Sci-Hub is fundraising

https://sci-hub.do/donate

by elashri • 5 years ago

518 122 5 years ago

sci-hub.do

ryanlol4• 5 years ago

How come the page is only in Russian?

f6v2• 5 years ago

I have an English locale and it's in English for me.

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

If sci-hub had popped up within reach of the United States, Alexandra Elbakyan would have already been "taken care of" like Aaron Swartz was.

(On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.)

perihelions3• 5 years ago

Exactly right, and that's why this innovation popped up in Kazakhstan and not Cambridge, Massachusetts. There was a person who could have easily created SciHub in Boston and because of US judicial philosophies he is dead.

I think this is going to become a trend going forwards -- IP (broadly interpreted) is a crippling disadvantage, and it's an asymmetric disadvantage some countries levy on themselves, and some don't. I predict that we're going to be continuously blindsinded by this -- by crazy-useful tech inventions thought up by clever people, not in the USA but in the developing world, in part because of the stifling effects of IP (and in part because genius doesn't follow national borders, and software needs no industrial base).

ryanlol4• 5 years ago

(On a more practical level, though: it's in English for me.)

Weird, the page only loads in Russian for me and doesn’t seem to offer any way to change the language.

NmAmDa2• 5 years ago

It shows in English for me. Do you have a VPN?

ryanlol4• 5 years ago

No VPN, English locale.

I read Russian and my phone has a secondary Russian keyboard layout, but as far as I can tell my browser isn’t leaking this.

navigator.language returns en-GB and Accept-Language header seems to be set to en-US

zzleeper• 5 years ago

Through my employer, I have access to practically all papers I need to download. But doing so is much more inconvenient than using sci-hub than I still prefer the latter.

And of course, don't get me started in the usual ramble about us writing papers, typesetting papers, refereeing papers, etc. etc. for free while Elsev** and friends get $bns every year.

wolverine8763• 5 years ago

You author your papers for free?

netr0ute• 5 years ago

Is that a bad thing?

SinParadise• 5 years ago

In exchange, he get a different piece of paper, possibly framed and maybe a pat on the back for a job well done. Sounds fair to me.

beanjuice• 5 years ago

In the grand scheme of things, the academia complex is funded by taxpayers to produce academic work. It used to be that journals would at least do good editorial work, help with editing, formatting, and perhaps even graphics. All of this work is now on the author, so the question increasingly becomes, why does a taxpayer not only pay for the lab to produce research, but also the $3,000 to 5,000 or more fee to have something published, depending on the journal. Furthermore, once the research was paid for by the taxpayer, the scientist's time wasted to format the research, and the journal paid for the privilege to publish the paper- these institutions have to pay once again for access to these papers once published. In a way, journals in the 21st century are double or triple dipping on citizens, all so we can share our work.

garmaine• 5 years ago

You don't?

humanistbot• 5 years ago

All academics do. You don't actually get directly paid for publishing journal articles. You get zero cut of the sales. Books are a different story, although most academic books don't actually make a profit.

As an academic, you get paid for teaching and to carry out research grants to support a particular project. The teaching and grants pay for your salary and expenses through the university. You do need to keep publishing at the end if you ever want to get a grant again. But when you publish in a traditional journal article, you have to hand over the copyright to the publisher that owns the brand and trademark to "Nature" or "Science" or "The New England Journal of Medicine" for free. You don't get a cut of the profits, you get the prestige of the privately-owned systems, which matters to your employer and grant funding agencies.

In fact, now you actually have to pay to publish if you want anyone on the internet to be able to read it for free. For Nature, the open access "article processing charge" is $11,390. It has become the norm to now budget in these fees in your research grants, which makes it more difficult for those who don't get big grants to publish.

