of the citations on most interesting papers. I'm not a practicing scientist (now or ever) so my access patterns are different but every time I explore a topic in academic journals that process becomes prohibitively expensive almost immediately. Even when I had institutional access it was a pain in the ass - without SciHub every doi is a game of subscription roulette.

I do not know, I use scholar.google.com and most of the publications not accessible for free. It is impossible to ignore a publication if you do not have access to it, it is highly demotivating, like doing something that is already done.

Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.

All of your solutions require extra manual work, and are therefore inferior.

And most importantly, only work some % of the time.

So if you have access to all the papers anyway, why make it harder than it has to be? What is the point of shutting down sci-hub?

Maybe scihub was a protoevent quickly dying but spreading the way to do on other official places.

Many of the papers I'm interested in are published long ago and the authors dead.

For some reason, they're also slow to respond to emails.

For any papers published before 1965, even with maximal renewals available at the time of publication, the works would now be in the public domain under copyright law at the time of publication. Otherwise, many works published prior to 1976 which were either only renewed once or never registered would similarly have lapsed to public domain, or always been so.

That's a huge effectively-lost trove of knowledge.

If you have a public university nearby, you can access most popular journals in the libraries. Since they are state funded, generally any resident of the state has a right to use their libraries.

My cheat code for research publications is to go to a University library on weekends, one of the universities that will actually let you in if you're not a student or staff, and download all the publications I want or need onto a USB stick.

But none of the stuff should be behind paywalls in the first place if it was funded by the government of any nation. Good luck fixing that.

if I had fewer scruples I'd infect one of the library computers and use it as a VPN from home. or maybe tuck an rPi behind a bookshelf and have it connect/bounce through WiFi. the easiest legal way would probably be for me to enroll somewhere and take some classes I'm already interested in.

Straight from Wikipedia:

> In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he committed suicide. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.

It is impossible to talk about this without getting emotional, especially on a site like Hacker News, so I won't.

The optics of this from a power and privilege perspective is abyssmal.

I can just imagine how negatively this effects scientists and researchers in the developing world, that lack so much content because these miscreants have absconded with so much from us. They did not create this content, they are worse than accursed gatekeepers, serving only to compile the work of others, then extract blood. Infernal blood sucking parasites are what these companies are.

By nature of my well heeled employer I have access to almost everything. However, I think it is unconscionable now, how much of it is paywalled, rent-extracted, and hidden from view. That so much of the world is missing out on this information because some extortionists want $ for something they had minimal, if any, involvement in creating.

Support how?

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