[HN Gopher] Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order
        
       Author : parsecs
       Score  : 169 points
       Date   : 2021-02-18 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
        
       | Frost1x wrote:
       | I'd love to see a pre-print database shared between all the major
       | federal funding agencies which required any publications that go
       | behind pay walls to share a corresponding pre-print that's
       | publicly accessible for any paywalled publications. Let state and
       | other private entities opt into joining the share repository.
       | 
       | I get it. Editing and reviewing costs money for journals. That's
       | fine, let them monetize their improved versions but let the tax
       | payers decide if they care to pay for those services or not as
       | opposed to digging around for a researchers public preprint if
       | they maintain one or being forced to dig through Sci-Hub and the
       | like.
       | 
       | arXiv sort of fills this role and is growing in popularity but
       | it's not mandated, centralized for all domains,, or promoted by
       | the federal government which would push such an effort to the
       | critical mass needed for larger adoption.
        
         | Someone wrote:
         | I don't think legislation is needed for that. Many publishers
         | already allow you to publish your pre-print. Examples (leaving
         | out some restrictions, but I think these are the gist of the
         | policies)
         | 
         | https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing#preprint:
         | 
         |  _"Preprint
         | 
         | Authors can share their preprint anywhere at any time.
         | 
         | If accepted for publication, we encourage authors to link from
         | the preprint to their formal publication via its Digital Object
         | Identifier (DOI). Millions of researchers have access to the
         | formal publications on ScienceDirect, and so links will help
         | your users to find, access, cite, and use the best available
         | version.
         | 
         | Authors can update their preprints on arXiv or RePEc with their
         | accepted manuscript."_
         | 
         | https://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/preprint-sharing/167...
         | 
         |  _"Springer journals encourage posting of preprints of primary
         | research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors' or
         | institutional websites, and open communications between
         | researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint
         | commenting platforms.
         | 
         | [...]
         | 
         | Authors may choose any license of their choice for the preprint
         | including Creative Commons licenses."_
         | 
         | So, if you know the title of a paper, you often can find a
         | preprint, if the authors are willing to make the effort to put
         | them on a site.
        
         | wooger wrote:
         | > I get it. Editing and reviewing costs money for journals.
         | 
         | Are you sure? I'm sure previous posts on here made it very
         | clear that they're peer reviewed for free.
        
           | TheGallopedHigh wrote:
           | Peer-review is free. Editing and Lay-out etc is done with the
           | journal (not much though as they supply latex templates for
           | your work). So there is some cost associated with this.
        
             | prepend wrote:
             | I actually prefer the layout on arxiv over actual journals
             | and recently was kind of surprised how the manuscript
             | management system changed my layout more than just my
             | preprint pdf.
             | 
             | I think the layout costs could be reduced to near zero (ie,
             | enough to be paid through the charity that funds preprint)
             | with no negative impact.
             | 
             | Editing is useful, I think. Although I don't anything about
             | the current costs or necessary costs.
        
           | 0xbadcafebee wrote:
           | Elsevier's ScienceDirect platform publishes over 500,000
           | articles a year, across 4,300 journals, providing over 18
           | million documents and 42,000 e-books, and serving over 18
           | million unique monthly page views
           | (https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-
           | Group/documents/re...). Everything published goes through a
           | process of peer review, editing, layout, final review, etc,
           | and then access to the publication is maintained in
           | perpetuity for thousands of institutions around in about a
           | hundred countries.
           | 
           | Here are their pricing policies:
           | https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/pricing and their
           | other policies, which gives you an idea what else is involved
           | with managing journals:
           | https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies
           | 
           | So, yeah, journals do have costs. I am not defending those
           | costs. But it is worth pointing out that there's more to
           | publishing than a free peer review and uploading it to
           | GitHub.
        
         | nafizh wrote:
         | Reviewing doesn't cost money for journals. Scientists do it for
         | free. As for editing, don't know how much papers improve by
         | that beyond a very few select journals.
        
       | breck wrote:
       | Anyone who was waiting for the revolution, now is the time.
       | 
       | No more bullsh*t. No more compromise. The sun does not revolve
       | around the earth, and the overwhelming evidence shows the ideal
       | duration for patents and copyright is zero.
       | 
       | #EndImaginaryProperty #LiberateIdeas #AbolishCopyrights
       | #AbolishPatents #BringBackNapster
        
         | forrestthewoods wrote:
         | GPL license doesn't function without copyright law. Do you want
         | to throw that out too?
        
           | kuroguro wrote:
           | WTFPL is the only license we need! :)
        
           | breck wrote:
           | Yup. Licenses are for losers.
        
