# Sci-Hub: Bypassing paywalls



## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

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


> Sci-Hub is an online repository of over 48,000,000 scientific academic papers and articles,[1] available through its website. New papers are uploaded daily after accessing them through .edu proxies.[2][3] Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, a software developer and neurotechnology researcher from Kazakhstan, in 2011, it began as a reaction to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls, typically US$30 each when bought on a per-paper basis.[3][4] Academic publisher Elsevier has in 2015 filed a legal complaint in New York City alleging copyright infringement by Sci-Hub.[5]


Like piratebay except for academic papers.
What do you make of it?


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## Epherion (Aug 23, 2011)

Nice.


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## aef8234 (Feb 18, 2012)

For the love of god yes, I don't have to do backwards shit to read a three page word salad meta analysis on kelp migration patterns.








































It was a slow day.


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## RobynC (Jun 10, 2011)

So it's like Google Scholar?


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

RobynC said:


> So it's like Google Scholar?


Nah. Google scholar directs you to journal articles based on your search. With scihub youd presumably already found the paper and have access to its doi or something else that can be used by scihub to identify the paper youre trying to access.
So its not for searching, only bypassing the paywall that stops user from viewing full paper.


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## RobynC (Jun 10, 2011)

What's a DOI


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

RobynC said:


> What's a DOI


Code to find specific Journals articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier


> A digital object identifier (DOI) is a serial code used to uniquely identify objects. The DOI system is particularly used for electronic documents such as journal articles. The DOI system began in 2000.[1]


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## RobynC (Jun 10, 2011)

From there can you download


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

RobynC said:


> From there can you download


Can do that or just view from browser


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## Stelmaria (Sep 30, 2011)

Neuroskeptic on Twitter:
"We demand better paywalls for our papers! It's not fair that @sci_hub lets anyone access them for free." - said no academic ever

https://twitter.com/Neuro_Skeptic/status/712379796135796736


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## aef8234 (Feb 18, 2012)

Snowy Leopard said:


> Neuroskeptic on Twitter:
> "We demand better paywalls for our papers! It's not fair that @_sci_ _hub lets anyone access them for free." - said no academic ever
> 
> https://twitter.com/Neuro_Skeptic/status/712379796135796736


I don't even know if scientists get money from this, or if it's similar to the system with musicians.
I mean in essence the career of scientists and musicians are about the same.
Except the critics actually know what they're fucking saying and are musicians/scientists themselves.


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## Stelmaria (Sep 30, 2011)

aef8234 said:


> I don't even know if scientists get money from this, or if it's similar to the system with musicians.
> I mean in essence the career of scientists and musicians are about the same.
> Except the critics actually know what they're fucking saying and are musicians/scientists themselves.


The publishers pay nothing to the scientists who create the work, nor the peer reviewers. 

Worse than that, the scientists either have to pay to publish (open access) or pay to read articles written by others in their field.

The scientific publishing industry is a leech upon scholarly research.


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## aef8234 (Feb 18, 2012)

Snowy Leopard said:


> The publishers pay nothing to the scientists who create the work, nor the peer reviewers.
> 
> Worse than that, the scientists either have to pay to publish (open access) or pay to read articles written by others in their field.
> 
> The scientific publishing industry is a leech upon scholarly research.


I wonder how many research articles got buried by extortion attempts.


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## puzzled (Mar 15, 2016)

Aaron Swartz would be proud.


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## Grandmaster Yoda (Jan 18, 2014)

Sharing ideas should be done freely. This is correct. I don't disavow.


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## pertracto (Sep 4, 2015)

> Like piratebay except for academic papers.
> What do you make of it?


Use it shamelessly?


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## Enantiodromia (Feb 12, 2013)

There's an article out with figures based on Sci-Hub's server logs from last September through February.
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone | Science | AAAS









Sci-Hub activity on 5 Feb 2016


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

http://www.the-scientist.com/?artic...title/Opinion--Academic-Publishing-Is-Broken/


> Let's take a look at the flow of money in the production of research. The government takes tax revenue from citizens and uses it to fund university research groups and libraries. Researchers obtain government grants and use the money to conduct experiments. They write up the results in manuscripts that are destined to become published papers. Manuscripts are submitted to journals, where they are handled by other researchers acting as unpaid volunteer editors. They co-ordinate the process of peer-review, which is done by yet other researchers, also unpaid. All these roles—author, editor, reviewer—are considered normal responsibilities of researchers, funded by grants.
> 
> At this point, researchers have worked together to produce a publication-ready, peer-reviewed manuscript. But rather than posting it on the Web, where it can contribute to the world's knowledge, form a basis for future work, and earn prestige for the author, the finished manuscript is then donated gratis to a publisher: the author signs away copyright. The publisher then formats the manuscript and places the result behind a paywall. Then it sells subscriptions back to the universities where the work originated. Well-off universities will have some access to the paper (though even they are denied important rights such as text-mining). Less well-off universities have access to varying selections of journals, often not the ones their researchers need. And the taxpayers who funded all this? They get nothing at all. No access to the paper.


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

Also recommend these for books, can even have some more obscure stuff.
Library Genesis
https://www.gutenberg.org


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## Ermenegildo (Feb 25, 2014)

*Scholarly Literature: Unpaywall, Open Access Button, Sci-Hub*



The Citationsy Blog said:


> *Unpaywall*
> 
> Unpaywall is a website built by Impactstory, a nonprofit working to make science more open and reusable online. They are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. What they do is gather all the articles they can from all the open-access repositories on the internet. These are papers that have been provided by the authors or publishers for free, and thus Unpaywall is completely legal. They say they have about 50-85% of all scientific articles available in their archive. Works with Chrome or Firefox.


*https://unpaywall.org with Firefox and Chrome Add-ons*

_An open database of 16.898.683 free scholarly articles. We harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use._




The Citationsy Blog said:


> *Open Access Button*
> 
> The Open Access Button does something very similar to Unpaywall, with some major differences. They search thousands of public repositories, and if the article is not in any of them they send a request to the author to make the paper publicly available with them. The more people try to find an article through them, the more requests an author gets. You can search for articles/papers directly from their page, or download their browser extension.


*https://openaccessbutton.org with Firefox and Chrome Add-ons *

_Avoid Paywalls, Request Research. Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors.

Firefox Add-on: You can use the Open Access Button on journal articles. When you use the Button, it'll either take you straight to a free copy of the research article or help you ask the author to freely share the article with you. _


*(Source with Sci-Hub links)*

*The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles*


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## Wellsy (Oct 24, 2011)

That's pretty cool extension that allows for a greater ease of access ^_^


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## SilentScream (Mar 31, 2011)

aef8234 said:


> I don't even know if scientists get money from this, or if it's similar to the system with musicians.
> I mean in essence the career of scientists and musicians are about the same.
> Except the critics actually know what they're fucking saying and are musicians/scientists themselves.


Scientists make their money from the source that funds their research. Some of them want to be paid like authors and writers do, but some don't. However, most of the funding sources then try to make their money back from the results the scientists produce so that they can continue to fund other scientists and more research. 

There needs to be a balance between free knowledge vs paid knowledge because money ultimately keeps people fed. If you take money out of the system in any industry, you're de-incentivizing growth in that industry.

It's the same as any industry really. I'm ok with a very small population getting free information (which is what a lot of newspapers do when they report on scientist findings), but if the entire population got all research material for free always, then I doubt that research would ever get done at all.


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