Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Hub, a Site With Open and Pirated Scientific Papers
lpress writes: Sci-Hub is a Russian site that seeks to remove barriers to science by providing access to pirated copies of scientific papers. It was established in 2011 by Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who could not afford papers she needed for her research and it now claims to have links to 48 million pirated and open papers. I tried it out and found some papers and not others, but it provides an alternative for researchers who cannot afford access to paid journals. After visiting this site, one cannot help thinking of the case of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature.
http://www.sic-hub.io/ is where the article currently points to.
http://www.sic-hub.io/ is the website.
At least the summary is realistic about this incident, and refers to it as a suicide.
I'm always astounded when this matter comes up at a place like Hacker News, and they twist it into "the state" or "the prosecutor" somehow being responsible for what Swartz voluntarily to himself, completely on his own. It's like his fanatics are trying to convert a suicide into some weird "murder" where the alleged "murderer" was not involved in any way. The delusion these people suffer from is just absurd.
this is the correct one http://www.sci-hub.io/
yeah a typo
It's really just looting, right? Looters often find ways to justify what they do too, talking about greedy capitalists and store owners.
Well I can not afford to travel the world
That means the airlines must give me free travel, hotels free accommodation and restaurants free food. Oh the same to all those touristy things too, I should not have to pay for entry.
Now wait for someone to argue that open access to scientific papers does not advance the progress of science.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Aaron Swartz killed Aaron Swartz.
This is the kind of person/entity that has the balls to do what is right regardless of the penalty. A true hero. Maybe a stereotype has died today.
with books etc:
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
He didn't "commit suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature."
After a prior similar episode which earned him a visit from the FBI in which they told him they'd caught him doing something illegal, declined to prosecute him but warned him not to do it again......he trespassed repeatedly onto the MIT campus, into buildings, into network closets, where he installed unauthorized computers. He then worked to intentionally bypass the network registration system, and then further to avoid MIT's network engineering group as they tried to figure out where his equipment was installed.
His data-dumping efforts were so aggressive that they interfered with JSTOR services for thousands of researchers around the world; his 'free the research' stunt actually interfered with their ability to work. Despite bringing JSTOR's servers to its knees, he installed a second laptop because the first wasn't pulling data fast enough. JSTOR attempted to block his system, but he kept changing IP addresses to subvert the ban, and finally, JSTOR had no choice but to block the entire MIT network.
JSTOR is not some evil "take guvvmint-paid-for research and hide it behind a paywall." JSTOR is a service which archives journals and then provides storage and searching across them all, to institutions which could never afford the journal subscriptions themselves. They're not-for-profit. The fees they charge go directly to paying for the capital and operating expenses necessary for storing, cataloging, and making available for download, millions of papers - and the inherent overhead in doing so.
To what goal, I might add? He would have ended up with a directory of PDFs. Now what? They have to get indexed, a web UI needs to be made, someone has to pay for all that server hardware and bandwidth and electricity and the people to maintain it all. Maybe we could set up a non-profit organization to make that all happen?
Oh....wait...that's...JSTOR.
Does anyone now realize that his stunt was just that? A publicity stunt? A fucking tarball of PDFs doesn't help academic researchers. The whole point behind JSTOR was to collect research, store it, and make it available both at affordable rates and in an accessible way.
This was like going to the village cooperative farm chicken coop (where people pay a small fee to house, feed, and care for their chickens), blowing up the only bridge to the farm to stop the police from getting to you (but also keeping all the townspeople from getting to the eggs they need for food), throwing open the doors to let the chickens out, and then being proud of yourself for "freeing the chickens so everyone can have a chicken."
Let us be absolutely clear: there is extensive proof of all of his crimes, and nobody has argued he did not commit them. The argument from some has been that somehow these crimes were legitimate or honorable.
He was offered plea deals, and even if it had gone to trial - as a white-collar, white male criminal - he never would have received the maximum sentencing. People saying "he would have gone to jail for 40 years" clearly do not spend any time reading the news, because prosecutors almost always ask for maximum sentencing, and rarely do they get it, EVEN FOR MURDERERS. It's highly likely he would have been given little more than parole.
Lastly: Swartz had a history of mental illness and suicidal thoughts - some of it public and irrefutable. He did not commit suicide because he was prosecuted. He committed suicide because he had a history of suicidal thoughts.
Please help metamoderate.
No, the people that made him do that are responsible.
