[HN Gopher] Sci-Hub future plans and donation request
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Sci-Hub future plans and donation request
Author : NmAmDa
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-08-07 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sci-hub.do)
(TXT) w3m dump (sci-hub.do)
| f6v wrote:
| To play the devil's advocate: you can find many articles as pre-
| prints, for example on biorxiv. And it stays there for free even
| after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
| So you CAN access the article without paying to the publisher.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Not all articles are available this way, even in fields like
| cryptography, which have a decades-long tradition of using
| preprint servers.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's not fair unless researchers in every country can access
| _every_ paper. Not a subset, but every single one. Why should
| rich countries or rich institutions be granted the exclusive
| right to do research? It can do nothing but harm.
| otherme123 wrote:
| Careful, preprints are not peer reviewed. I had to change
| significant parts of papers in the peer reviewing process in
| almost all my papers, and also required changes when I'm
| reviewing.
|
| More often than not, the reviewer requires additional checks
| and tone down some claims, so a paper preprinted as "we ended
| world famines" ends up as "our soy requires 5% less water than
| the second best".
|
| What is infuriating is that Biorxiv is free and stores forever,
| but the final publisher gets more than $1,500 for the same
| service. And we have to do 98% of the edition (I've been
| required to change the font of a graph) so they can just feed
| your .docx into a program and it spits the Pdf ready.
| bunje wrote:
| I think in the past journals prohibiting the use of preprint
| archives was more common.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 100% true for some fields.
|
| 100% false for other fields.
| dmix wrote:
| There hasn't been a single paper I've looked for that wasn't
| available on Scihub, even old ones.
|
| It's like how every movie, even the rare no longer distributed
| ones are available on Torrent sites but you can't find them
| even if you have access to a good online commercial libraries.
| vmception wrote:
| (Sadly there are a bunch from major film festivals that never
| are screened again, I wish I could torrent some)
| gwern wrote:
| "There hasn't been a single paper I've looked for that wasn't
| available on Scihub, even old ones."
|
| Let's not exaggerate here. I hit gaps in SH all the time. And
| I have to wonder how you haven't noticed that SH halted its
| 2021 paper uploads entirely because of the Indian court case.
| That's quite a gap.
| [deleted]
| Jerry2 wrote:
| I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and
| free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year
| but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only
| donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still
| feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like
| they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day.
|
| My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative
| disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have
| been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible
| treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept
| on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about
| it. In large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub.
|
| Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or
| non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them.
| You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Nothing in this world is free.
|
| Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't
| be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns.
|
| The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what
| distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't they
| just start working independently? There's really no reason for
| these paid journals to even exist anymore.
| elcritch wrote:
| I'm a fan of Sci-Hub, but given multiple "clones" and the ever
| changing DNS names how does one verify this is the legitimate
| organization? It gives off a legitimate feel as most frauds don't
| tend to make new things.
|
| The BTC addresses I've seen on HN are different than the one on
| the page. Does Alexandra have a public key that could be used to
| provide a sig-validation? P.S. the main sci-hub.do page gives the
| same BTC as previous commentators list as valid.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| I wonder what do you mean by sci-hub.do pag3 because the link
| in this post is referring to https://sci-hub.do/donate page.
| ryanlol wrote:
| How come the page is only in Russian?
| f6v wrote:
| I have an English locale and it's in English for me.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| It shows in English for me. Do you have a VPN?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If sci-hub had popped up within reach of the United States,
| Alexandra Elbakyan would have already been "taken care of" like
| Aaron Swartz was.
|
| (On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.)
| perihelions wrote:
| Exactly right, and that's why this innovation popped up in
| Kazakhstan and not Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a
| person who could have easily created SciHub in Boston and
| because of US judicial philosophies he is dead.
|
| I think this is going to become a trend going forwards -- IP
| (broadly interpreted) is a crippling disadvantage, and it's
| an asymmetric disadvantage some countries levy on themselves,
| and some don't. I predict that we're going to be continuously
| blindsinded by this -- by crazy-useful tech inventions
| thought up by clever people, not in the USA but in the
| developing world, in part because of the stifling effects of
| IP (and in part because genius doesn't follow national
| borders, and software needs no industrial base).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| zzleeper wrote:
| Through my employer, I have access to practically all papers I
| need to download. But doing so is much more inconvenient than
| using sci-hub than I still prefer the latter.
|
| And of course, don't get me started in the usual ramble about us
| writing papers, typesetting papers, refereeing papers, etc. etc.
| for free while Elsev** and friends get $bns every year.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| You author your papers for free?
| SinParadise wrote:
| In exchange, he get a different piece of paper, possibly
| framed and maybe a pat on the back for a job well done.
| Sounds fair to me.
| beanjuice wrote:
| In the grand scheme of things, the academia complex is funded
| by taxpayers to produce academic work. It used to be that
| journals would at least do good editorial work, help with
| editing, formatting, and perhaps even graphics. All of this
| work is now on the author, so the question increasingly
| becomes, why does a taxpayer not only pay for the lab to
| produce research, but also the $3,000 to 5,000 or more fee to
| have something published, depending on the journal.
| Furthermore, once the research was paid for by the taxpayer,
| the scientist's time wasted to format the research, and the
| journal paid for the privilege to publish the paper- these
| institutions have to pay once again for access to these
| papers once published. In a way, journals in the 21st century
| are double or triple dipping on citizens, all so we can share
| our work.
| garmaine wrote:
| You don't?
| netr0ute wrote:
| Is that a bad thing?
| generalizations wrote:
| Sci-hub is doing what google once promised: making the world's
| information accessible to everyone.
| zffr wrote:
| I would argue that google did a pretty good job of that for
| information on websites. Sci-hub is specifically focused on
| academic papers.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Google was more aligned to making human communication
| searchable. Now it's about assimilating that information and
| actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content
| creator)
| _Nat_ wrote:
| > Now it's about assimilating that information and actually
| making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)
|
| Academics generally value their work being made accessible.
|
| The paywalls that block viewers, to the detriment of human
| progress, are rather disgusting.
| perihelions wrote:
| In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" --
| they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away
| with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at
| this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA
| settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets
| in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could
| plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to
| prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just
| "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if
| you squint?)
|
| They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
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(page generated 2021-08-07 23:00 UTC)