Yes it is bullshit. That is why so many academics support sci-hub.

f6v2• 5 years ago

To play the devil's advocate: you can find many articles as pre-prints, for example on biorxiv. And it stays there for free even after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. So you CAN access the article without paying to the publisher.

bunje• 5 years ago

I think in the past journals prohibiting the use of preprint archives was more common.

jjoonathan3• 5 years ago

100% true for some fields.

100% false for other fields.

Fomite5• 5 years ago

This. The medical field is still struggling to fully adopt pre-prints.

dmix• 5 years ago

There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones.

It’s like how every movie, even the rare no longer distributed ones are available on Torrent sites but you can’t find them even if you have access to a good online commercial libraries.

vmception• 5 years ago

(Sadly there are a bunch from major film festivals that never are screened again, I wish I could torrent some)

gwern• 5 years ago

"There hasn’t been a single paper I’ve looked for that wasn’t available on Scihub, even old ones."

Let's not exaggerate here. I hit gaps in SH all the time. And I have to wonder how you haven't noticed that SH halted its 2021 paper uploads entirely because of the Indian court case. That's quite a gap.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

Not all articles are available this way, even in fields like cryptography, which have a decades-long tradition of using preprint servers.

zarzavat• 5 years ago

It's not fair unless researchers in every country can access every paper. Not a subset, but every single one. Why should rich countries or rich institutions be granted the exclusive right to do research? It can do nothing but harm.

otherme123• 5 years ago

Careful, preprints are not peer reviewed. I had to change significant parts of papers in the peer reviewing process in almost all my papers, and also required changes when I'm reviewing.

More often than not, the reviewer requires additional checks and tone down some claims, so a paper preprinted as "we ended world famines" ends up as "our soy requires 5% less water than the second best".

What is infuriating is that Biorxiv is free and stores forever, but the final publisher gets more than $1,500 for the same service. And we have to do 98% of the edition (I've been required to change the font of a graph) so they can just feed your .docx into a program and it spits the Pdf ready.

generalizations• 5 years ago

Sci-hub is doing what google once promised: making the world's information accessible to everyone.

judge2020• 5 years ago

Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

perihelions3• 5 years ago

In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?)

They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.

_Nat_• 5 years ago

Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

Academics generally value their work being made accessible.

Paywalls that obstruct human progress are contemptible, and I suspect that most academics at least dislike them.

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

That's one of the few good things you can say about Google today.

To me, the whole point of contention here is just an artifact of a serious problem with the web as a whole, a problem to which Google contributed thanks to their role in Internet advertising. The problem is: "content creators" have too much control over the form of what they put out there. That Google is taking some of that control, by republishing the data in a different form, is just a different flavor of the issue; whether it's the "content creators" or Google that control the form, it's not the end users.

Right now, the fight is mostly between people peddling ad-infused, SEO-ridden garbage sites and Google rehosting the little real content their have in a half-assed, often wrong or improperly attributed, box on the results page. Both sides have strong, user-hostile reasons to be in this fight. Neither has "making knowledge accessible" in mind.

To truly make knowledge accessible, it needs to be published in a machine-readable format and accessible as if through a database. Just like when building a database-backed system, you don't put React components into your database rows, and you don't render your frontend from stored procedures, accessing the "information superhighway" shouldn't involve navigating countless of web pages that wrap the information you need in tons of garbage (nor it should involve hoping that the magic Google box will pick up the correct bit to show you). You should be able to make queries, get the data without all the formatting fluff, and browse it through whatever client software you want - and then issue further queries.

I mean, note how many successful startups out there exist only because publicly available information is not machine-readable, and all they do is scrapping, mixing, and republishing the data. E.g., in my country, there's a popular tool that tells you how to get from point A to point B using public transportation - but it only exists because the official time tables are published as web pages. It would not need to exist if you could just do an equivalent of arbitrary SQL query on the official data. But you can't, so you have to use that other tool whose vendor did the necessary scrapping work - and you can't get at the data itself in that tool either, because they have to lock it down to justify their existence.