You're generally right, but your wording is off. There weren't "people" involved. There was one person: Aaron Swartz. Aaron Swartz is the one and only person who made himself commit suicide.
Who really reads any of these papers? They are dry as hell and of no use to anyone unless you need to cite sources for your own paper. Yeah it's nice they are out there but come on these site probably get more google spider hits than real users.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Exactly. Conservatives constantly make people do things then blame the people for doing exactly what they did. They're illogical and hateful. They oppress people so hard, so hard then crush them with their thugs in blue when they eventually try to fight back like happened in Ferguson. The conservatives created that situation, and they got want they wanted out of it. Death, just as they got death out of this situation.
And what about the republicans that hated him and decided to drive him to desperation?
I guess you blame the Jews for the Holocaust since most went to their deaths without fighting back.
But their kind never takes responsibility for what they do.
Too bad Edward Snowden and Julian Assange don't have the balls to follow his fine example.
Swartz was facing prosecution for his methods, not for his aims. He entered a wiring closet and impeded the ability of others in the library to do their work (while simultaneously creating a safety hazard in the hallway). Had he been intelligent about it and just used the connection in his office instead it would have taken marginally longer time but he wouldn't have been in anywhere near as much - if any - trouble.
He was either a fool, looking to bring attention to himself, or both.
For the rest of us, there is interlibrary loan - or going to the nearest public university library and using their resources responsibly.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Like with rap. Rapture by Blondie was the rap song but those morons blame inner city disadvantaged youth for it.
heh you imbecile, get lost.
Seems odd - we may agree that publications are very expensive (extremely might be better) to purchase, but pirating copyrighted material isn't something that should be condoned. And it definitely won't get the publishers to change their models as quickly as demanding further open access jourmals.
Self-styled intellectual aristocrat thinks, "ABLOOBLOO INFORMATION WANTS 2 BE FREE FITE DA SYSTEM FUCK DA MAN!" is somehow a valid legal defense; finds out otherwise; becomes an hero Slashdot deserves.
Film at eleven.
So you don't think the people responsible for it are responsible for it?
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
These shenigans of paywalls are bullshit.
It is ironic that for a system that is built on being "open" (Scientific) that the modern trend is for research to be "closed."
. /sarcasm Oh noes! We can't let anyone get the original data so that you can _replicate_ and _verify_ the results for yourself.
This is anti-Science by definition.
-- /Why does /. fuck up formatting when a new paragraph starts with "/" such as this one?
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tails (2.0.1) unstable; urgency=medium
* Major new features and changes
- Enable the Tor Browser's font fingerprinting protection
(Closes: #11000). We do it for all browsers (including
the Unsafe Browser and I2P Browser mainly to avoid making our
automated test suite overly complex. This implied to set an appropriate
working directory when launching the Tor Browser, to accommodate for
the assumptions it makes about this.
* Security fixes
- Upgrade Tor Browser to 5.5.2 (Closes: #11105).
* Bugfixes
- Repair 32-bit UEFI support (Closes: #11007); bugfix on 2.0.
- Add libgnome2-bin to installed packages list to provide gnome-open,
which fixes URL handling at least in KeePassX, Electrum and Icedove
(Closes: #11031); bugfix on 2.0. Thanks to segfault for the patch!
* Minor improvements /usr/local/bin. /usr/local/lib.
- Refactor and de-duplicate the chrooted browsers' configuration:
prefs.js, userChrome.css (Closes: #9896).
- Make the -profile Tor Launcher workaround simpler (Closes: #7943).
- Move Torbutton environment configuration to the tor-browser script,
instead of polluting the default system environment with it.
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- Move tor-launcher-standalone to
- Move Tor Launcher env configuration closer to the place where it is used,
for simplicity's sake.
* Test suite
- Mass update browser and Tor Launcher related images due to font change,
caused by Tor Browser 5.5's font fingerprinting protection
(Closes: #11097). And then, use separate PrintToFile.png for the browsers,
and Evince, since it cannot be shared anymore.
- Adjust to the refactored chrooted browsers configuration handling.
-
I wonder what my Jewish Republican friends would have to say about that.
AAAAAAAND IT'S DOWN
If there is a Nobel Prize for Promoting Information Freedom, she should be in the running.
If there isn't, it's long overdue.
This is the kind of person/entity that has the balls to do what is right regardless of the penalty. A true hero.
