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French ISPs Ordered To Block Sci-Hub, LibGen (torrentfreak.com)
The High Court of Paris has ordered several of the largest French ISPs to block access to the pirate libraries LibGen and Sci-Hub. "The decision is a setback for the sites that have come under increasing pressure, but Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan believes that determined researchers are smart enough to find an alternative route to her site," reports TorrentFreak. From the report: Following a complaint from academic publishers Elsevier and Springer Nature, Internet providers Bouygues, Free, Orange, and SFR have been ordered (PDF) to block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen sites for the year to come. In its decision, picked up by Next INpact, the French court ruled that the two sites "clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers' subscription access portals."
The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied. The court sided with the ISPs, who argued that they should have the freedom to choose their own blocking method, including DNS blocking. That does mean, however, that the ISPs will also have to bear the costs. "The blockade will have some effect, though not very profound," says Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakya. "The people who are using Sci-Hub because they need access to research can still unblock it using VPN, TOR and etc."
The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied. The court sided with the ISPs, who argued that they should have the freedom to choose their own blocking method, including DNS blocking. That does mean, however, that the ISPs will also have to bear the costs. "The blockade will have some effect, though not very profound," says Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakya. "The people who are using Sci-Hub because they need access to research can still unblock it using VPN, TOR and etc."
Cough, unblocked.krd, cough.
@ThePirateProxy lists the latest domain.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
publishers. Scientists don't make any money on science publications. You write for free (or sometimes are asked to pay a fee), you edit and format your article, you're expected to do peer review for free, and when your own articles get published you not only surrender your "copyright" to them, you are even expected by the greedy lawyers to pony up to access them yourself. And the fees are, indeed, exuberant.
Ages ago, when distribution of scientific articles was mostly on paper, and "scientific publishing" was not a lawyer-run money-grabbing monopoly, those "journals" may have had some positive impact.
This is no longer the case today. Today, those assholes sit on stuff that should have been public domain for ages, stuff that isn't theirs, and use part of their outrageous income to bribe politicians to extend their monopoly, hoping to eventually extend it into perpetuity.
The good news is that in many fields they are already irrelevant, or becoming irrelevant fast. The community is creating their own, open-access journals online, and new metrics of academic goodness dispense with the super-promoted and meaningless indices based on perceived paid journals "prestige" factors.
Fuck yourselves with a rusty rebar, assholes.
Enjoy the US freedom to publish
You're surely aware that the fight against Libgen started in 2015 in thhe US.
I won't even mention a certain Aaron Schwartz, who experienced the fredumz you are so excited first hand.
His plight was widely discussed here
Lucky you. I was unaware there was any institution with a subscription to every single journal out there. Last I heard, even the obscenely wealthy Ivies couldn't boast that. Must be nice.
Unfortunately, not everyone is so fortunate. Not all institutions have access to all journals. If you are a researcher or grad student at a smaller, less wealthy university, that's a problem. This is particularly true in less wealthy countries, where scientists and students have no choice but Sci-Hub. That is also a problem; just because they were born into a poorer country does not mean they can't contribute to science just as well.
For another thing, you don't need to work at a university to be a scientist. Scientists are people who do science, not people who work at universities, or research institutes, or corporations. Their tax dollars likely paid for that research in some form, why should they not be able to access it?
Yeah, for those of us with institutional access, we usually have interlibrary loan or something. If you're lucky, you can ask an author and they might respond (crapshot). But that doesn't work for everyone. And since it was more often than not publicly funded, it should be publicly accessible, not paywalled for the profit of a corporation. Science works best when everyone can see the data.