           | HideousKojima wrote:
           | Stallman himself has repeatedly said he only devised the GPL
           | because it's the best option in a world where copyright
           | exists.
        
         | mepian wrote:
         | HN doesn't implement hashtags.
        
           | breck wrote:
           | Well then I guess people should post these hashtags to other
           | places.
        
         | xibalba wrote:
         | So should you be able to take a free copy of a movie that
         | people spent years and millions of dollars making?
         | 
         | I think a little more nuance is warranted here.
        
           | breck wrote:
           | Well I see you've thought deeply about this.
           | 
           | https://giphy.com/gifs/tipsyelves-math-26gR0YFZxWbnUPtMA
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | Yes!! Artificial monopolies make no sense in the 21st century.
         | Data is infinite and the only way to lock it down is to prevent
         | computers from copying it. That will necessarily destroy free
         | computing as we know it.
         | 
         | We must let go of these archaic ideas in order to safeguard the
         | future of computing.
        
       | varshithr wrote:
       | So VPN?
        
         | dbetteridge wrote:
         | I think just changing your DNS resolver to google/cloudflare
         | still works?
        
           | feu wrote:
           | It doesn't currently work when accessing The Pirate Bay (at
           | least using Virgin Media). I have my DNS resolver set to
           | Cloudflare and I get sent to
           | https://assets.virginmedia.com/site-blocked.html. Manually
           | setting the records in my home DNS server does not work
           | either.
        
             | dastx wrote:
             | Double check that your DNS settings is correct. I'm on BT
             | and it's working fine for me. I've previously used it on VM
             | fine too.
        
             | dbetteridge wrote:
             | Ah, talktalk may just be being lazy (or the sci-hub change
             | hasn't hit me yet)
        
             | akadruid1 wrote:
             | I found that Vodafone broadband was intercepting my DNS
             | requests to Cloudflare. Using cloudflared[0] to enable DoH
             | on my pi-hole resolved this.
             | 
             | [0] https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/cloudflared/
        
             | mhh__ wrote:
             | Even more insidious sometimes is that Virgin Media seem to
             | silently block some VPN websites.
             | 
             | They may have given up by now but think of those children
             | they saved!
        
               | Isthatablackgsd wrote:
               | Actually that Virgin is keeping on with this unethical
               | practices. There are posts popping up almost weekly in
               | various VPNs' forum and it always about their speed are
               | so low (dial up/DSL speed) or they reached the timeout.
               | And Virgin don't support IPv6 (it look like they are
               | starting to support IPv6 but they plan to impose 20Mbps
               | cap on IPv6 connection) and IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnel will 99%
               | to fail to connect or stuck in the loop until timeout.
        
           | otsukare wrote:
           | DNS-over-HTTPS generally works
        
         | mrlonglong wrote:
         | Also, tor does a good job too.
        
           | toomuchtodo wrote:
           | To avoid congestion on the Tor network, you'd likely want to
           | use Tor for the DNS resolution, but fallback to IPFS and
           | HTTPS directly to IP addresses when fetching the content.
        
             | generationP wrote:
             | Is sci-hub actually on IPFS now or is it still an idea
             | floating in some heads?
        
               | toomuchtodo wrote:
               | Sci-hub is not yet on IPFS, libgen content already is.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Delivery_to_users
        
               | zaik wrote:
               | Btw if you want to help mirror some of libgen's files
               | here is how you can do it: https://freeread.org/ipfs/
        
             | the8472 wrote:
             | Are they only blocking it at the DNS level? If so running
             | your own resolver should do the job too.
        
               | teekert wrote:
               | Yeah, just tap "DNS over HTTPS" Firefox and watch the
               | world open up.
        
             | worldofmatthew wrote:
             | There is no congestion on the Tor network, Capacity is 2x
             | demand.
        
             | DyslexicAtheist wrote:
             | or dnscrypt-proxy https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-
             | proxy
        
         | giomasce wrote:
         | To me the best access way is the Telegram bot. Fast, keeps your
         | files easily accessible and is shared with other devices.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | uncledave wrote:
       | Zen and AA have no blocking in place for any sites.
       | 
       | Don't go with major ISPs in the UK. They are a shit show.
        
         | benlumen wrote:
         | Shhh.
        
       | burundi_coffee wrote:
       | In TalkTalk the domain of the website is explicitly stated. Would
       | it be enough to change the domain name to get around this?
        
       | dr_dshiv wrote:
       | I have great access through my university library system.
       | 
       | But Sci-Hub and LibGen have radically accelerated my ability to
       | do research.
       | 
       | It can be infuriating when I can't find a book or article that I
       | need. But 9/10 that happens within the digital library system not
       | scihub/LibGen.
        
