[HN Gopher] Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new a...
___________________________________________________________________
Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to
celebrate
Author : DominikPeters
Score : 1035 points
Date : 2021-09-05 03:46 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Aaron Schwartz would be so proud and so am I. You are a hero!
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| Torrent seeding effort:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
|
| All papers on sci-hub are available as torrents from library
| genesis. The full collection contains 85 million articles (before
| this announcement), and is about 80TB. If anything ever happens
| to sci-hub or library genesis, there's enough people out there
| with backups that a replacement can be set up fairly quickly,
| albeit without the proxy functionality to obtain new papers.
|
| However, the more the merrier, so if you've got some spare
| hardware and bandwidth to share, I'd encourage you to contribute
| to the seeding effort if you're able. At current market prices of
| ~$30/TB, it costs ~$2400 to have a copy of the full collection
| sitting on your desk.
| animex wrote:
| Is there any legal risk to users in North America that do this?
| Is this copyrighted material?
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| Probably; use a VPN.
|
| Yes they're copyrighted - albeit not by the authors who
| actually wrote them, but by the publishers who require
| copyright assignment for the privilege of having your work
| hosted on their website.
| blueblisters wrote:
| So when academics casually share papers with their
| collaborators, are they technically exposing themselves to
| lawsuits? Or is being part of a research
| organization/university with subscriptions to these
| services enough to mitigate that risk?
| type0 wrote:
| > casually share papers with their collaborators, are
| they technically exposing themselves to lawsuits?
|
| For the final, not open access published papers they
| certainly do.
| lrem wrote:
| What happens in practice: researchers are usually free to
| share the draft they had before the publishing process.
| Which means you can read the text before every sentence
| was wordsmithed in huge pain to make the paper a quarter
| page shorter.
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| No one talks about this, but for many (most?) of the
| papers they publish, there's no copyright to assign. When
| I was in grad school, 100% of my research was federally
| funded (NSF, Navy, NASA) so they insisted that every
| product of that research be freely available with no
| restrictions. When we get an article ready for
| publication, the Journal would send us the standard "you
| assign your copyright to us" forms. We'd sign them but
| also send a copy of "the green form" stating that it was
| federally funded and we didn't have any copyright to
| assign. They just ignore that.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| That is an interesting question without a good answer. As
| I understand it (I am far from being an expert), there
| are sometimes specific exemptions to allow that sharing.
| However, generally speaking, I think it is a gray area.
| The journals would surely be shooting themselves in the
| foot, though, if they tried to sue their contributors.
| Academics would bring down hell on any journal that tried
| that. Moreover, it is not clear to me that they would win
| as it seems to be a customary practice even if it is not
| an explicitly allowed one. Finally, sharing a single
| paper might get research or academic exemptions as you
| aren't copying the whole journal issue. I doubt any
| publisher wants to go down that road. They are probably
| better off with the law remaining vague.
| CannoloBlahnik wrote:
| Sharing with collaborators may constitute fair use. I
| wouldn't put one of my own papers on my website, though,
| for example, for something that isn't published as open
| access.
| apdar wrote:
| They are usually shared under the title of "preprint" or
| "draft" often, but not always, before the time of actual
| publishing.
|
| Always seemed like a grey area to me. We didn't really
| distribute the copy of the paper with the
| journal/conference's name + copyright - though a perhaps
| a line under the title: "To be published in..."
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| It depends on the circumstances and the publisher. In
| many cases publishers permit authors to host the accepted
| version of the paper (but not the final version that
| includes revisions based on reviewer feedback) on their
| personal/institutional website and to email copies of the
| paper on an individual basis to people who request them.
|
| For example, see
| https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright (under
| "Author Rights") for what Elsevier permits you to do with
| your own work.
|
| On the other hand, publishers have sometimes filed
| lawsuits against sites where authors share their papers,
| e.g. ResearchGate:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06945-6
|
| Elsevier have also sent takedown notices to universities
| where academics have made the final version available on
| their institutional websites:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2013/12/19...
|
| https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2013/12/elsevier-
| take...
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/elsevier-
| tak...
|
| https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/01/28/setti
| ng-...
| smarx007 wrote:
| You are almost always allowed to self archive the final
| version, but you have to share the PDF you generated
| yourself, not the nicely formatted one from the
| publisher. And some publishers only allow self-archiving
| outside repositories like researchgate. But most
| importantly, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar would
| pick up most links from blogs and Arxiv.
|
| Use https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ to check. Also, EU
| projects in most cases now require open publishing and
| publishers make exceptions even when OA is forbidden
| ("self archiving is allowed if mandated by the funding
| agency").
| [deleted]
| ogma wrote:
| LOL you're gonna get raided for sure. The feds are slaves to
| the RIAA and the rest of their corporate masters.
| baybal2 wrote:
| I encourage you to do this in the most audacious, and visible
| way possible.
|
| Let see how will they sue millions, upon millions of people.
|
| Make them face a fait accompli. They already lost.
| [deleted]
| laurent92 wrote:
| They never target millions. They target one, and ruin his
| life, preferably one with children so he also divorces.
|
| Every dystopian regime does that.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| From watching the Aaron Schwartz documentary, hopefully once
| scihub makes these publishers obsolete they will no longer
| have the power to press charges. But yeah they can and will
| get the Feds involved and will ruin your life like Schwartz
| mishafb wrote:
| Is it compressible or already compressed?
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| It's all PDF files, which have their own compression, so it's
| unlikely there would be substantial gain from additional
| compression. Each torrent has 100 zip files, and each zip
| file has 1000 PDFs, but the files are stored uncompressed
| within the zips (i.e. using the STORE method).
| Thorentis wrote:
| Is there some kind of searchable index included so that you
| can locate an article in a particular Zip? I'm assuming
| each article has some kind of ID numbers and the Zips are
| divided by ID range or something?
