Some ways I can think of:
* Get her elected as rector of a university. Contraversial figures are sometimes elected as Rector, at least in the UK, because students are the electorate. However for the same reason this isn't considered especially prestigious by people who know this.
* Fund and create an academic post specifically for her (Ptolomy II Professor of the ethics of copyright strikes me a a suitably biting title [1])
* Nominate her to some well known prize
[1] Ptolomy II decreed that any book found in a ship in the port of Alexandria should be copied by the scribes of his library - with or without the permission of the owner. The UK actually has a similar law in that publishers are required to send copies of any book published in the UK to the British Library
It's a shame Elbakyan hasn't written a paper about sci-hub that people can cite. Many software packages do that, to give academics an obvious way to cite them.
On nominations: the Nobel nomination process is very open (iirc, any relevant professor can make a nomination). For that reason it is also largely meaningless, but that doesn't stop many people boasting about it, and chunks of the media enabling them. So this is leaning a long way towards fake news, but is also something a single person could do.
[Publishers claim sites like Sci-Hub] “have no incentive to ensure the accuracy of scientific articles, no incentive to ensure published papers meet ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct articles if issues arise.”
The correct response to this should be to always note in citations when a paper was accessed through sci-hub. Then the reader is warned, and can compare against the canonical version if they are worried.
The science has changed to fake paper mill to advance the careers of people in the countries with weak institutions.
The accuracy of articles themselves and the integrity of them is trivial to establish as SciHub, LibGen, and ZLibrary all index principally on checksums of files. If there's a modification, the checksums will reveal which items are affected.
Note the MD5 hash provided for Stephen Breyer's seminal article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" (1970): 8F8B57972236B04621795C49A15E8C2E
Her effort deserves to be rewarded with the nobel peace prize, imsvho.
Since then, I've become so enthusiastic about academia in large part because of sci-hub. For all my interests I can find papers and access them with no institutional affiliation. I've learned how I learn, gained valuable research skills, and am planning on re-applying to finish a bachelor's degree!
Although I come from a place of privilege I owe a great debt to sci hub. I can't imagine how critical it is for those outside my bubble, where institutions might not have great access in the first place.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If Sci-Hub is forced to shut down due to legal pressure, technical problems, running out of money, or the founder losing interest, it would take a long time for anyone to duplicate Sci-Hub if they started from zero.
I think a good way to keep the cause alive is to backup or mirror the 85,483,811 papers hosted on Sci-Hub. That is, if she's willing to allow it (maybe it's already being done, but how widely?).
In the case of Sci-Hub, you'd need between 85 and 850 TB for each backup or mirror depending on whether the average paper size is 1 MB or 10 MB.
There's already an effort where the data is broken up into 100GB chunks [1]. Looks like the entire database is duplicated now at least 10 times. [2]
> Anyone remember Napster? There were extremely obscure musical recordings that were instantly found on Napster that are impossible to find even today.
That existed (and still exists) - there was oink.cd, then what.cd, and now RED. But each incarnation has lost things. Each time you burn down the library, you're bound to lose something. It's disappointing there isn't a legal way of cultural preservation. We need something like a crowd sourced digital library.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
[2] https://phillm.net/torrent-health-frontend/stats-filtered-ta...
index for all the papers in these torrents (SQL db): https://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz
also see https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
However, this is certainly more challenging for older articles.
Pretty much this.
Elbakyan: builds library of Alexandria.
Elsevier et al.: tries to burn it down.
The courts here in India are notoriously slow on many cases. Depending on luck, the hearings don’t even start for a long time after an initial notice is sent to defendants. If the publishers are able to push the court for an earlier hearing, we’ll know how soon Sci-Hub can get back on track (surely she’s not going to stop maintaining the site and stop uploading new papers regardless of how the case turns out). I don’t think the publishers would be content with just new papers not being uploaded. If the case drags on, the backlog of newer papers to upload may become an immense effort that may create some “holes” in the data archive.
I just hope the court decides sooner and we can get on with Sci-Hub growing.