       | andyjohnson0 wrote:
       | > At the time of writing, TalkTalk's rival ISPs including Virgin
       | Media, BT, Sky, EE and O2 are not reporting the existence of a
       | blocking order but it seems extremely unlikely that they won't be
       | required to act against Sci-Hub under the same order.
       | 
       | sci-hub.se is still accessible to me on EE and Virgin Media.
       | 
       | Edit: s/scihub/sci-hub/
        
         | dash2 wrote:
         | Actually it's sci-hub.se.
        
           | andyjohnson0 wrote:
           | Thanks. sci-hub.se was the domain that I tried.
        
             | calvano915 wrote:
             | Zlibrary is a mirror and they have a Tor address
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Experience taught me you can always find a good link in the
           | right side-box at:
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
        
             | m-p-3 wrote:
             | Looks like it would benefit them from having a .onion
             | domain as well.
        
               | riedel wrote:
               | https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ exists for some while now
               | but it times out for me
        
               | LockAndLol wrote:
               | And .i2p domain too.
        
               | StavrosK wrote:
               | Or a handshake domain :(
        
               | Terretta wrote:
               | _# Sci-Hub Leaves Handshake Blockchain After 2 Days,
               | Citing Centralization Concerns_
               | 
               |  _Sci-Hub, a pirate library of academic papers censored
               | by Twitter, PayPal and domain systems, left the
               | distributed domain platform Handshake after two days,
               | unsatisfied by the level of decentralization. ..._
               | 
               |  _"I first just thought that another domain for Sci-Hub
               | won't hurt. But later I realized it's them who really
               | controls the domain, not me," Elbakyan told CoinDesk via
               | Telegram._
               | 
               |  _The Namebase team reached out to Elbakyan after Sci-Hub
               | was banned by Twitter, reportedly due to a new copyright
               | infringement case in India, she said._
               | 
               |  _"They wrote to me when I was having that stressful
               | situation with Twitter," Elbakyan said. "I just gave them
               | an IP address and they connected it to the domain. That's
               | all I did. Now, where is the decentralization?" ..._
               | 
               |  _"In fact, I'm not in control and they can throw me out
               | at any moment, just like Twitter did. And yes, all domain
               | services are like that, including .se and .do, but they
               | aren't promoting themselves as decentralized. Plus, those
               | are reputable ones, and this is God knows who. They are
               | just using Sci-Hub to promote this weird project,"
               | Elbakyan said. ..._
               | 
               | https://www.coindesk.com/sci-hub-leaves-handshake-
               | blockchain
        
               | StavrosK wrote:
               | I know, but this sounds like a misunderstanding. The
               | Handshake equivalent of domains in the traditional DNS is
               | TLDs, and that's what you can own and control (for
               | example, I have several TLDs like .stavros). I own the
               | keys for those and they're in my own wallet, and Elbakyan
               | can own them too.
               | 
               | She thought that having her own TLD was a hassle, so they
               | gave her a second-level domain the TLD of which they
               | managed themselves, but she didn't like that because they
               | managed it.
               | 
               | This could have been very easily solved if she was fine
               | with them giving her www.sci-hub, but it sounds like she
               | thought that owning a TLD would somehow be more hassle
               | than owning a second-level domain. It doesn't sound very
               | reasonable to me, sounds like a misunderstanding.
        
             | Miner49er wrote:
             | Somebody created dns-over-wikipeda for this:
             | 
             | https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia
        
       | HotHotLava wrote:
       | I wish scientists would start growing a spine and _stop citing_
       | Elsevier journals. That 's the only thing that will break the
       | vicious cycle of everybody publishing there because it gets a lot
       | of citations, despite nobody actually _reading_ in the journal.
       | Put up a link to the pdf on the authors home page as reference,
       | if it is essential to the paper, or leave it out completely if it
       | isn 't.
        
         | matheusmoreira wrote:
         | The only thing these journals are good for is peer review. It
         | seems reviewers don't even get paid for that valuable work.
         | They should just start reviewing independently of the journal.
        
         | gautamdivgi wrote:
         | I don't agree with what Elsevier and Springer are doing but
         | asking scientists to rectify the problem is the wrong thing.
         | The decision needs to be legislated. No scientist or grad
         | student is going to put their careers or PhD at risk for this.
         | I wouldn't. fwiw - when I was a grad student I had access to
         | these journals through my university library.
        
           | breck wrote:
           | > No scientist or grad student is going to put their careers
           | or PhD at risk for this.
           | 
           | I would and I urge everyone to do so too.
           | 
           | History will look back on this period and see which side of
           | the line people stood on.
           | 
           | #LiberateIdeas
        
             | nullspace wrote:
             | > I would
             | 
             | From your comment, it looks like you have zero skin in the
             | game here. Given that your comment is unproductive.
        
