Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order(torrentfreak.com)

201 pointsby picture5 tahun yang lalu97 comments

Sci-Hub: Elsevier and Springer Nature Obtain UK ISP Blocking Order

https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-elsevier-and-springer-nature-obtain-uk-isp-blocking-order-210218/

100 comments

Frost1x5 tahun yang lalu

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.

Someone5 tahun yang lalu

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.

wooger5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

0xbadcafebee5 tahun yang lalu

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.

TheGallopedHigh5 tahun yang lalu

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.

prepend5 tahun yang lalu

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.

rsfern5 tahun yang lalu

I haven’t heard of any reviewer that was compensated for a review, though I once won a reviewer award that had a small honorarium.

Editing is generally a paid service — the journal will not correct your typos or your prose. They will find incomplete reference data and ask you to fix them, and that’s about it

nafizh5 tahun yang lalu

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.

leonry5 tahun yang lalu

I don't know how, but the Zotero Connector usually retrieves the submitted paper when I don't have access to the article.

andyjohnson05 tahun yang lalu

> 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/

dash25 tahun yang lalu

Actually it's sci-hub.se.

amelius5 tahun yang lalu

Experience taught me you can always find a good link in the right side-box at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Miner49er5 tahun yang lalu

Somebody created dns-over-wikipeda for this:

https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia

m-p-35 tahun yang lalu

Looks like it would benefit them from having a .onion domain as well.

StavrosK5 tahun yang lalu

Or a handshake domain :(

southerntofu5 tahun yang lalu

My understanding of handshake is that it's an interesting auction system (though the rationale for monetizing domain names itself should be questioned), but does "little more".

There was this ICANN session a while back (streamable on zoom) with folks from both Handshake and GNU Name System devs making each a presentation about their "emerging identifiers". I found it really interesting to see how the two projects cover (in my view) different grounds.

Terretta5 tahun yang lalu

# 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

StavrosK5 tahun yang lalu

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.

LockAndLol5 tahun yang lalu

And .i2p domain too.

riedel5 tahun yang lalu

https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ exists for some while now but it times out for me

andyjohnson05 tahun yang lalu

Thanks. sci-hub.se was the domain that I tried.

calvano9155 tahun yang lalu

Zlibrary is a mirror and they have a Tor address

varshithr5 tahun yang lalu

So VPN?

giomasce5 tahun yang lalu

To me the best access way is the Telegram bot. Fast, keeps your files easily accessible and is shared with other devices.

dbetteridge5 tahun yang lalu

I think just changing your DNS resolver to google/cloudflare still works?

feu5 tahun yang lalu

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.

akadruid15 tahun yang lalu

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/

feu5 tahun yang lalu

Thanks! Will look into that.

mhh__5 tahun yang lalu

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!

Isthatablackgsd5 tahun yang lalu

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.

dastx5 tahun yang lalu

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.

dbetteridge5 tahun yang lalu

Ah, talktalk may just be being lazy (or the sci-hub change hasn't hit me yet)

otsukare5 tahun yang lalu

DNS-over-HTTPS generally works

mrlonglong5 tahun yang lalu

Also, tor does a good job too.

toomuchtodo5 tahun yang lalu

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.

generationP5 tahun yang lalu

Is sci-hub actually on IPFS now or is it still an idea floating in some heads?

toomuchtodo5 tahun yang lalu

Sci-hub is not yet on IPFS, libgen content already is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub#Delivery_to_users

zaik5 tahun yang lalu

Btw if you want to help mirror some of libgen's files here is how you can do it: https://freeread.org/ipfs/

DyslexicAtheist5 tahun yang lalu

or dnscrypt-proxy https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy

the84725 tahun yang lalu

Are they only blocking it at the DNS level? If so running your own resolver should do the job too.

teekert5 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, just tap "DNS over HTTPS" Firefox and watch the world open up.

worldofmatthew5 tahun yang lalu

There is no congestion on the Tor network, Capacity is 2x demand.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

cybert00th5 tahun yang lalu

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.

vixen995 tahun yang lalu

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.

toxik5 tahun yang lalu

Even people with access use scihub. It’s just easier than whatever institutional login crap they throw at you.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

matthewdgreen5 tahun yang lalu

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.

KingFelix5 tahun yang lalu

Very true

burundi_coffee5 tahun yang lalu

In TalkTalk the domain of the website is explicitly stated. Would it be enough to change the domain name to get around this?

uncledave5 tahun yang lalu

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.

southerntofu5 tahun yang lalu

> Don’t go with major ISPs in the UK.