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| Yep! See https://github.com/sci-
| hub-p2p/artifacts/releases/tag/0
|
| This project is in it's early stages and the
| documentation has quite some way to go, but the index
| that's part of the release contains all the necessary
| information. This tool also contains the code necessary
| to produce the index files if you have a local copy of
| the zips.
|
| Each torrent contains 100,000 files, comprised of 100 zip
| files with 1,000 PDFs each. They are named by DOI.
| There's a database dump at (http://libgen.rs/dbdumps/)
| (scimag.sql.gz) which has the id -> DOI mapping and other
| information. The specific torrent and zip file can be
| determined based on the id; torrent = id/100000 and zip =
| id/1000.
| andyxor wrote:
| Sci-Hub database/index is available here:
| http://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz
|
| and database documentation is available here: https://git
| lab.com/lucidhack/knowl/-/wikis/References/Libgen...
|
| also see introduction to Sci-Hub for developers: https://
| www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/nh5dbu/a_brief_intr...
| dmurray wrote:
| > It's all PDF files, which have their own compression, so
| it's unlikely there would be substantial gain from
| additional compression.
|
| You could write a custom compressor that decompiles journal
| PDFs to valid TeX, then compresses that.
|
| Or at the simpler end of what's technologically possible,
| you could at least extract shared assets such as fonts that
| appear in multiple files. Keep files from the same journal
| together to find more overlaps.
|
| I suspect there's quite a large gain to be had from further
| compression, at least theoretically. Even more if you could
| accept some level of non-semantic loss.
| ectopod wrote:
| You could losslessly translate PDFs with compression to
| PDFs with no compression (bitmap images excepted), tar
| them up and compress the lot. This would get you a fair
| bit of gain for little pain.
|
| However, I guess they use .zip STORE because it's fairly
| robust against minor corruption.
| jobigoud wrote:
| But each PDF is compressed individually. The textual
| content of the papers must have a lot of redundancy between
| them, maybe there is some gain to get there?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Illustrations easily outweigh the textual content, and
| those aren't shared. I mean, the text/formatting/latex
| code for an article compresses to something like 10kB,
| there's not much to save there.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Virtually all the works are published as PDFs. (There are
| some other formats, occasionally DJVU, etc.) There's
| integrated compression, though this can still vary
| tremendously by docuemnt.
|
| Recent publications are virtually always based on direct PDF
| renders, and tend to be a few 100 kB per article.
|
| Older publications are often scanned from paper-based copies,
| and can be about 10-20x larger, depending on the source.
| These may or may not have OCRed text, and OCR itself may be
| of variable quality. For documents with images or diagrams,
| those also add to both size and difficulty in vectorising
| copies.
|
| It's possible to go through larger scans and regenerate them
| as rendered PDFs. That's intensive and error prone. There's
| also a range of viewpoints on archival as to whether it's
| preferable to retain the full expression of the original
| published version (and often accumulated marginalia and other
| marks of a specific instance), or to optimise for both
| storage and automated processing through reprocessed renders.
| The costs are high (typically you'll require a human or
| multiple humans to proof each work), though the storage and
| line-transmission savings are considerable.
|
| I lean toward the latter myself. The attitude of other
| archivists (notably the Internet Archive) is to capturing as
| faithful a replication of originally-published formats as
| possible, at considerable cost in both storage and
| accessibility. (This applies to the Archives work in print,
| online / Web, and other document formats.)
|
| Pressed, I'd strongly recommend a "capture what you can,
| reprocess according to need and demand as possible" approach.
| xoogler234 wrote:
| This sounds very appealing. However, from a cursory search I
| can't locate any NAS of that size anywhere close to that price
| point.
| yread wrote:
| 8-bay dock ~ 400$ (Icy Box 10-bay)
|
| 7x14TB HDD ~ 7*300$ (Toshiba MG07ACA14TE)
|
| total 2500$
| [deleted]
| nicoburns wrote:
| What we really need is an index of these torrents by DOI, and
| then ultimately by journal and issue. Are you aware of any work
| to make this happen?
| moyix wrote:
| I believe there is a database dump available with this
| information:
|
| http://libgen.rs/dbdumps/scimag.sql.gz
| sixtyfourbits wrote:
| The only one I'm aware of currently is
| https://github.com/sci-hub-p2p/sci-hub-p2p. Library genesis
| also hosts database dumps at https://libgen.rs/dbdumps/.
|
| There's really a need though for more developers to get
| involved with building tools for more easily searching and
| working with the collection, ideally with a nice UI and
| integration with things like crossref. This is a massively
| valuable data set and it would be great to see what people
| can come up with. Lots of awesome potential for data mining
| too.
|
| If it weren't for the legal issues (publishers using
| copyright law to restrict access to literature they got for
| free since they never pay authors for their work), there's no
| shortage of projects that could utilize this data and be
| enormously beneficial for the scientific community and
| humanity in general. Unfortunately such work can only be done
| in the shadows right now, which greatly limits the number of
| people/institutions likely to do so.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Isn't libgen already distributed via IPFS too?
| commoner wrote:
| Yes, LibGen is mirrored on IPFS:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25209246
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://nitter.eu/ringo_ring/status/1434356217208623106
| anyfactor wrote:
| SciHub is the greatest achievement in academia, research or
| anything that is knowledge. The truest form of accessibility of
| knowledge.
|
| In those 10 years, all the students you see or saw in your campus
| coming from second or third world countries, most of them have
| used scihub to research and publish papers that enabled them to
| pursuit higher studies.
|
| Taking this right (not a privilege) away will mean the second
| burning of Alexandria. If anyone really cared about education or
| knowledge in general they will advocate scibub and libgen to
| survive.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| Context: Sci-Hub stopped uploading new papers in December 2020,
| after being ordered to do so by an Indian court. There was (is?)
| some hope of winning the case which could make Sci-Hub legal in
| India.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_els...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26264378
| [deleted]
| folli wrote:
| Is there actually any update on the case?
| Stupulous wrote:
| Wikipedia says the restriction was only for a couple weeks:
|
| >In December 2020, Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical
| Society filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sci-
| Hub and Library Genesis in the Delhi High Court... >...The
| high court restricted the sites from uploading, publishing or
| making any article available until 6 January 2021.