P.S.: This link shared in another comment worked for me without any CAPTCHA prompts - https://archive.ph/huNwk
Sci-Hub is just as relevant as ever. What has happened is that paywalled papers published in 2021 are losing a substantial proportion of their readers and potential citations, and their future impact will be depressed compared to papers from previous years. Even when Sci-Hub starts adding papers again, there may be a significant permanent effect.
Unestablished researchers publishing important early-career papers in paywalled journals are getting harmed.
Did people really stopped reading arXiv, like they stopped reading journals, and moved on to Sci-Hub completely?
Or the final published versions are substantially different from preprint versions often enough to make Sci-Hub is so important?
No, that's not the case outside a few subfields.
I'm always amazed at the lack of will to change what everyone agrees is a problem.
Unless you meant that the way academia is structured is the problem here. Because it is and it leads to these excesses. Publishing, itself an acknowledged problem, is being addressed. But slowly, very slowly. Because the incentives in academia do not point to risk taking.
And I’ll just +1 here that even when I did have access through university, the flow for logging into elsevier was like 8 clicks, and then after finding the paper, the button to download and read it was hidden on the side as an image-button, no alt or title text. Just an image with the word “download pdf”
So yeah, I went to sci-hub every time.
Reminds me of being a kid living in a small town in the mountains of Norway. The only music I could buy was the Top10 CDs on display at the kiosk. Being rotated only a few times a year and not at all my taste. But with p2p filesharing I could listen to all kinds of music. Often times the illegal way is just so much more convenient, not because it's free, but because it doesn't have lots of artificial hurdles.
Nope. Most people read PDFs inside the browser, with the same sandbox protections as other web content.
Both have had exploits in the past, but I would trust the pdf.js approach more.
Even then there might be some remote management exploits which would work on turned off machines, so unplug the cables aswell.
It seems like as long as every university in the world can just switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight.
Why are paid journals still a thing?
Now, if all scientists in a field were to switch to a new journal, they could take the prestige with them, get rid of the rent seeking publisher, and have the same science, prestige, and impact for a fraction of the cost. But if any individual scientists switches, they'd carry the full loss (of foregoing prestige/impact), while achieving no gain. So, you need to have everybody on board simultaneously.
A switch like that can happen [1], but it happens rarely. Often it takes the nestor of a field to get sufficiently pissed off with a journal and persuade everyone to move on. Great example: Don Knuth in 2003 convinced the Editorial Board of the Journal of Algorithms (which he had founded) to resign [2], and start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher. Elsevier kept the old Journal going, but gave up and folded 6 years later. Yay.
Wish that would happen more often. But given that the situation was basically the same 20 years ago, I am not optimistic. What needs to happen to shake the scientific publishing world up??
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
I have received plenty of emails inviting me to submit work to predatory journals, but their low quality and lack of peer review and general ethics is pretty obvious and they are easy to avoid. They feel more like a spammy annoyance than a real threat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
Therefore is a captive customer case. And captive here has the same meaning as slave. If you don't work for free for some journals, basically you can't have a scientist career. In higher levels articles are not enough and you need to consider seriously to write a book for Elsevier or somebody else.
And this cut both ways. Acta Vertebrata, the journal of the Doñana's Biological Station since 1974, have to be closed in 1997 after decades trying unsuccessfully to achieve a higher impact index as journal. Low impact index means that you obtain less and less of the researchers effort and that interesting articles fly away your radar. Researchers deciding to publish in Acta Vertebrata had a competitive disadvantage. It was a terrific journal, the problem is that they did science in the latinosphere, period. Nowadays science means do politics or go home
When planning your holiday, the canyon matters. When submitting your paper, the venue matters - is it the right audience, and does it maximalise the impact?
Article in Science / Nature is vastly more impressive than in most regional journals - which affects your career options.
But you're right, she faces risk, which the Prometheus story, while overused, better captures.
Her name Alexandra also brings to mind the Library of Alexandria, which is a happy coincidence.
And as for risk, we also remember her predecessor, Aaron Swartz.
Another reference to Saraswati.
It's famously irreverent towards western-style copyright, seems like it could (well, it's a difficult "it", granted) score some brownie points by making a mirror which is accessible both within and without their great firewall.