The woman and the site are Russian. So tell me what she has put at risk.
These were not data sets. They were research papers. He believed information should be free. Especially since the people who wrote those papers get shit in return.
It's a shitty system that they setup. Hopefully with this new site it helps curve it a bit.
What we call "science" is 17-century technology. The system made sense when research was done by a relatively small group of learned individuals who needed the printed journal as a way to collaborate and communicate, but it has since devolved into a racket. It has devolved into two rackets, to be precise:
First, you have the journals who add no value to the process but appropriate huge amounts of taxpayer money. Consider the process of research and publication: the scientist/researcher, who is generally taxpayer-funded, creates some result which he writes up in an article and sends it for publication to a journal. Of course, he cannot just send in a handwritten manuscript; he has to typeset and format it himself via Latex. The article is then sent out by journal's staff to other researchers for multiple rounds of peer review, which these other researchers, in the overwhelming number of cases, do at no cost and at significant investment of time. It can easily happen that a reviewer contributes more to a paper than the third or fourth author, yet doing the reviews is simply seen as a collegial duty. If the paper passes, it is published by the journal at basically zero cost, because journals are rarely printed physically nowadays. All Springer and Elsevier have to do is provide a PDF and maybe some BibTex info online. For the end product other people's work, to which they have contributed nothing, they then charge 20-50$ per article. Of course, nobody pays that; they get their money though subscriptions from libraries and universities. Thus you have the absurd situation that a university has to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to provide access to research that its salaried scientists have themselves done.
Second, you have the university-government complex. University administrators (who tend to be the most incompetent people you can find at a university because nobody with actual scientific ability wants to do the job) use indicators like the h-index and the numbers of papers published in "big-name" journals like Nature to gauge the worth of a prospective employee - "worth" meaning the ability to bring in grant money. It should be noted that the h-index favors authors with a large number of seldom-cited papers over authors with a few oft-cited ones, again contributing to the pressure to publish endless streams of mediocre work.
Publishers make basically free money, while bureaucrats keep the hamsterwheels of scientists spinning and themselves necessary. Why do scientists put up with this shit? Mostly because they're autists who imagine themselves to be above petty economic concerns like the theft of millions at the hands of useless middlemen every year, but primarily because they're enamored with the prestige of the institution of the journal. If you're a scientist, publishing in Nature or Science or The Lancet or the ACM Transactions on something is your life. You're constantly regaled about the august nature of the entire edifice of science, of the journals, of peer review and its alleged ability to eliminate errors and fraud (yeah, fucking right). The overwhelming majority of scientists have an utterly slavish devotion to the system and would not even consider alternatives to it, lest they lose the ability to get a spot on the cover of prestigious Nature.
Now that the racket-part is out of the way, let's go back to the "17th-century" aspect: the article format is hopelessly outdated in the age of the Internet and wikis. Once again, the desire and the necessity of getting sole credit precludes a great deal of possible, fruitful collaboration. Even though people would technically be able to work together and share ideas much more quickly and organically by, say, working out a proof in a wiki together or pooling genetic data into a instantly searchable database, they sit on it and hide it like Galileo way back when. The measure of scientific output is not the theorem, or the model, or the algorithm, but the published article which describes it, and which tries to transplant the outdated medium of the book onto the computer screen, inconveniences like alternating page numbers and non-clickable citation lists included.
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
Interesting seeing as FDR was a republican.. so he denied his whole purpose of being president within history??
Tea party republicans yes, are dumb enough to not care that there are gaping holes in their world view.. and yes they claim to be republicans.
Africans fought to escape the slavery and genocide being committed by their own people?!? Really? What kool aid you drinking? Everyone knows who was committing the genocide, enslaving and being fought and who is still committing those acts. Sounds like a lot of cluelessness in your rant. Makes sense that you are supporting the state sponsored actions that drove a great person to feel the only escape was suicide
If the liberty loving population would get up and move the war of freedom could be won. I joined the Free State Project's effort to move 20,000 people to a single low population state. The project is proving a success with 20,000 signers and 10% have already moved and it's not even been a month since reaching 20,000! However more people need to move for the effort to have a more substantial impact. That's why I'm moving. I've been planing to move for about a year and have a closing date on my new house for next month that I'm buying.