|
| But it's very strange to me that that could go by unnoticed.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Courts are slow. The court date kept getting pushed back
| (now scheduled in October) and so Sci-hub paused new papers
| for several months. But apparently Elbakyan's lawyers have
| determined that the temporary restriction on uploading new
| materials has expired.
| stavros wrote:
| I love Sci-Hub, even though I never use it. I just really like
| what it's doing for science. However, the law has failed us. It's
| very clear that Sci-Hub is overwhelmingly a Good Thing, yet
| governments want to tear it down because it's threatening
| companies' revenue streams too much.
|
| Given how important it is, and how at risk it is, I think it's
| very important to find a technological solution to keep it up. We
| have the technology to distribute the papers (torrents) as well
| as a search index. I really hope that either Alexandra starts
| using these technologies more, or the technologies mature enough
| to be usable.
|
| Then Sci-Hub would be unkillable.
| asimpletune wrote:
| She should get the Nobel peace prize some day
| type0 wrote:
| If authors kept their copyrights and submitted the articles to
| the likes of sci-hub themselves, they would enjoy higher
| citations and virtually everyone would do this and all this would
| be legal. But now journals are keeping uncountable number of
| articles as hostage in order to parasitize on publicly funded
| institutions and universities. Higher education places in Africa
| and other poor parts of the world that don't have resources are
| unable to lawfully access the papers, it's not just morally
| wrong, the current system is throttling the progress of science
| and harms the research in important subjects.
| stereoradonc wrote:
| https://radoncnotes.com/scihub-its-back/
|
| Here's a quick recap and reaction on the blog.
| aaron695 wrote:
| What Aaron Swartz did in the 2010's was what we all talked about
| around that time.
|
| It was everything we read about as hackers in the 90's The Phrack
| stories for instance about missions to steal (liberate) hardware
| PABX's from offices.
|
| Swartz literally went into a library to break out info, fucking
| Gibson.
|
| Alexandra Elbakyan and crew beat that. And bent history. If you
| think history is a line, Sci-hub (Which is a little different to
| Libgen) changed that.
| btilly wrote:
| In https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1414342378765307907 she
| jokingly asks where her Nobel Peace Prize is.
|
| Given how often that prize is given out as a bully pulpit to
| advance a cause, and given the global debt that science owes to
| her, I think she really does deserve one.
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| For a woman in the similar age, I would say she is more
| deserving of Nobel Peace Prize than Malala Yousafzai.
|
| The risk that Malala takes in advocating for women right in
| Islamic countries is admirable, there is no denying in that.
| However, her impact are minuscule compared to Alexandra's in
| the big picture of progression as a human race. Malala's
| activism has not changed much on the course of women right in
| the countries where religion governs the lives from family to
| governance.
| eat_veggies wrote:
| You do not need to uplift one impactful woman by putting down
| another.
| nivenkos wrote:
| It's become a prize of the political establishment though (why
| did Kissenger and Obama get one?) - there is no way they'd give
| out such a controversial one these days.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Start nominating...
| vasco wrote:
| She needs to step it up by killing thousands of innocent people
| from drone strikes to increase her chances.
| foepys wrote:
| Or start a war with her own citizens and use hunger as a
| weapon by destroying infrastructure, farming equipment and
| blocking foreign aid, creating a famine among millions.
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Ethiopian PM choice was really the most stupid thinf they
| did with the peace prize.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Once they started using it as a political tool to say "we
| support this persons policies". I'm happy that they
| continue to have a near perfect record of terrible
| winners. It makes it clear if you win the Nobel Peace
| Prize you're likely not as good as you thought.
| [deleted]
| Santosh83 wrote:
| There is no absolute guarantee that SciHub or any other site will
| always manage to survive the impressive array of forces against
| it.
|
| As far as I can see, the most robust fallback has to be some kind
| of distributed data store that can mirror humanity's vital
| information on the widest possible array of computer/storage
| systems, and which would literally take an apocalypse to wipe
| out. Depending on one brave person to fight what should be our
| common battles (and we do that everywhere, the heroes are always
| lonely at the top while their actions benefit all of us) is
| disappointing.
|
| Data has to be duplicated massively or it is always extremely
| vulnerable. DNA figured this out billions of years ago.
| andyxor wrote:
| all Sci-hub articles are duplicated via torrents, you can help
| by seeding the torrents
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
|
| there is also some ongoing work moving to IPFS that could use
| help, see https://freeread.org/ipfs/ and
| https://github.com/sci-hub-p2p/sci-hub-p2p/ , it seems to have
| IPFS support https://sci-hub-p2p.readthedocs.io/_en/ipfs.html
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I find it fascinating that SciHub seems to be highlighting two
| large issues.
|
| - Globalisation and the rule of law. Mostly that's a good thing.
| But SciHub would unlikely survive if Russia was unable to give US
| courts the middle finger regularly over the last decade. I am not
| convinced that the benefits of totalitarian regime outweighs the
| downsides but it is a thing
|
| - copyright law is not patent law, science is not patents
|
| So patents do seem to provide a way for inventors to protect a
| revenue stream. But the model of science is not one person or org
| does all the research and then exploits it for profit. So patents
| don't really seem to support science. And copyright has nothing
| to do with either.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
|
| Edit: one way of looking at it is that Science has socialism
| built in. Patents are a means of encouraging innovation by
| arranging that revenue flows back to the innovator, as long as
| the whole market obeys the patent law and licensing conditions.
|
| But apart from "bad" actors, the amount of licensing is vast and
| probably impossible to track back (you would need point of sale,
| bill of materials, supply chain data etc)
|
| Science has a simpler answer - publish the innovation openly and
| assume that the growth in wealth will feed back into general
| wealth growth. Which is kinda looking like "everyone shares".
|
| So it suggests a singularity style step function - when / if
| something like UBI works, science will have a massive boost as
| the feedback loop is not mediated through university grants etc.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > So patents do seem to provide a way for inventors to protect
| a revenue stream.
|
| Not necessarly:
|
| 1. The vast majority of patents are owned by large companies,
| not the individual inventors.
|
| 2. Patents are very often used purely as "spoilers", i.e.
| preventing other companies, and even more so individuals, from
| working in a close enough field to the holding company's, so as
| not to risk patent litigation.