They just turn a blind eye towards piracy when it suits them.
Indian courts on other hand have in the past taken public decisions in the favour of common good, like with pharmaceutical parents recently.
A victory here won't solve everything, but it is a start. Developing world is where the licensing fees are impossibly expensive for even universities. Perhaps an Indian precedent would help in other countries.
Why is she bullish on potentially winning the case? Is there a law in India that she is counting on? Or as I suspect she is counting on a sympathetic judge who might rule in her favor by finding some precedent from around the world.
If say she does win how would the appeals process work?
Yes. Indian courts have ruled that photocopying books isn’t copyright violation, i assume we can expect a similar judgement for copying research papers.
from https://www.indialegallive.com/cover-story-articles/il-featu...
"Copyright, specially in literary works, is thus not an inevitable, divine, or natural right that confers on authors the absolute ownership of their creations. It is designed rather to stimulate activity and progress in the arts for the intellectual enrichment of the public. Copyright is intended to increase and not to impede the harvest of knowledge. It is intended to motivate the creative activity of authors and inventors in order to benefit the public."
Jesus, what a beautiful opinion from the Delhi High Court. Go India.
It's weird that the reporter did not find that interesting enough to discuss.
She seems to be fine. She decided to fight the case in India, on her own, because she thinks she can win it.
In Austria the providers do block it, but it's still reachable via the *.st TLD. Not sure if that's an official sci-hub page or not, but it works.
Hilariously, it's also available through JANET, the British universities' networking system. So essentially every student and researcher in the country has access from work...
It’s my impression that it’s a matter of adaptation before the free access becomes the norm. Therefore technical help and civil disobedience should eventually do the job.
In this case, we are stealing from the CD company without actually stealing the CDs. With a path adjustment we should be able to stop stealing CDs without any monetary impact on the content creators.
In this story, I do not feel any guilt "stealing" from a journal that did not contribute anything but prestige to the creation of that paper (and was already paid twice for it, before I even tried to read the paper).
The latter deprives someone of an item, the former increases its availability. An important distinction when considering the purpose and goals of Sci-Hub.
Definitely some effort goes to running these companies just like keeping the dial-up lines operational. Totally not cool to steal the dial-up, what we should do is to cancel it.
It is very simple, i have to publish if i want to get my phd. And due to years of corruption those publications have to be in certain journals.
My work isnt financed by the publishers. Neither is the review process, my doctoral supervisor gets nothing out of doing reviews like these. I also pay to attend the conference, which is mandatory to get published.
I am coerced into signing away my (publicly funded) research to then see it put behind a pay wall. Preventing me from sharing it freely robbing me of the feedback from my peers.
Elsevier are a cancer and only function through forced labor. Not only are they rentseeking on somebody elses work, they are creating a worse situation for everyone involved. Including Science itself.
Without SciHub uploading the newest articles, the vast majority of institutions and individuals are unable to access the latest science. This results in the pace of global scientific advancement slowing way, way down. That means that cures to diseases, for example, are either not discovered or the progress toward discovering cures is delayed months, years, or decades. That means people die who did not have to die except for the greed and corruption of the publishing companies and the academic publishing system. It means people suffer unnecessarily. It means progress toward climate change solutions is stifled. It means species that didn't have to go extinct, may go extinct. It goes on and on. It means progress in all fields, in all nations is stymied. It means you, your family members, and your friends may suffer and die from diseases and endure calamities that were entirely unnecessary to experience.
The moral argument involved in this debate is ENTIRELY different than Napster. No one dies because they don't get to hear J Lo's latest hit.
There is a giant difference between moral and legal. It was illegal for Rosa Parks to not give up her seat for a white person. A white person in Montgomery, AL circa 1955 may have attempted to claim that Ms Parks was guilty of "theft" - that she "stole" a seat from a white person. But by doing what she did, she sparked a movement that has begun to create a different and better world for African Americans. Was Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white person an immoral act?