This is also the situation in France, where authorities have many times avoided targeting smaller non-profit operators, because they knew those would fight tooth and nail in courts to try and defeat censorship orders.

uncledave5 tahun yang lalu

We’ve got an alliance here called ISPA which is pro censorship. The small guys aren’t interesting in being members.

benlumen5 tahun yang lalu

Shhh.

HotHotLava5 tahun yang lalu

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.

gautamdivgi5 tahun yang lalu

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.

Someone5 tahun yang lalu

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/)

breck5 tahun yang lalu

> 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

nullspace5 tahun yang lalu

> I would

From your comment, it looks like you have zero skin in the game here. Given that your comment is unproductive.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

bocklund5 tahun yang lalu

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.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

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.

southerntofu5 tahun yang lalu

It's never too late to stand up to your ideals. I say that without any judgement of your past/future attitude in this matter: the decision is yours.

rsfern5 tahun yang lalu

Publish a preprint with Sci-hub links then?

It doesn’t seem worth it to have to fight and lose during proofing over what amounts to a DOI anyways

jsilence5 tahun yang lalu

Fortunately a lot of EU funded research projects require that any paper stemming from a project has to be published under Open Access.

gautamdivgi5 tahun yang lalu

Yes, but Elsevier and Springer open access publishing is prohibitively expensive. That's what needs to change via legislation.

zozbot2345 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

gautamdivgi5 tahun yang lalu

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_dshiv5 tahun yang lalu

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.

gautamdivgi5 tahun yang lalu

I think the debate is that the charges are not fair. Reviewers often donate their time to journal reviews. The research may often be paid for by government grants.

researchgate.net & arxiv provide a away around this. Arxiv is well known, not sure how researchgate is doing. Scientists could setup their profiles and papers in arxiv or researchgate and then they can be accessed over google scholar.

dr_dshiv5 tahun yang lalu

I can't imagine that these licensing fees amount to a very high proportion of the cost of running a university—the value provided is very high.

Arxiv, research gate, scihub— they all seem to work well together with the commercial publishing system.

I think the world without a lot of money going into scientific publishing would be worse off.

jsilence5 tahun yang lalu

No question the actual publication costs should be covered.

Which they are when a paper is published Open Access. They are covered once, which is ok, because the publication costs also occur once for the most part. There is no reason for a publisher to be allowed to perpetually charge ~40$ for a pdf download.

One other often mentioned criticism is that universities are forced to subscribe to bundles of journals with a mixture of desired journals fudged with journals no one would want to read. Nominally the subscription fee covers a large swath of journals and papers, but essentially the actual value is much more narrow.

To be honest there is no need for journals anyway in our completely digitized world. If all the papers were published Open Access (paid for once) the users could simply filter for the keywords relevant to them. Why would I subscribe to a Journal? This is technology from the last century.

Edit: typo

dr_dshiv5 tahun yang lalu

I am conservative about these things because of my experience seeing how disrupting the news industry

bluenose695 tahun yang lalu

I cite articles and books that I think will help my readers understand the issues under discussion. As much as I hate some publishers, I'd do a disservice to my readers if I failed to tell them about something that could help them in their work. Limiting the scope of journals to which I submit articles makes sense. Limiting the scope of journals I cite does not.

matheusmoreira5 tahun yang lalu

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.

rsfern5 tahun yang lalu

Well there is pubpeer — https://pubpeer.com/static/about

I’m not sure how we get away from the current review system without a coordinated effort involving the prominent scholars in whatever field. The editors are often senior peers, and there’s sort of an expectation that you review others work, and that they will review your work

breck5 tahun yang lalu

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

matheusmoreira5 tahun yang lalu

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.

higerordermap5 tahun yang lalu

At least they could reduce it to 5 years or something, and make silly patents penalizable.

xibalba5 tahun yang lalu

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.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

Well I see you've thought deeply about this.

https://giphy.com/gifs/tipsyelves-math-26gR0YFZxWbnUPtMA

xibalba5 tahun yang lalu

I don't need to. A 5 year old can understand that you're not entitled to take other people's work without their permission.

hda25 tahun yang lalu

Yet that same 5 year-old will take thoughts, words, and ideas from their parents and their environment without asking for permission. He will attempt to draw characters he likes without permission.

Information is not property, and its sharing and reproduction is not theft.