| kongin wrote:
| >- Globalisation and the rule of law. Mostly that's a good
| thing. But SciHub would unlikely survive if Russia was unable
| to give US courts the middle finger regularly over the last
| decade. I am not convinced that the benefits of totalitarian
| regime outweighs the downsides but it is a thing
|
| I can't wait for 2030 when China overtakes the US as the worlds
| largest economy. We can all then be banned from the internet
| for having seen the doctored photo of nothing happening on May
| 35th.
| adventured wrote:
| That's not going to be a problem. When it comes to censorship
| of the Internet, your primary risk is the 5 / 14 / 19 eyes
| groups, not China.
|
| China isn't a critical part of the global Internet today and
| they'll be even less a part of it in another decade. They
| operate their own separate network that only poorly connects
| to the Internet, by design. That separation will increase
| considerably over this decade.
|
| Xi is currently putting new restraints into place to pull
| Chinese tech companies back even further from the Internet
| and into their own isolated network.
|
| When China becomes the largest economy by GDP, it'll be
| meaningless to the operation of the Internet, which they'll
| only kinda-sorta be a part of.
|
| Further, China is now widely regarded as the top adversary to
| the US and the West. That context will get increasingly
| confrontational and war-like in the coming years. Nearly all
| members of Congress are on board the anti-China bandwagon
| now, they've all gotten the message from above (the military
| industrial complex, which dictates nearly all foreign
| policy). The cultural atmosphere will increasingly become
| like it was when the USSR was the primary adversary for
| decades. As that confrontation increases, China's influence
| over the Internet will be intentionally reduced by the powers
| that actually do control the Internet today. China sees that
| coming as well and is taking steps ahead of time to reduce
| its exposure, points of influence and risk. At this point
| China views a military confrontation with the West as close
| to inevitable (which recent Xi speeches have elaborated on).
|
| This increasing separation effort by China is in part
| designed to make it possible for China to attempt to
| destroy/damage the Internet - if it comes to that - without
| posing much terminal risk to their network and economy in the
| process. If they take down the Internet, it'll butcher the
| economies of their adversaries, while their own network
| remains highly functional. This is something the West is
| almost entirely unprepared for, and China is aggressively
| preparing for it; an epic mistake by the West.
| ncphil wrote:
| The main flaw in both patent and copyright law is that the
| terms of protection are entirely too long. It's now over a
| century for some corporate owned copyrights. That directly
| contradicts the goal of copyright: to advance science and the
| arts by encouraging the building of a commons. The terms of
| exclusivity were meant as incentives to that end, not personal
| or institutional rewards. Lately I've been thinking that those
| terms should have been gradually shortened as the pace of
| change and speed of communications (including opportunities for
| sales) increased. At this point IP law is actively hindering
| the advance of science and art. Projects like Sci-Hub are
| restoring sanity to a system that lawmakers have for various
| reasons sold out to the barbarians.
|
| Two years, non-renewable, for any invention or work that had
| absolutely no public funding. Anything with direct public
| funding goes immediately into the public domain.
| intunderflow wrote:
| Remember that if Sci-Hub helps you and you can afford it, a
| donation to them would go a long way to helping keep them afloat.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It's kind of whimsical to read the praise of sci-hub and fear
| about its future here. Tech people have access to pools of
| billions and billions of dollars that are casually being thrown
| on mindless minor addictions that offer nothing to humanity.
| Can't someone make an initiative or startup that disintermediates
| those very old publishers who are trolling science?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Tech people have access to pools of billions and billions of
| dollars that are casually being thrown on mindless minor
| addictions that offer nothing to humanity.
|
| I feel the same way... It's always some new surveillance
| capitalism nightmare, endless advertising for garbage nobody
| really needs, addictive games with the win button hooked up to
| the player's credit card.
|
| And whenever someone makes something truly world-changing like
| Sci-Hub all these people start coming after them because
| they're hurting their "interests". Who cares about their
| interests?
| namdnay wrote:
| They have access to poils of billions of dollars because they
| are expected to aim to return multiples of those billions.
|
| How would a startup reach unicorn valuation based on publishing
| scientific papers? By making people pay. So we're back to
| square one
|
| No, for some problems private enterprise is not necessarily the
| best solution
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It would obviously not be for-profit. But it would benefit
| them indirectly. For investors who invest in biotech, they
| need to realize that open access is as important as open
| source is to software. Scientists have failed to overcome the
| collective action problem
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _For investors who invest in biotech, they need to
| realize that open access is as important as open source is
| to software._
|
| Open Source is important to software companies only because
| it lets them build new products cheaply. Most companies
| don't care, unless they can use it for cheap publicity, or
| to hurt their competition by making an open-source version
| of their proprietary product.
|
| OSS definitely did shift the landscape - it almost killed
| desktop software! There's a reason why technology business
| love SaaS business model - it's not just the recurring
| revenue, it's also because it's immune from being killed by
| open source. You can create a free alternative to any
| software running on end user's machine, but you can't do
| that to proprietary code running on servers the service
| provider owns.
|
| Open access doesn't bring such immediate, direct benefits
| to research companies - so investors will be less keen to
| sponsor it. There's just no business model here.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| There is no profit in it. Of course someone like Gates or Bezos
| could support a SciHub hundreds of years into the future, but
| they will avoid the inevitable controversy that will come
| attached. Rich people will play it safe. The poor can't afford
| the pennies. So ultimately it falls on to a few middle-class
| activists and concerned people all over the world. Ethically
| SciHub (or the idea behind it) is on much firmer ground than
| say PirateBay, but investors want no controversy, unless it is
| religious or political.
|
| I bet a "SciHub" devoted to political or religious articles
| will find backers despite being more controversial. People can
| be worked into passion for lots of things but not science and
| abstract philosophical ideas. That is largely why the FSF
| continues to barely cling to life.
| rsfern wrote:
| > There is no profit in it
|
| I don't know that I'm 100% convinced by this. Elsevier makes
| like 40% profit margins, and their primary contribution to
| researchers is prestige lock-in, basically.