What Alexandra is doing is illegal according to the laws of many nations. But is it immoral? I argue that not only is what Alexandra doing moral, but there is a moral imperative for the work begun by her to continue. If anything, Alexandra ought to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for her courage and dedication to the betterment of all humanity. I'm not kidding.
Elsevier is basically a rent-seeking monopoly. They also publish fake journals, and manipulate the impact factor of their journals by coercing citations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Academic_practices
It's about the mediator overcharging for the littlest work they do.
Also about taxpayer funded research being available to everyone, why should tax money go into the pockets of the publishing racket?
Taxes paid for the research, taxes pay for access to journals (institutional subscriptions by libraries and universities) so the whole paywall thing just feels like taxpayers are getting fleeced.
Make access to journals free and save us all the penny.
Verify it for yourself as well, but I believe the address is
12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSnsSeems like she is not that in trouble, so my concern does not hold.
Congress people or local representatives.
Talk about it.
I hope she will get her first win in the Indian court so that it gets back to add new papers and advance science and help students as it used to be for the last decade.
Different possibilities in different legal spaces. Any others like that, that you can think of?
I also know of several seed boxes to have servers in Switzerland, but my knowledge in both of these matters is rather dated. If somebody else has updated info on these matters I'd love to learn more.
We need a better solution to Elsevier etc but the people who most need it (grad students living on a 30k stipend) have little power to fight things, and every reason not to stick their neck out when their future depends on publishing to paid journals.
I do not meet that qualification. But I'd be willing to wager that at least one person frequenting this forum does. If you meet the qualifications to nominate a person for a Nobel Peace Prize, please consider nominating Alexandra. The deadline is midnight CET, Jan 31.
How is that use case addressed when the cost of finding each paper seems to be so much higher?
I thought the publicity for her efforts was made after this, in English language media anyway. Though perhaps I am misremembering the order of events.
Good luck to the scientific publishers. You can expend any resources to track users across the Internet.
I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development.
I only started to use it occasionally once I've graduated (but I didn't really do any formal research any more.)
Sci-hub requires the title of the paper. that's it.
Are you in France? In that case you'll find that french academic librarians are extremely open to this stuff. I have participated in some proposals to cancel all elsevier+other library subscriptions and give all that money directly to SciHub, and the librarians were always very receptive to the idea. Unfortunately, this sort of initiative inevitably gets stuck in the upper echelons of some administrative procedure and never materializes. I guess predatory editors have a deeply entrenched influence within the academic institutions, otherwise I don't understand how that happens...
I tried to access it while reading this thread, and couldn't. Then I remembered I had activated my VPN and I was tunnelling through the US.
maybe an ISP or VPN service thing?
I had no problem in so-cal. I tried tunnels in NorCal/Oregon/Washington, no problems there either.
Not blocked for me at the the original domain
Academia needs to throw away for-profit journal publishers and leave it with social co-ops and nonprofits.
Scientists want to publicize in a prestigious journal. Elsevier is prestigious. Elsevier charges a subscription fee. Other scientists can’t access it.
So what scientists want is to be able to publish in the most prestigious journals and have free access to them.
It’s like if I said “i want to be able to attend the most prestigious school but I don’t want to pay for it”.
There are free-access journals out there that charge virtually no fees, and still have excellent quality / reputation. One such example is Quantum: https://quantum-journal.org/
I think it's interesting to note that in many European countries the top schools are free to attend.
Also, https://archive.ph/huNwk
In a short it is a Soviet mindset rooted in a mindset of serfdom before Soviets.
On the other side is European and American culture with the rule of law, which (from Russian point of view) naively believes that law has something to do with fairness.
If Putin was a president of USA, he'd now made long speeches about intervention of wicked Russian culture attacking Traditional Western Values and diluting proud Western Academic Culture. And something about spirituality. And he'd made laws treating students with a prison for using sci-hub. Prison boosts spirituality and teaches to prefer spiritual over materialistic. Real USA presidents are not much fun in this regard. Even Trump.
Aaron Swartz died for free access to research. Eight years later, Elbakyan continues his work.
I had no idea who Alexandra Elbakyan was before this, and mostly clicked through out of curiosity. I would have followed this more if I knew it was about Sci-Hub from the start.
