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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

As someone that went through university solely thanks to Sci-Hub I value any effort that can be put into making scientific papers more available. I would have never been able to pay for all the papers I had to access and, in my case, I only got a smoother experience using uni available content in my last semester, so...

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Sci-Hub was an incredible achievement. It was the closest humanity came to the interconnected sharing of knowledge we dreamed the Internet would be in the 20th century.

And they tried their hardest to kill it because journals believe they're entitled to extract a century of rent from work they did not perform.

Something I wrote related to this in 2001: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society" https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations."

Glad to see better policy happening -- even if all too slowly and only in some areas.

Scihub is the best. They are doing a huge service to humanity.

Just saying, sci-hub (and libgen) has turned off in my country (Netherlands). Like, they block access at an ISP level — and all ISPs and phone companies are blocking it. I imagine there might be a measurable decline in academic productivity, at that point.

Anyway, the warning is: liberal free countries can stop these things if they want to.

So… it’s up to us the public. Why can’t university libraries make their books and journals properly accessible in a digital format, like libgen and sci-hub? Why can’t they make their whole collection RAG retrivable, for that matter?

Turned off how? Like a Chinese firewall kind of thing? Are you not able to simply VPN around the block?

I've also had some trouble accessing them in Denmark. They're still available on Tor though.

they also had a telegram channel which sent you the papers.

I recommend a good vpn, such as Mullvad.

But I agree, countries should not allow this kind of authoritarian practices.

Is there an actual court order in effect, or is it some kind of tacit agreement between ISPs?

Dynamic court order. Meaning they can block any new address under the order without returning to court. https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-court-orders-isp-to-block-ann...

I wouldn't be surprised if the fact that Elsevier is a Dutch company had something to do with it.

Is Anna's Archive also blocked?

It is certainly not true that all ISPs and phone companies in the Netherlands are blocking Sci-Hub. Both my home ISP and my phone provider don't, and I'm also not aware of, nor can I find any, legal requirements for ISPs to block it. Dutch ISPs aren't in the habit of blocking things without being legally required to. Which provider are you on that does block it? That would normally be significant news and get picked up by various publications.

Here is one older article about it. It appears to only cover the larger ISPs — https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-court-orders-isp-to-block-ann...

Thanks for the link. That is specifically about LibGen and Anna's Archive, and links to the general agreement that when a court orders one ISP to block a pirate site, others will also block it. I suppose in situations where Sci-Hub forwards you to LibGen (does it still do that?) that means you'll be blocked regardless of the blocking status of Sci-Hub itself.

I am still unable to find any news about court orders relating to Sci-Hub in particular. The biggest ISPs appear to not publish their block lists unfortunately. I did find that Delta publishes their list[1] of blocked sites which includes only sites for which I can also find news about court orders, and does not include Sci-Hub.

I queried the KPN DNS servers and they return a KPN IP address for LibGen, but a DDOS-Guard IP address for Sci-Hub, so that leads me to believe KPN doesn't block them either at least.

[1]: https://www.delta.nl/geblokkeerd/

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