               | breck wrote:
               | https://giphy.com/gifs/itt-13f5iwTRuiEjjW
        
           | Someone wrote:
           | Things are changing (slowly). See
           | https://www.coalition-s.org/. That has decent support from
           | Europe, but not from the large US funders
           | (https://www.coalition-s.org/organisations/)
        
         | breck wrote:
         | Agreed. First time I published a paper as first author my first
         | reference I put the SciHub url and got flak for that.
         | 
         | My only regret is going soft after that. I should have made
         | 100% of my citations include the SciHub url.
        
         | bocklund wrote:
         | Think of it from the scientist's perspective. You can't ignore
         | the work in journals who have business models and policies you
         | do not agree with.
         | 
         | Pretending research doesn't exist slows progress and it is
         | anti-science to put your head in the sand because you don't
         | agree with the location that knowledge was published in.
         | 
         | If you did read the papers in journals you don't agree with,
         | built on their ideas and didn't cite them, then you just
         | committed plagiarism and obscured the scientific record.
         | 
         | The "link to the PDF of the author's homepage" trick doesn't
         | work because eventually that page will go away, as we have seen
         | over and over in the age of the web. Part of the value journals
         | add is promising to archive the work _forever_. They don't
         | promise it will be free forever (or at all) - which is what
         | needs to change.
         | 
         | The answer isn't to "not cite", but to not publish there in the
         | first place. That takes systemic change. Change of both the
         | incentives: "how do I get promomoted?" or, fundamentally: "how
         | do I make an impact and measure it?". Citations are the de
         | facto standard right now. It will change when we can measure
         | impact (and get more promotions, grants, etc.) in a way that
         | doesn't favor the richest journals getting richer.
        
         | jsilence wrote:
         | Fortunately a lot of EU funded research projects require that
         | any paper stemming from a project has to be published under
         | Open Access.
        
           | gautamdivgi wrote:
           | Yes, but Elsevier and Springer open access publishing is
           | prohibitively expensive. That's what needs to change via
           | legislation.
        
             | zozbot234 wrote:
             | > Yes, but Elsevier and Springer open access publishing is
             | prohibitively expensive.
             | 
             | Pretty much everything is prohibitively expensive when it
             | comes to Elzevier and Springer, or so it seems. But that's
             | enough reason to avoid them altogether as publishers, open
             | access or not.
        
               | gautamdivgi wrote:
               | That's the point, you cannot. Most high impact journals
               | are with Elsevier or Springer. As a researcher you need
               | papers in high impact factor journals. As a researcher
               | you also don't want to spend precious grant money on open
               | access. As a researcher you also want to be on review
               | committee of said journals because it enhances your
               | resume. What a lot of folks saying let's not use these
               | journals don't understand is its not easy to get away
               | from them. There's too much invested in a feedback loop
               | that you will have very limited success with just
               | individual researchers. You need to advocate for
               | legislation.
               | 
               | fwiw - I'm also not sure why IEEE and ACM get a free pass
               | either.
        
               | dr_dshiv wrote:
               | I don't know why people are so surprised that scientific
               | publishing costs money -- good journals and conferences
               | are more than a webpage to post content.
        
       | dartharva wrote:
       | When will they ever learn? Forcing ISPs to block websites will
       | only antagonize the scholars more, who can anyway access the
       | website with or without a ban. They'll do nothing to harm Sci-
       | hub, in fact it'll make it even more popular.
       | 
       | Elsevier also did this in India - it pissed me off so much I
       | shifted towards downloading papers from Sci-Hub even when I have
       | a university subscription.
        
       | cybert00th wrote:
       | It's whack-a-mole time again children!
       | 
       | Lots of money and time spent on what will, in the end, amount to
       | a whole lot of nothing as, those who REALLY do want to access
       | Sci-hub, will find a way round this.
        
         | vixen99 wrote:
         | And isolated people without university connections who can't
         | find a way will just have to abandon trying to access research
         | papers relevant to their work unless able to shell out tens of
         | Euros/dollars for one-off viewing. This is not an argument for
         | or against, merely a statement of how things are for some. I
         | wonder how many fall into this category.
        
           | toxik wrote:
           | Even people with access use scihub. It's just easier than
           | whatever institutional login crap they throw at you.
        
             | matthewdgreen wrote:
             | Yup. We used to have to use some kind of obnoxious VPN to
             | get access; Sci-Hub is just easier. My University's library
             | has gradually been making this easier -- I suspect
             | partially due to COVID and partially due to the fact that
             | people weren't using it as much because Sci-Hub is actually
             | user-friendly.
        
         | KingFelix wrote:
         | Very true
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-02-18 23:01 UTC)