|
| Scientific publishing is in many ways stuck in the previous
| century. There are plenty of interesting opportunities to
| build technology to make that entire ecosystem more awesome,
| especially as funding agencies increasingly require open
| access publication.
|
| Maybe there's still not enough to build a stable company, but
| I took your reaction as a bit fatalistic
| jacquesm wrote:
| I just noticed something funny: The library of Alexandria was
| accidentally burned in 48 BC by Julius Ceasar. Here we are in
| 2021, we now have Alexandra's library, which rivals the first in
| size and scope, and there are at least as many forces trying to
| burn it. But fortunately this one is digital and you too can have
| a copy in your hallway closet for the price of some harddrives
| and bandwidth.
|
| Go make a backup, if you can afford it, and let's make sure that
| this one sticks around.
| chx wrote:
| Small footnote: despite its standing in popular culture, the
| burning of the library at Alexandria was not as important as
| they make it.
|
| > We do not lose texts because of catastrophic events that wipe
| out all copies of them. We lose texts because they stop being
| copied.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5t6op5/facts...
| aloisdg wrote:
| Good reminder to backup.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Copyright holders taking down these libraries should be
| considered a crime against humanity.
| xvilka wrote:
| Sciencide or knowledgecide. Let's hope our descendants
| condemn companies and personalities behind these attacks like
| we condemn criminals of the past.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Condemnation is not enough. We must actively work at
| dismantling the foundations of their power. We must abolish
| intellectual property laws, especially copyright.
|
| They'll still try to maintain control but it will no longer
| be a crime to resist. They will lose.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| The people making these decisions are used to being
| condemned by common folk, so we are not in any way better
| off by having more people condemning these actions.
| throwaway715u wrote:
| How much would it cost to store the articles on one of the
| blockchains?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| blockchains are not the right tool for terabytes of pdfs, and
| don't really provide any functionality over the current
| torrent approach
| mmiliauskas wrote:
| I always wondered if for knowledge as for ecosystems fire is an
| important part. Basically, is there a point where the amount of
| knowledge is so wast that it becomes impossible to reach the
| edge and come up with something novel.
| google234123 wrote:
| Nah, ideas becomes simplified and refined overtime. E.g.
| quantum mechanics was the bleeding edge of physics at one
| time and now it's taught to undergraduates. Some university
| even have classes in string theory for undergrads (not that
| this is a good idea).
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I personally see it as an essential element of preserving
| democracy going forward. As science becomes a more influential
| component in public policy (it has arguably become the most
| influential component over the past 18 months), you end up with
| a governance style of "the law is whatever science says it
| should be". If that science is not available for public
| scrutiny, then you have the added dynamic of "...and the
| science is whatever we say it is".
| rsfern wrote:
| I think open and transparent science is really important if
| we want to adopt evidence based policies in a democratic
| society.
|
| However, when it comes to law I don't think there really is a
| "what science says it should be". We can use the scientific
| method and evidence based reasoning to assess the likely
| outcome of any law or policy change, but figuring out what
| outcomes were as society are willing to accept given all the
| reasons trade offs is not a scientific question.
|
| Unfortunately I'm not sure just having open and transparent
| science will be enough when so many seem uninterested in
| having a good faith conversation about the evidence and its
| implications
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I don't think there is either. It ignores the fundamentally
| solipsistic nature of "the truth", and perhaps more
| importantly the fact that science can't tell you what
| values to have, or what concerns to prioritize. It's a
| methodology for refining knowledge, not designing a
| society.
|
| But in the realm of governance, science is frequently used
| (or perhaps abused) as an unassailable authority to justify
| a wide variety of policy positions. I generally consider
| this to be a governance anti-pattern, but so long as
| science is being used to justify technocratic policy, it
| should be available for all of us to make our own
| judgements about.
| makapuf wrote:
| True question: is there a value that elsevier&co are providing?
| Proofreading or Selecting the articles, by example? If so, even
| if their price reflect more their _de facto_ monopoly than this
| value, if we want to replace them we need to also find a way to
| replace it. Could we outcompete them?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Working in research, I do see a clear business value that
| Elsevier&co are providing and why they continue to get their
| money.
|
| It's acting as an impartial rating/filtering service for the
| non-scientist administrators.
|
| In essence, the funding agencies want a way to evaluate
| scientists and institutions without asking their scientists and
| institutions to do so, probably because they don't trust them,
| and also because they have very strong incentives to avoid
| making any subjective judgment themselves but instead defer to
| some "objective" outside source - so they use paper counts
| published in "proper places" or the existence of papers
| published in "very good places" as the evaluation metric to
| circumvent the (genuinely very hard!) problem of evaluating the
| quality/quantity of the actual research done.
|
| And so this incentive, attached to much of the money flowing
| within academia, trickles down to evaluation of people when
| hiring and promoting (the committees also often look at paper
| counts and publication venue rankings instead of trying to
| evaluate the actual papers - which is time-consuming, and if
| the papers are not in "your field", then very hard to make an
| informed judgement) and so to the individual motivations of
| almost all the people in the system, who have to take into
| account the "proper publishing rituals" or severely limit their
| career.
|
| So having worked a bit with administration and evaluation of
| funding proposals I kind of see why something like that is
| valuable in general, the main problem being is that the costs
| are enormous and not really commensurate with the provided
| value - however, all the costs and barriers are suffered by
| "someone else" (i.e. the scientific community), while all this
| value is provided exactly to the funding decision makers who
| have the power to prevent replacing the current system of
| Elsevier&co, but don't really suffer from its problems. And
| when I say "funding decision makers" I don't mean people who
| have the money and personally care about if it's spent
| efficiently, I mean all the administrators and bureaucrats
| running the process of allocating someone else's money or
| hiring scientists in e.g. some public institution, and whatever
| "sticks and carrots" these administrators have in their career.
| This means that to outcompete the current process, any solution
| would have to benefit _them_ (not the scientists) or it won 't
| be accepted and used, and it's hard to imagine what that would
| be since there's a huge barrier of entry (e.g. it must work for
| evaluating/ranking _all_ scientists /institutions, across all
| disciplines and across all the decades of previous work, or
| it's not useful) and a huge inertia, as the criteria are also
| included in very many hard to change legal documents e.g.