Awesome things going on in New Hampshire and why you should move (you don't have to get arrested to contribute! just being in NH makes a difference):
0. Fought for equal marriage rights (and the movement isn't republican/democrat, racist, bigoted, etc we have a lot of LGBT folks including myself)
1. There are a lot of GNU/Linux and Free Software Activists involved in the Free State Project
0. Many technical types including supporters of mesh networking, developers, entrepreneurs, etc are in involved in the Free State Project
1. BitCoins BitCoins everywhere (FSP members are big supporters and getting BitCoins "out there")
0. FSP participant James Cleveland got precedent created through trial to ensure recording of police encounters is not a crime
1. Numerous libertarian representatives elected by FSP participants
0. Stop the crackdown on Uber (one person arrested, really political persecution, illegally drove, but trumped up on federal wire tapping charge for recording)
1. 420 rallies to legalize pot (Rich Paul arrested, did not plea, year in prison, only occurred because FBI wanted informant at Activist Center- due to successes)
0. Lowering the drinking age to 18 (actual hearings have occurred thanks to FSP reps)
1. Fought and won DHS's attack on Tor in libraries (protests held outside library which shut down Tor node, then restarted after protests by FSP participants)
0. “Free the Nipple” Trial created good precedent applicable to overthrowing other bad local laws (FSP lawyer & participants assisted defence)
1. Jury nullification out reach (successfully ensured defence lawyers have the right to inform juries of right judge bad law, not just judge guilt)
0. Lots of agorism going on for political reasons (ie under the table cash transactions- the government doesn't have the right to steal your money)
1. Fighting wasteful spending (a great example right now is the governments take of so much from the public in tax dollars that most can't afford to cover there own children's education expenses, and are forced to send them to school on tax dollars, but we could fix that by limiting government spending to the destitute)
0. Many many many more projects and successes that wouldn't be feasible anywhere else!!!
You don't sound like you know much about African history. No, I am not the person you replied to.
Yes, Africans were captured by other Africans before being dragged to ports and sold into further slavery.
If taxpayer money is paying for academic research, the researchers should release to the public, not just put their work behind paywalls that have nothing to do with funding the work, then charge exorbitant rates into perpetuity. Aaron Schwartz was right, but not for the reason he thought. You see, the public has already paid for that work, and are the true owners.
That's a mischaracterizarion of JSTOR. If they were truly trying to make work available to libraries and the like, then they would be far, far cheaper. I don't understand why people continue to just give them their work.
The publishers simply do NOT own the data they are publishing, nor are their agreements with the researchers valid. They own their servers and the bandwidth they've paid for, but that's it. They are stealing from the public on everything else.
While there is some merit to that argument, the reality is that not all of the stuff released was paid for by the government. I do not really hold much of an opinion on the subject other than this: Accept the consequences of your actions. If you are unwilling to accept the consequences, do not perform the action.
Accountability and responsibility are important things to me. It's one of the reasons that I try to avoid posting as an AC. I said it. I own it. I may be wrong. I will learn. I am accountable for my actions. Actions have consequences. If you are unwilling to accept the repercussions for your beliefs then they are not beliefs, they're suggestions.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And people don't "just give them their work"; JSTOR managed to work out deals with ornery publishers to digitize and make old editions available.
In any case, JSTOR for the most part does not publish research financed by the US tax payer, so what justification is there to demand that they make their stuff available free or cheap?
If they really believed in open documents, surely they would make the whole collection browseable or available in torrents? Instead from what I could see, it is a DOI search.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
They probably would be the first to agree about this sorry state of affairs. Being "republican" by itself, of course naturally doesn't impoluy that they would be, but the narrowminded clique has swelled to gargantuan proportions within the republicans since these types always want to identify as "conservatives". They are of course aanything but, but you won't find as many of these close minded pinheads in the "opposing" parties. Really if you want to blame anything for the resurgence of Holocost denial, or the reurgence of.. you got it.. Flat earthers.. or climate change denial (a big one) then blame the internet.. a great big wacko delusion enabler...
Most Republicans are Holocaust Deniers.
It might have been more accurate to turn it around to say "Most holocost deniers are republicans"
I renember fed AG BY HIS NATURE UNACCOUNTABLE AND PLAYING POLITICS. And after hammering Aaron FOR EVER trying for a plea bargain, threating to indict his lover. So I heard. And what do you do about AGs?
Too bad Edward Snowden and Julian Assange don't have the balls to follow his fine example.
Why would they want to kill Aron Swarz?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.