Sorry for the rant. I could go on and on. I might write a long blog post about it eventually. But in this context the point is that both "content creators" and Google know they're not acting in the best interest of the people. They're just fighting over the money printing machine.

zffr• 5 years ago

I would argue that google did a pretty good job of that for information on websites. Sci-hub is specifically focused on academic papers.

musicale3• 5 years ago

To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" sounds like a great mission to me.

Unfortunately the "universally accessible" part seems to be incompatible with current copyright law, so amazing resources like the Google Library Project are reduced to a glorified card catalog/search index rather than an actual online library.

Unlike Google, Sci-hub has so far managed to evade copyright law, so it can fulfill more of the "universal access" part.

dredmorbius4• 5 years ago

Google's been stymied by copyright.

The Internet Archive and Open Library ... to a much greater degree ... have not. And much of the material there is the result of Google scans.

I still prefer unencumbered sources (LibGen, ZLibrary, Sci-Hub), but at least having the option of access through the Archive is helpful.

Reading books on my own device with local optimsed software remains superior to Archive.org's Bookreader, though the latter is pretty darned good.

Jerry2• 5 years ago

I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day.

My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about it. In a large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub.

Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them. You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.

matheusmoreira3• 5 years ago

Nothing in this world is free.

Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns.

The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.

esalman3• 5 years ago

Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.

amirkdv• 5 years ago

Yup. They shouldn't exist. It's an outrage that they do.

They don't pay the reviewers. They charge the authors (who pay the ransom typically from taxpayer funded research grants), and they charge the readers, who are either the public or said academics again.

But the reason they do exist is that they have the monopoly on issuing the only acceptable currency that dictates the life and career of academics: publishing their work in "high impact" publications.

throwaway9843932• 5 years ago

You mean you want journals to exist only for peer review, but that's not their actual function today. They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information.

Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub: a million random repositories maintained by random people with no index. Only there's a whole host of new problems that scientific research needs to solve that is more complicated than some poorly written lines of code. The stakes are different; the errors lead to worse outcomes, rigor is much more important, and finding relevant information in the vast array of available research is much more important.

I'm not saying publishing today is great. It very much isn't. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's like saying, this government is corrupt, let's throw out the government! Look how well that works for countries that don't have a new government prepared to replace the old one.

mjn• 5 years ago

The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently?

It's happening slowly in some fields. Well, not quite independently, but in loose professional associations. It requires pretty coordinated action and still has a chance of failing though. One early successful case is that almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned in 2001, and threw their weight behind a community-run, non-profit, open-access alternative, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which is now considered by most people to be at least as prestigious as the Springer journal.

Open letter with their rationale from the time: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html

cfn• 5 years ago

Because reviewing is difficult, time consuming and, if you want anonimity of the reviewer, needs a third party to select the reviewer and coordinate the operation. I am not sure if most people are aware but peer reviewing is not paid. The journals that charge for access to the papers only do coordination and publishing (which is vanishngly cheap these days). All the work is done by the authors and the reviewers and they get nil from that pile of money.

Peer review worked (mostly) when most researchers had tenure in an university or research institution and volume was low. They were able to manage their time and allocate the necessary to that function. The situation now is that journals spray and pray review requests' emails to anyone who has ever published a paper regardless of their position or even if their work is related. This is a consequence of the volume and the mess that research positions are where the focus is on grants, money and power with science a distant fourth.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

So why can't reviewers just start working independently?

because trust and reputation in institutions is stronger than trust in individuals (which is ephemeral) and fields like scientific research consist of communities who only really can function under high levels of trust.

Journals, just like physical universities exist because they can accumulate that degree of trust and it's why top researchers go to Oxford and not to Khan Academy. It's also why corporations exist and we're not all freelancers on the internet.

mrslave• 5 years ago

I know editors of journals and they all get paid. However it is recognized that it is low and not expected to seriously complement their income. Think in the order of $2-5K p.a. All of whom I know have permanent university roles.