| contracts for long-term funding projects, bylaws and processes
| of many organizations and committees, actual laws regulating
| funding institutions, etc; if we had a clear winning
| replacement launched today, it would still take at least 5-10
| years to switch to it.
|
| IMHO the way to change is not a competing solution - it
| requires institutional change, with the major decision makers
| simply choosing to make decisions on different factors that do
| not include the metrics of Elsevier et al. Here's a talk by
| Stonebraker which gives a strong related argument -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA&t=1220s . However,
| this institutional change is not that likely because, as I
| said, for the people who can change this there's little
| incentive to change, and the people who would benefit from this
| change are not in a position to make it.
| martingab wrote:
| Depending on the field of research it is quite common to
| publish only in open access journals [1]. At my university, we
| are actually only allowed to publish in peer-reviewed OA
| journals. Most of them provide a paid subscription for the
| print version while the online version is free and open to
| everyone.
|
| However, I got the (personal) impression, that this is only
| well established in fundamental research (which typically comes
| with few economic interest). As soon as the research is not
| paid by the state but by private companies (such as in
| medicine, robotics or any other "applied sciences"), scientists
| have a hard time to choose a OA journal (i.e. either it does
| not exist or you are not allowed to publish there). Changing
| this scheme is of course quite difficult, since too many
| commercial parties still benefit from it (which likely can only
| be change by law)...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
| azalemeth wrote:
| Nominally, publishers proof read, copyedit, format and
| publicise my articles after they've been through peer review.
|
| Occasionally the editors -- inevitably based in Chennai -- spot
| a typo that the reviewers missed. Sometimes they cock things up
| massively, especially equations -- I had a big argument about a
| tickz-based scheme once. The formatting is done automatically
| and for me as a latex author I really think we could do that
| very easily. Colleagues who use word see the text transfer to
| something better as a major value add. The publicity the
| journal adds is a strong function of how "good" it is. Science
| and Nature effectively exist because they are Science and
| Nature.
| avnigo wrote:
| Do journals coordinate the peer review, or does that happen
| prior to the submission to the journal? I was under the
| impression it's journals that get the peer review process
| going.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Yes, they do. And editors -- academics, sometimes paid,
| usually not -- are the ones who do it. There's a lot of
| "old boy's network" involved there too, as although each
| author "suggests" a referee usually the editors submit it
| to someone not suggested by the authors as well. I didn't
| include that in the list because it's not really a skill
| done _by_ the journal, more, as they would say,
| _facilitated_ by it.
|
| Frankly, they profit from: academics writing articles
| (funded by someone else); academics editing a journal
| deciding who should review articles (usually, but not
| always, for free); academics reviewing articles (always for
| free); and academics citing articles in subsequent ones.
|
| The whole system is a house of cards, and a relatively
| immutable one.
| cs2733 wrote:
| > Science and Nature effectively exist because they are
| Science and Nature.
|
| Right, the perception of being associated with authoritative
| and knowledgeable publishers which follow certain formalities
| (in other words "the proof you as a scientist belong to the
| Club") has been an important part of academic career
| progression, even if in the last few years the reputation of
| peer-reviewed papers in general has taken a dive.
| pkz wrote:
| A journal was a thing when it was based on paper. What value
| does collecting papers to a specific issue of journal have
| today? Science and Nature may attract better peer reviewers
| but maybe we could find a new way to compute a weight for a
| paper depending on the people who peer reviewed it instead of
| the journal it appeared in?
|
| What if we could look at authors, peer reviewers and papers
| as a graph of weighted edges to come up with a score that was
| independent on journals as a concept? And where there is an
| ontology for the semantics of edges (not only number of
| citations)?
| b215826 wrote:
| Sci-Hub and LibGen have contributed more to my PhD than my so-
| called advisers. So thank you Alexandra for your unselfish
| efforts to make science accessible to all!
| hirako2000 wrote:
| And it has contributed to the majority of the knowledge I've
| gained from its published documents than I could have ever
| afforded.
|
| Makes me realise I never donated. They have the pudic courtesy
| to never even prompt for support.
| logicchains wrote:
| >They have the pudic courtesy to never even prompt for
| support.
|
| Thank you, I learned a new word today.
| [deleted]
| nullifidian wrote:
| Yes, let's publicize it more so it would die faster. /s
| lcvw wrote:
| I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like
| an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep
| as you wish into any technical subject. There's really no
| comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material
| available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is
| surface level. If you to build something, research something, or
| just really delve into it, there's no substitute for having
| access to all of the latest textbooks, manuals, and papers. I've
| never found any source paid or otherwise that comes even close.
| ehvatum wrote:
| Yes, it's a new and better world. On the other side of the $275
| per-paper Elsevier paywall, there are researchers who wish
| _more people_ would read their papers. In my experience digging
| into robotics kinematics, authors are happy to answer questions
| and can point me to the right person when I want to send a
| check to support investigating specific research questions. The
| paywall deceives; science is neither an institution nor a
| copyright. It's people. You can talk to them. You can learn
| from them and they can learn from you. When you apply their
| research, they often want to know about it! They might even
| discuss your application, in future papers. You don't have to
| be Siemens or Big University Labs. The situation with for-
| profit journal publishers is diseased. Who the hell do they
| think they are? Elsevier should be dead, and Aaron Swartz
| should be alive.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I have been pleased that The Journal of Field Robotics is
| well represented on scihub. I have an open source off road
| robot I am designing and the journal is literally about
| robots out in fields and stuff. I am a "serious hobbyist" in
| that I believe my open source contributions to be at least
| somewhat helpful to others, but it's not the kind of thing
| that would justify paying for paywalled papers. I just want
| to glance over the material and keep track of what
| researchers are up to. Libgen is to me a vision of a world
| without copyright and intellectual property restrictions and
| I think it's a much better world than ours.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| Wow! The content in JFR is fantastic! Thank you for the
| pointer!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| So glad it was helpful!
