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Sci-Hub 'Pirate Bay of Science' Blocked In Russia Over Medical Studies
UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing the company's copyrights and should, therefore, be subjected to blocking," reports TorrentFreak. "Listing 'bulletproof' hosting company Quasi Networks and U.S.-based CloudFlare as facilitating access to the site, Springer Nature complained that three specific works were being made available illegally by Sci-Hub." From the report: As the above table obtained from the Court shows, the research papers cover topics of interest to the medical community in the spheres of heart and brain health -- Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure, Nitric oxide signaling in cardiovascular health and disease, and Lactate in the brain: from metabolic end-product to signaling molecule. These would ordinarily sit behind paywalls but thanks to Sci-Hub, their contents are available for everyone to absorb for free. It's a situation that's unacceptable to Springer Nature and the Moscow City Court was sympathetic to the company's complaints. As a result, several Sci-Hub and Library Genesis domains (gen.lib.rus.ec, www.libgen.io, scihub.unblocked.gdn, lgmag.org, libgen.unblocked.gdn, sci-hub.tw and libgen.io) are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers.
gen.lib.rus.ec DOWN, www.libgen.io DOWN, scihub.unblocked.gdn DOWN, lgmag.org DOWN, libgen.unblocked.gdn DOWN, sci-hub.tw DOWN, all down for good
"...are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers, unless people actually care, in which case they'll trivially get around that silly shit."
With sanctions biting, this pro-corporate stance will isolate Russia from cutting-edge research when it is unable to pay Springer's rent-seeking fees.
I suspect this is political, someone has an agenda here, probably has pockets in the medial industry
Who's going to win this battle ? :-(
I hope Springer also bought the Whac-a-Mole brand, because the benefit to that brand from this court decision is probably going to be more significant than the benefit to Springer directly.
Will they never learn?
Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure
This study seemed interesting, so I downloaded the paper from sci-hub to check it, but disappointingly it only talks about using drugs to lower glucose, rather than the obvious therapy of removing glucose and starches from the diet.
See how the ISP does the state's dirty work? They are government agents. We have the obligation to build technology to circumvent them!
Of all the times for Russia to enforce another country's copyright laws, this was an odd choice. A lot of students in less financially sound countries don't have access to the latest publications, which are kept paywalled behind exorbitant fees, so they need Sci-Hub. What other choices do they have, pull $40 out their ass to skim a paper, a paper what was paid for by some country's tax payers which the journals now profit off of, that may or may not even be relevant to what they're looking for? Then do that again a hundred times over? Get real.
I notice that the second paper has an author at University of Louvain in Belgium and the third at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, so clearly, tax payer dollars already went into the listed works. I'm all for copyright laws protecting the rights of artists, writers, musicians, and the like, but the situation in scientific publications is just ridiculous. The journals are just using all the means they can to hold onto their bygone cash cow, to everyone else's detriment.
Springer 2018. Pre-publication price $298.
I'm waiting for the day those scientific publishing barons are recognized for the parasites they are and are driven out of their comfy places. Springer, Elsevier, all of you.
Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers...
stolen access != open access
One could make a good argument that those research papers should be open access since many of them are funded directly or indirectly by governments. However, those papers are not open access. Stealing might make them free as in beer, but it does not make them free as in freedom.
dna.js
Hug you. Now my arms are sore from all that hugging. Maybe Springer owns some medical information useful for my condition. I wonder if they take Bitcoin.
"Springer: making the world more ignorant, one repressive lawsuit at a time!"
We could sever all physical cables, connections, and channels, with Russia, and absolutely nothing of value would be lost. The same goes for China.
These nations are nothing but sewers of online criminality, scam artists, crackers, and losers who contribute nothing worthwhile to open source technology, and otherwise devote their energies to stealing IP, credit card numbers, identities, passwords, etc. To be more specific, if everything East of Germany, and everything in China and SE Asia was purged from the Internet - it would be no loss. I doubt businesses would lose anything, since these places wouldn't pay for anything in any case, and only offer a handful of useful export sites. Until they adjust their attitudes, they should be treated as human spam, and the internet should route around them.
I suspect a lot of sysadmins already block countries wholesale, since they generate nothing but spam.
Cry cry cry you clearnet babies, cry some more, bleat for your mommies lil teats.
All those sites are already on Tor's Onion and I2P's Eepsite networks
and are thus completely immune to any attempt at being shutdown.
Fuck you can even torrent on I2P and tor+onioncat.
So who gives a fuck about this bullshit clearnet news.
Clearnet can just fuck off.
Overlays are where it's at these days.
Get on there.
Always use sci-hub, even when your institution has access to the article. It's just easier and much faster.
Knowing that you might cause a small loss of profit for those 'scientific publishing' companies is just a plus.
Those f*ckers deserve it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Springer's one of the greedy publishers that take papers, many produced with public funding, and locks them away from all but subs. We paid for the stuff, so should be free to us.
Thanks, Russia!
Comparing dissemination of scientific knowledge to illegally copying a fucking MP3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
It may be long past time to eliminate "intellectual property" as a legal concept, since it amounts to government enforcement of business models that are no longer viable in a true free market. If your company relies on being able to exclude world-wide access to a random configuration of bits in a file, then maybe you should find some other way to add value to society that doesn't try to defy the laws of physics.
The detriment of copyright seems to be overriding the benefits these days.
It's about time people overhaul the system or break it apart.
Springer is actually in a better position than most commercial publishers - some of their publications never show up at SciHub. These are the English-edition translations of a handful of scientific journals from Nauka, the only major commercial academic publisher in Russia (Springer shares with Nauka the proceeds from these translated journals). Of course, the contents of the original Nauka journals are also never redistributed by SciHub, so this is strictly an anti-Western operation - which is no secret, the founder is an avowed neo-Stalinist, and a while ago SciHub blocked all Russian universities from access for nearly a year because they were of the firm opinion that Russian academia was too westernized and insufficiently supportive of Putin's politics and thus not worthy of access.
Who surrenders their work to Springer?
Are the authors somehow compelled to bow to Springer?
Does Springer pay authors fabulous sums?
Does Springer have influence over funding for their research?
Springer is locking up this information because Springer profits.
They would do anything they could to make a dollar.
But why aren't cooperating "acadenics" being villified?
Who prohibits the author from submitting their work to an open access distributor. You are implying that some mysterious entity is controlling the authors ... ...or do they use the Flip Wilson excuse - "The devil made me do it!"
... some kind of link to outside the country, on another Network that was Private - and it wouldn't have to be real, it could be Virtual even.
It's a shame no such technology exists.