Sci-Hub founder receives EFF award for providing access to scientific knowledge
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
> “Why did not they want to give the award to me directly? Sci-Hub is my sole creation; it is not an organization and never had any team. In 1998 they awarded Torvalds, not Linux,” she added.
Definitely understandable, especially considering that the DOJ/FBI were investigating her directly.
- Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan — EFF Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge
- Library Freedom Project — EFF Award for Information Democracy
- Signal Foundation — EFF Award for Communications Privacy
Yes, it's possible. Their current web gate: https://standard--template--construct-org.ipns.dweb.link/
More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/13cms8m/how_to_use_...
For the new papers, a significant percentage can be found as preprints in arxiv or the like, or are published in open-access journals, so the difficulty in obtaining them is typically less than for older papers that are still important.
Moreover, even if I pay a non-negligible amount of money for the access at certain journals, I frequently prefer to search for their articles on Scihub, because I can get them so much faster, without wasting time with logins or with searching for articles in the wrong place, because they were published elsewhere.
Btw, using this opportunity to remind everybody about her donation page: https://sci-hub.ru/donate
Since 2017 she's pursuing her research in Russian universities (although she maybe partially doing it remotely) https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra
Annual EFF Awards: Alexandra Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal (248 points, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899608
I can't say that about many organizations.
A lot of the reason that Sci-Hub content has stalled in more recent users is security around accounts (MFA, SAML etc).
The reason there is still a lot of warnings floating around about using Sci-Hub is the threat that publishers hold over Unis in terms of licensing and the users understanding the threat to their accounts/personal data.
The method of getting the papers was bad, even if the reasoning was good.
Hopefully more Universities continue focusing on open access of their research in line with BOAI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiativ...).
How can I claim this?! When both copyrights and patents were invented the longest 'corporate charter' a company could hold was 6 months in total.
Patents and Copyrights were designed to aid fledgling businesses in America compete against the behemoth industrial machines of England, Spain, France, and Europe in general. Companies in those countries were expansionist and simply bought out any serious competition.
Our country's founders didn't want that system taking hold of American economics, so invented protections against such things occurring here.
Remove the copyrights and patents from ANY multinational corporation. If it's not an American-ONLY based company -where money isn't shipped wholesale overseas- then they can no longer enjoy patents or copyrights in America.
POOF... problem solved.
They had zero IP and were building a country on stolen IP, of course they wanted to play fast and loose.
Now that the US has IP and others dont, they are doing what they do best, The World Police.
Now the MPA and copyright holders can dismiss their testimony out of hand for being that group that gave an award to a copyright infringer. Not that the MPA or John Deere would’ve respected the EFF anyway, but I’m sure it’s going to be mentioned in future court cases as a way to discredit the arguments.
The thing I'm against is the government telling me that I can't strip DRM. But I think it's everybody's right to wrap their creations in a puzzle; it's just cheating to get the cops to hit me with a stick if I try to solve that puzzle, or try to tell anyone else how to solve it.
Scihub saves you from finding the email address of one of the authors and waiting for a reply for your request for a copy of the paper.
I'd be surprised and disappointed if a party like the EFF would be against free access to scientific knowledge. That includes educational books on the Internet Archive.
It's possible to support and encourage free access to scientific knowledge while not supporting IP infringement.
Is not supporting IP infringement a necessary precondition to supporting and encouraging free access to scientific knowledge?
I think there are many people who believe that this knowledge should be out there regardless of potential copyright violations.
This is assuming that spreading knowledge as effectively as possible is the only goal. Even if you take a utilitarian approach to ethics, I doubt anyone has this as their only goal.
> The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.
I think what is and isn't related to morality is at least somewhat subjective.
Not even theoretically. IP is the concept that people should be prevented from reading things without negotiating with the people who own them. So "free access" quite obviously requires that future "scientific knowledge" be excluded from IP protection, and that people who already own "scientific knowledge" be compelled and/or bribed into relinquishing their ownership.
And to expand, those options would also require the government to define what is "scientific knowledge" and what is not. Or else, I could just call my paper a satire and Elsevier could become a publisher of satires.
My personal opinion is this: tax dollars pay for a huge proportion of the research that is then reviewed by volunteers (whose pay also comes out of taxes) and then published in journals that charge insane prices to host a PDF of this taxpayer-funded research. Sci-Hub takes this publicly-funded research and makes it available to the public like it always should have been.
It's possible authors might be forced to pay publishing fees for open access, which would then inflate grant budgets (since this only applies to government research, this means the taxpayer is footing the bill). They may choose to be open access by default, in which case, another source of revenue will be necessary. Part of the challenge is that for many academics, it's necessary for advancement to publish in prestigious venues which are not always open access.
https://cen.acs.org/policy/publishing/White-House-mandates-i...
However, some money is still required and I'm not sure where this would come from aside from funds collected from either authors or consumers (institutional or otherwise). I'm not saying the model we have is the only possible model, just that I don't think there's an obvious alternative that solves all the various aspects of the problem.
Q: Do content creators (the scientists and researchers) approve or disapprove of Sci Hub?
The pirates are Elsevier etc.