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Most authors of scientific papers will gladly send you a free
| PDF of their papers if you ask them (assuming they remember
| to check their e-mail and respond in the first place). The
| profitability of their publisher is of no concern to them.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| What about a _Netflix but for science information_.
|
| Pay $15 a month for access to a rolling catalogue of science
| info.
| [deleted]
| sleepingsoul wrote:
| You can more or less do this with scite's Citation Statement
| Search[1,2], or by setting email notifications when we detect
| new citation statements to one or more papers (grouped by a
| topic you're interested in like a disease or drug, an author,
| or more)[3].
|
| Quick video of our citation statement search to give you a
| glimpse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjCn-4uMJk
|
| [1] https://scite.ai
|
| [2] https://citation.to
|
| [3] https://help.scite.ai/en-us/article/how-can-i-set-alerts-
| on-...
|
| (Disclaimer -- I work at scite!)
| shkkmo wrote:
| This self promotion seems off topic and unrelated to the
| person you are replying to.
| curiousgal wrote:
| It's always amusing to see how much people take for granted.
| $15 is a lot of money for most people. Not to mention that
| not everyone has access to internation bank accounts.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| I think the comment makes fun of the fact that content gets
| removed from Netflix all the time, so it is not very useful
| as a reference.
| jules wrote:
| Why? The authors write the papers for free, the peer review
| is done by other scientists for free. Why should this
| "netflix for science" get to reap the profits by locking it
| behind a paywall? The reason why predatory publishers still
| exist is a coordination problem. The journals have prestige
| built up historically, and the scientists need to publish in
| prestigious journals for their career. It's a chicken and egg
| problem.
| qmmmur wrote:
| And the papers are often funded by public money.
| dmos62 wrote:
| A related cause is to have publicly funded software be
| published open-source. Check out the FSFE Public Code
| campaign https://publiccode.eu/.
| GeckoEidechse wrote:
| I'm glad initiatives like [Plan
| S](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S) exist ^^
| tchalla wrote:
| How much does it cost for an author to publish in a
| Nature or Science journal under Plan S?
| rsfern wrote:
| I don't know specifically about for Plan S, but most open
| access fees are in the 3-5k range per article
| mynameismon wrote:
| Desktop version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| I'm not sure about how fair the whole system is, but if we
| assume the papers should be free, then a service where the
| papers are available is still reasonable to have a small
| fee.
|
| Someone needs to rent and service the servers, update the
| software, bandwidth costs money, etc..
| MrManatee wrote:
| There's a lot of information, data, and software out
| there that is available to download for free. Yes there
| are hosting costs, but there are also people and
| organizations that are willing to pay them because they
| believe that it's worth it.
|
| I'm absolutely convinced that if copyrights weren't an
| issue, there would be enough governments, foundations,
| universities, corporations, and individuals willing to
| pay the costs of making scientific publications available
| to everyone. It wouldn't have to be a paid service.
| lcvw wrote:
| Libraries can get you a physical copy of pretty much any
| paper or book for completely free. But somehow getting a
| digital copy is not on the table? It's just insane, I would
| happily pay for a service that did this even if it included
| drm or something. The journals would never go for it though
| because they live off of the insane rates research
| institutions pay to subscribe.
| mimsee wrote:
| Then download everything possible with a small script and the
| FBI will hunt you down. For those who don't know, I'm
| referring to Aaron Swarzt
| crest wrote:
| And the DA will hound you till you drop dead to get re-
| elected.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I really wish someone could build a better UI for this research
| internet.
|
| Hyperlinks for all references would be a good start. Finding
| some way to make some automatic glossary of definitions of
| technical terms would make scientific papers substantially more
| accessible too.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Some of the background data for this is being collected by
| wikiCite (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite) and
| Scholia https://scholia.toolforge.org/ projects
|
| Part of this involves turning text data of authors into
| linked data that used to navigate between texts:
| https://author-disambiguator.toolforge.org/
| generalizations wrote:
| Seems like a large part of what's needed is just being able
| to make the pdfs machine-readable, by making decent plain-
| text versions of the text content. Right now, IIRC, there's
| no hands-off way to get the text of a pdf. Especially if
| there's weirdness like multiple-columns (sometimes happens
| with this stuff).
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Currently working in this field and this is actually the
| cutting-edge(!!) but it will be 100% possible/robust within
| the next year or so I believe. Really cool ML techniques
| being used for htis.
| sleepingsoul wrote:
| How well does it work with old OCR'd PDFs? :)
| zapataband1 wrote:
| Like you said the hard parts are the unstructured
| data/images/tables. There are pretty-good(80% of the way
| there) solutions tho. But nothing that could handle
| millions of paper without error
| sleepingsoul wrote:
| Have you come across scite (https://scite.ai) yet? We're also
| innovating in this space by extracting citation statements
| from full-text articles and classifying their intent.
|
| So let's say paper A cites paper B. If you look at paper B,
| we show you:
|
| - how many times it was cited
|
| - the direct paragraphs from paper A where it was cited
|
| - the sections from paper A where paper B was referenced
|
| - ... and a lot more
|
| You can also now search these citation statements directly to
| find evidence-based information pretty quickly.
|
| - Short video to showcase that search:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjCn-4uMJk
|
| - Website with a bit more details: https://citation.to/
|
| You can also visualize citation networks similar to
| ConnectedPapers, set notifications for new citations on
| groups of papers you're interested in, and much more.
|
| (Disclaimer -- I work here!)
| KNrDajfZ wrote:
| No one cares. This thread is about free access to papers
| and not another paid service that forces you to pay monthly
| fees for something that could be a free service. In that
| sense you aren't any better than large online publishers. 8
| bucks a month for a scientific paper search engine? Really?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I vouched for your comment because you have a very valid
| point, but you could be more polite in making it. Welcome
| to HN.
| KNrDajfZ wrote:
| Thanks. I am really cranky today. I'll do better next
| time.
| sleepingsoul wrote:
| Hiya,
|
| Well, I definitely agree with your sentiment in a
| normative sense that scientific papers should be free and
| readily accessible to all -- in part because a lot of it
| is funded through tax dollars!