I agree that people who work on building complicated information (movies, software, ..) should be compensated, but not at the expense of our right to share. There are many proven business models that guarantee compensation without restricting sharing, but they don't generate as much money as industry standard "passive-revenue" (rent-seeking) scheme of "licensing" and copyright.

It's incredibly sad that many people no longer understand this.

southerntofu5 tahun yang lalu

Five year olds are usually really good at cooperation (including skillsharing), and it takes many years of school to teach them that "copying is theft" and helping one another to achieve a task is "cheating".

theamk5 tahun yang lalu

If a classmate takes 5 year old's work, and claims it is theirs, there would be immediate outrage.

If a 5 year old has a "secret" picture and someone takes it and shows to entire class, they would be outraged.

Not all sharing is good. There are nuances everywhere.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

These aren’t nuances at all. These are completely different things.

I share something with my friend and she shares it with someone else. Nothing wrong with that. If she were to share it and say she made it that’s lying/fraud. There are consequences for that.

If my friend breaks into my desk and shares photos of the contents, that’s a violent property crime. There’s consequences for that.

Pretending that these are what we are talking about is dishonest.

theamk5 tahun yang lalu

Sara: “Hey Johnny! Want to see my new picture? But do not show it to anyone else.”

Johnny: “Sure, show it to me... can I take it home?”

Sara: yes, you can have it. But don’t show it to others!

Johnny: “HEY EVERYONE LOOK WHAT A STUPID PICTURE SARA MADE”

Sara: No! I told you not to show it to anyone else! (Starts crying)

——-

No nuances you say?

beckman4665 tahun yang lalu

You wrote above:

> Not all sharing is good.

Try this:

---

Sara: “Hey Johnny! Want to see my new invention? 99% of it is made up of discoveries made by my ancestors. I was on the receiving end of a lifetime of patience and privilege, as my parents (and other mentors) were able to give me a lot of attention as they are privileged (non-propertied) knowledge workers under capitalism, and therefore not as stressed out as the majority of today's working class (non knowledge workers). My luck compounded into a role as lead researcher of a publicly funded research project, where I was able to do lots of experiments and make a significant new discovery which can benefit the owners of this new trade secret/intellectual property. So yeah, check out my work, but do not show it to anyone else. And here, sign this NDA, the capitalist firm I work for asks anyone to sign it.”

Johnny: “Sure, show it to me... and yeah I'll sign that NDA. Can I take this home?”

Sara: "yes, you can. But remember to not show it to others, otherwise they will 1) see how the ability to replicate my research is impossible today because of the privatization of science by capitalists (the continued assault on our shared inheritance), 2) see all the privilege I received, and lastly, 3) to see from the negative research exactly what experiments I did, and that it was not due to my own genius after all."

Johnny: “HEY EVERYONE LOOK WHAT AN AWESOME INVENTION SARA MADE. THIS IS AMAZING AND COULD HAVE SO MANY MORE APPLICATIONS IF SHARING IT WASN'T CRIMINALIZED UNDER CAPITALISM.”

Sara: "No! I told you not to show it to anyone else! Now they can see it. (Starts crying) Now I get to sue you and be backed up by the sickly rich capitalist rentiers/monopolizers who funded me."

---

You know full well that sharing a drawing is not the same as the benefits gained from new discoveries made in science, which has the potential to benefit all humans.

mepian5 tahun yang lalu

HN doesn't implement hashtags.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

Well then I guess people should post these hashtags to other places.

benlumen5 tahun yang lalu

Want an econony built on imitation instead? Like China? No thanks.

beckman4665 tahun yang lalu

> Want an econony built on imitation instead? Like China?

So just like America then? Where did you get this idea that America is squeaky clean and original?

Newsflash: it's not.

wohfab5 tahun yang lalu

We need blockchain open access! IDEA coin incoming!

forrestthewoods5 tahun yang lalu

GPL license doesn’t function without copyright law. Do you want to throw that out too?

HideousKojima5 tahun yang lalu

Stallman himself has repeatedly said he only devised the GPL because it's the best option in a world where copyright exists.

breck5 tahun yang lalu

Yup. Licenses are for losers.

kuroguro5 tahun yang lalu

WTFPL is the only license we need! :)

dartharva5 tahun yang lalu

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.

higerordermap5 tahun yang lalu

I could access Sci Hub from India a few days ago, from Jio, for what it's worth.

dr_dshiv5 tahun yang lalu

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.