It is considered prestigious for the editor/reviewer in the sense of service to their intellectual community, and to their resume; and their university to have their brand in positions of influence. Most tend to leave after only a few years and this is considered normal. The role of reviewer/editor is not significant enough to earn promotions - this must come from their research & teaching.

They are required to declare any conflicts of interest for any papers under their review and they are simply passed to another editor. While the person who reviews your paper is usually unknown (through the review software/pool of reviewers) there's really little incentive to cheat on this as there exists sufficient high quality readers who can call out obvious bias/unusually low quality publications for the tier of journal.

The most burdensome class of problem is the mass of papers submitted of insufficient quality for publication in the journal. These are quickly rejected but the volume is so high, and rejected authors often attempt to challenge. Sometimes they are rude. (I can't estimate the size of this from memory, sorry.) The upside is fortunately these don't require deep/secondary review.

ummonk• 5 years ago

If there were a legal subscription service with the convenience and breadth of Sci-Hub I’d pay for it. It’s an incredibly useful tool when researching a topic whose articles are published across a multitude of paywalled journals that aren’t accessible on JSTOR (using its 100 free articles).

spac• 5 years ago

Jerry, I am so very sorry to hear about your daughter. My toddler son is affected by a very rare cancer, and while I can't put myself in your shoes, I know that feeling, that it's upon you to go through all the biomedical knowledge to figure it out.

The company I co-founded, Epistemic AI [0], was built to accelerate biomedical research especially in rare diseases and cancers. I would love to connect and give you free access to our platform, and to extend it to any researcher working on your daughter's condition.

Feel free to shoot me an email at info at epistemic.ai should you find that useful.

In the meantime, best of luck to you and your family.

[0] https://www.epistemic.ai

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Have you had any troubles donating to scihub ? (From bank refusing wiring to warnings from officials)

Best of luck with your child.

sneak2• 5 years ago

Donate with bitcoin so that your payments can't be interfered with.

sleepingsoul• 5 years ago

Hi Jerry -- thank you for sharing your story, and for your note about donating to those organizations; they are all doing incredibly important work.

I know it isn't fun being advertised to, but I really believe that what we're building at scite.ai will be directly useful for you in staying on top of the research in that field.

I wasn't sure how best to reach you, but if you drop me a note at the email in my profile, I would be happy to give you access to our platform (and run through how you can use it to stay up to date).

Ashish

elcritch2• 5 years ago

I'm a fan of Sci-Hub, but given multiple "clones" and the ever changing DNS names how does one verify this is the legitimate organization? It gives off a legitimate feel as most frauds don't tend to make new things.

The BTC addresses I've seen on HN are different than the one on the page. Does Alexandra have a public key that could be used to provide a sig-validation? P.S. the main sci-hub.do page gives the same BTC as previous commentators list as valid.

NmAmDa2• 5 years ago

I wonder what do you mean by sci-hub.do pag3 because the link in this post is referring to https://sci-hub.do/donate page.

elcritch2• 5 years ago

The https://sci-hub.do/ main page lists a BTC that matches what previous HN commentators have posted as a valid BTC address. The new "/donate" page has a new BTC which gave me pause. But my original question stands. It appears sci-hub has made a NFT based nft address? https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625

cyounkins• 5 years ago

The BTC address on the /donate page appears to be semi-random.

This is the address I see on the main page of the .do and .st domains: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns

Kubuxu• 5 years ago

It is most likely Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet, where the web server holds only public key and derivation seed. This way the private key doesn't have to reside online and you can generate as many addresses as you want.

icelancer• 5 years ago

Elbakyan confirmed it here:

https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1424027276270837762

bsdice• 5 years ago

While browser extensions are a security risk (especially auto-updating), you might want to check out https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia

btheshoe• 5 years ago

I find that the wikipedia page generally has accurate information on the legitimate link

goerz• 5 years ago

What I seem to be missing from that page is their “future plans” for when/if current (2021) papers will be available through Sci-Hub. In its current state, the site is essentially defunct.

kragen• 5 years ago

Most papers are from before 02021, and in particular most papers that are old enough to be widely cited. A lot of new papers are open access; sci-hub is most crucial for access to research from 15 or more years ago, and its coverage of that research is still fairly comprehensive.