|
| But given the current state of affairs, we're looking at
| making that information accessible to people without
| having to pay exorbitant fees to access individual
| research. We also offer steep discounts for students or
| anyone in academia.
|
| With that in mind I would push back a little that we're
| _just_ a scientific paper search engine -- our system
| does a lot of work in extracting and classifying those
| citation statements, which makes it more powerful than
| traditional scientific search engines.
|
| And besides just using our search, a huge time-saving
| value of our service is the report pages which helps you
| quickly build a qualitative understanding of how
| something was cited.
|
| Even if all scientific papers were freely accessible, our
| report pages allow you to see the direct, relevant
| snippets from citing papers without having to manually
| read each and every single one. I think that is quite
| valuable!
|
| I know I've gone on a little tangent from the original
| discussion about scihub, and having free and open access
| to papers, but I did just want to throw that in because I
| think it's an important distinction. And as much as we
| all want that free and open world to exist, I think it's
| also interesting to think about how we can open up that
| information for people in the interim.
|
| Best,
|
| Ashish
| abcc8 wrote:
| The site sounds interesting, but signing up just to
| evaluate the results of my first query is a no-go for me.
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah it's called Web of Science. It's very good but it's not
| free unfortunately. And it doesn't go as far as hyperlinking
| references in PDFs or defining terms. I agree those would be
| great, but unfortunately there's not much incentive for paper
| authors to do that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Science
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Hyperlinking references in PDFs is trivial for authors if
| they use LaTeX and the journal/conference template supports
| it. It's just a matter of ensuring that the bibtex entry
| has an URL or a DOI, and most bibtex entries copied and
| pasted from curated sources already have them.
|
| If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked
| references, it's probably just because they're published in
| journals whose templates don't support it. In my particular
| research field, most publication venues' templates starting
| supporting those links around 3-4 years ago, so my papers
| from, say, 2015 have no hyperlinks in references, while
| those from 2019 do. This didn't require any significant
| extra effort on my part, in fact in general it requires
| less because well-curated bibtex entries are easier to come
| by now than some years ago.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not adding the links that is hard. It's choosing the
| destination URL. Where do you link to? I guess you could
| link to doi.org. Probably better than nothing but still
| not ideal because it doesn't actually take you to the
| PDF.
|
| Can you show an example paper with links?
| jltsiren wrote:
| Linking directly to the PDF is usually the wrong choice.
| When you find a new paper, you often want to get the
| citation metadata, which the PDF document rarely contains
| in a convenient form. There are often multiple versions
| of the same paper, and you may want to determine which
| version you managed to find. Is it a preprint, the final
| authors' version, the published journal paper, an early
| version published in conference proceedings, or an
| unpublished extended version of the paper?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| DOI is the correct thing to link to because the author or
| publisher has chosen this as their canonical URL for the
| object. The DOI could and sometimes does point to the
| pdf, it's just conventional to point to an html version
| of the paper. It would make a lot of sense to me to
| standardize a field in the DOI metadata containing the
| PDF URL. (source: I manage the DataCite membership of a
| large organization)
| beckman466 wrote:
| Have you heard of Alexandra Freeman's Octopus?
| https://www.science.org/careers/2018/11/meet-octopus-new-
| vis...
|
| Edit for direct link to Octopus: https://science-octopus.org
| geokon wrote:
| One thing I've recently discovered is this website:
| connectedpapers.com/
|
| It builds a graph of referenced papers and makes it easier to
| narrow down which one are important/foundational for further
| research
|
| I don't think a glossary would help. What you need to find is
| a "review paper". These act as a primer to the field for new
| researchers. They're usually well written, with less jargon
| and have tons of references for you to dig into. That said, I
| don't have a good method for finding them.. I just stumble
| across them haphazardly..
| stevesimmons wrote:
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/ is very good too for
| reading paper abstracts, links to the references, citations
| and related papers. The full papers are included, if
| copyright allows.
|
| The references and citations are tagged and filterable,
| making it easy to see which are the most cited, or review
| papers, etc.
| elcritch wrote:
| DOI URIs work great and sci-hub understands them. Figuring
| out the DOI from the citations section is a bit more annoying
| still. A meta glossary would be fantastic. 80% of learning a
| new field is figuring out the jargon.
| goodmachine wrote:
| > A meta glossary would be fantastic. 80% of learning a new
| field is figuring out the jargon.
|
| True!
| jpeloquin wrote:
| It wouldn't take much to significantly improve things. We
| don't even have full-text search for paywalled articles. The
| paid search engines like Web of Science just do title,
| keywords, and abstract. Even considering the subset of open
| access articles, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar do ok
| but don't offer much in the way of search refinement (e.g.,
| "DTAF" NEAR "collagen"). They're good at finding _something_
| related to your query but not good for systematic review.
| zapataband1 wrote:
| That's the best part about a good idea once it's out there!
| It's hard to kill. Really wish we had come up with an
| alternative to 20 streaming sites...
| rapnie wrote:
| PeerTube at https://joinpeertube.org/ or Owncast at
| https://owncast.online/
|
| Both support live streams, and are (being) federated and ever
| more integrated with other Fediverse apps.
| codewithcheese wrote:
| There is. Torrents. The UX can be amazing if you know how,
| but we dont want spoil the party by sharing.
| KNrDajfZ wrote:
| It's the typical Eastern European (or non-US centric) Internet.
| The IP laws make sense only if people have the capital to buy
| stuff. When I was a kid in a post-Soviet country, no one ever
| bought anything original (like a CD with a game). Everything
| was bootleg or pirated from the Internet.
|
| After [the US lobby started to push for copyright enforcement
| in the EU under the threat of
| sanctions](https://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-
| extent-of-lap...), things have changed. The copyright and IP
| laws that US lobbies push to the world are killing the idea of
| free Internet and only benefit large corporations that are
| untouchable.
|
| Elsevier is Dutch-based and they are fierce in suing everyone
| who tries to get away with getting free papers that were paid
| for by the taxpayers.
|
| The "free" Internet doesn't exist anymore, but it's good to
| have places like Russia where the IP law is not strictly
| enforced, because everything is broken so no one cares.
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