("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or Library Genesis) should consider helping back. I certainly do, but I don't know how to best support her. Any suggestions?
She's not very communicative lately: https://twitter.com/ringo_ring
My guess would be to donate to her. Near the bottom of the page is a BTC address (please check it yourself):
https://sci-hub.do/ https://sci-hub.st/ https://sci-hub.se/
All the domains have the same address for me: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
Money (and Bitcoin is among the freest money) can be used on whatever she needs.
- https://mempool.space/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2m... shows a presumably-USD$ amount next to each transaction
- https://explorer.bitquery.io/bitcoin/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgS... (select "Sankey", slide "Detail level" all the way to the right) shows how the money's mostly going elsewhere
I know it’s a lot, but legal fees eat up so much. Hopefully she can win the case without sacrificing her entire savings too.
I had a Coinbase account already from years ago but never linked it to any payment source. At the time the only options were my bank account, which didn't sit well with me.
Now PayPal is an option, which is also linked to my bank account, but the one level of indirection made me a bit less hesitant. Also, the combination of Coinbase and PayPal seems low(er) risk to me.
If you’re wondering how to get the public to support it, we need to start spreading the truth. The opioid crisis kicked off by Purdue? Wouldn’t have happened without USPTO. Big tech monopolists? They get their monopoly power from IS laws. The list goes and on. IS laws choke the flow of information through the nervous system of the world and we feel it’s consequences all over the place.
We need to extend those provisions to include all research that gets federal tax money
And it’s hilariously short sighted. Without patent and copywrite protections, you’ll instantly see innovation come out of places where people are paid for their work. US offloading it’s manufacturing in a short sighted move to cheap labor and head-in-sand environmental outlook - sure, let’s kill the design industries too now too.
There is a problem with how papers are shared and the orgs that control archiving and release. That doesn’t mean all patents must be thrown out.
https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Do you have any rebuttal to parent’s points on Purdue and tech monopolies?
If every scientist published their work on open access platforms, Sci-Hub wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
Does anyone know?
The existing "prestigious" journals are prestigious because of the peer-reviewing process. How do we solve this problem with Sci-hub? I mean, you can publish your research anywhere (like your homepage) already if you choose to.
But cloning the top journals’ peer review process wouldn’t make you a top journal. Many mid and low tier publications use the same peer review process as the high tier ones.
It’s more of a bit of a tautology: the most prestigious journals are the most prestigious because they’re seen as the most prestigious - which means they get all the best submissions, the best people volunteer to be organizers, speakers, reviewers, and people pay attention to their proceedings increasing their citation numbers.
This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.
Pool money with everybody you know and hire a lobbyist.
Weird thing to say - like you think 32 is a child or something? That’s someone well into their second decade of adulthood.
Otherwise, write to whatever lawmaker represents you to talk about it, to ask for a change of law and to support asylum for her if she ever asks it. But for now Russia seems to protect her.
1. She will be destroyed, one way or the other. Since she is eastern European the possibilities are vastless: Russian asset/ Spy/ Dangerous Hacker/ Covert Operation/ Putin enabler, etc, etc
2. Expect hundreds of "insightful" comments on here how she was actually wrong because X, Y, Z, the same points produced by mainstream media and the establishment politicians.
3. She will be shunned, forgotten and even jailed if she puts a foot in a "wrong" country, and by that I mean 80% of earth,
This is insult to the intelligence of the publishers.
Are you Indian? Does the Indian government have some kind of authority over you? Are you combing through the laws of India to make sure you are complying with all of them?
When you're operating this kind of site, why even bother acknowledging the existence of Indian courts, or any court that can't literally imprison you right now?
> The latest lawsuit, filed in India by three academic publishers, including Elsevier, asks the High Court of Delhi to block access to Sci-Hub throughout the country. While the case is pending, the court has instructed Sci-Hub to stop uploading papers to its database. The order is not unusual; what’s surprising is that Elbakyan has complied. She has a history of ignoring legal rulings, and the Indian court has no power over Sci-Hub’s activities in other countries. So why has she chosen, at this moment, to give in?
> 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.