So "essentially defunct" is far from the truth from my point of view.

quink• 5 years ago

legal status
Access to information and knowledge is a basic human right. Sci-Hub will fight those laws that make free exchange of infomation impossible. The project will eventually be recognized as legal

I keep thinking about sensible ways of copyright reform. Ones that allow a balance between rewarding creators fairly and allowing use independent of quantity or subject area.

The latest iteration I've arrived on in my head is a land tax at one end and at the other an Elo-like rating system that all the population participates in (but rate limited to some quantity x per year) to determine which works get how much funding, with participation rewarded with a fixed amount from the same pool (and the choices being randomly chosen, possibly with a bias towards interest areas though).

This should make things independent of the wealth of the creator, that of the user, spamming works, encourage shipping, built-in review, minimise externalities, tax undesirable behaviour, make it independent of the government, be something that's implementable incrementally (opt-in at first), encourage broad participation in the creative process, have reliable and predictable funding mechanisms for new interesting science, be a simpler system than the current mess, remove how consuming more creative works is more expensive (which I think is a bad thing because it's regressive, and there's no incremental cost to producing copies of creative works these days, but creators need to be rewarded), etc., etc.

And this would be applicable to all creative works, including open-source projects.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

At least in the context of academic and scientific research, copyright is nonsense. Especially given that the ones that hold copyright (journal/conference publishers) do ~0 of the actual work behind the research.

gwicks56• 5 years ago

But people on Hacker News keep telling me Bitcoin has no genuine use cases? I'm confused.

heckerhut• 5 years ago

Pssht

distantsounds• 5 years ago

if they are going to ask for donations like this should at least detail out how much their expenses are. how much space does a clone of the content consume? what's the hosting situation look like? giving them crypto is pointless if they waste it.

dredmorbius4• 5 years ago

Very happy to see Alexandra's future plans, strongly encourage support.

For anyone still unclear of the benefit and value of Sci-Hub and similar literature distribution services:

What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...

ilaksh• 5 years ago

Wish they had an ALGO donation option.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

How to verify that this site is the actual sci-hub site, and not a mirror/clone that has replaced the Bitcoin address?

(FWIW, I see the same Bitcoin address on sci-hub.do/donate and sci-hub.se/donate, so I assume it's legit - the SE domain is listed on Wikipedia and seems to have been for a long time).

howtofly• 5 years ago

Is there an alternative way of donation? I want to donate to sci-hub, but DONT want to pay for cryptocurrency miners.

70rd• 5 years ago

Start buying ETH and donate it once the beacon chain merges with ETH1. Transaction fees will go to validators instead of miners.

sneak2• 5 years ago

No, cryptocurrency payments are the only effectively uncensorable payment system in widespread use today.

Perhaps cryptocurrency mining has more value than you thought.

wanderingmind• 5 years ago

To give an alternative viewpoint, imagine an open-source project like React being built in GitHub. The code is built, reviewed and maintained by developers for free. When the project is out of beta, if suddenly GitHub says it needs to be paid for anyone to access it and says the new license also prohibits anyone from sharing it. That's the kind of behaviour that we are tolerating with academic publishers.

helloworld11• 5 years ago

Those of you on this site who hate on crypto to an emotionally charged, dismissively reactionary degree, take note: How secure do you think SciHub's donations system would be if it depended on Paypal, credit card processing, Venmo or Stripe?

You see? Crypto fanboy "to the moon" fanaticism and the criminal activities that bitcoin et al get used for aside, there are positive, defense-worthy use cases for blockchain currencies.

Sci-Hub is fundraising

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