[HN Gopher] I'm a programmer - how can I help SciHub?
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I'm a programmer - how can I help SciHub?
Author : andyxor
Score : 141 points
Date : 2021-07-11 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| sprash wrote:
| SciHub needs to be decentralized. Zeronet seems to be a good
| blueprint on how to do it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I am afraid the basic problems are still not solved with
| regards to proof of authorship and file integrity - how do I
| know the pdf I'm downloading is what was published?
|
| I'm just in a "be careful what you wish for" state of mind, if
| there was no one in charge of sci-hub, the publishers could go
| on attack and fill the database with noise, copies of papers
| with numbers and methods altered.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I am afraid the basic problems are still not solved with
| regards to proof of authorship and file integrity
|
| These are not basic problems. We're talking about scientific
| papers, not deeds to a piece of land or something.
|
| > how do I know the pdf I'm downloading is what was
| published?
|
| How do you know the paper photo-copy you have of an article
| is what was published? You don't 100% know, you make a
| reasonable assumption.
|
| The exceptional case of needing integrity verification can
| have a niche solution.
| bnj wrote:
| Sounds like it would be a good idea for authors to start
| providing checksums for their papers
| user3939382 wrote:
| Checksums are for error correction, I think you're
| referring to digital signing, unless I'm misunderstanding
| the issue being referred to
| marcosdumay wrote:
| In the context of sharing data between people, people use
| checksums with the same meaning as cryptographic hashes,
| as anything else would break for nearly all use-cases.
|
| Digital signatures are actually overkill. The same
| infrastructure one uses to discover the authorship of a
| paper can distribute file hashes without any loss of
| autentiction, and I don't think anybody needs the non-
| refutation feature they bring. Maybe there is a nice use
| case for a paper authorship database with a PKI, but to
| my view the idea goes against an open scientific
| community that I think is much more valuable. (But again,
| maybe there is a way to have both.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Right it's not insurmountable, authors can publish public
| keys and sign the files - it's a UI/UX problem like
| everything else in crypto.
|
| Keybase makes it fairly easy, but people still have to
| learn what it means and why it's trustworthy - my bet is
| things don't change, there is a small percentage of people
| who understand how to verify the source, and the general
| population who either believes anything or nothing.
|
| In the context of scientists and professionals tho maybe it
| is achievable to do some outreach and get people on eg
| keybase, something user friendly
| ithkuil wrote:
| Most people I've been advocating Keybase to, just assumed
| it's yet another place where you create an account and
| hence you must trust them (now owned by zoom, boo-hoo).
|
| I found it well explained etc, but it's hard to reach
| everybody.
| viraptor wrote:
| Unfortunately that's not practical. When you download from
| a uni gateway, pdfs are often auto-watermarked with the
| source. That way the authors have no idea what checksum you
| see. And the places which don't do that yet could easily
| start padding the end of the pdf with a random number of
| spaces to stop verification efforts.
| sli wrote:
| It would be kind of neat if that could be layered so that
| one could not only verify that their source-provided copy
| is legit, but also that the underlying paper itself has
| also not been modified.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Torrent file is a checksum.
| 6510 wrote:
| Yes, the price we pay for the exploitation of stupid
| movies? Torrents should be the standard way to distribute
| anything.
| [deleted]
| captn3m0 wrote:
| A DOI to IPFS directory would be cool. Is it still a copyright
| violation if you write a hash, but don't put a IPFS link?
| logifail wrote:
| > A DOI to IPFS directory would be cool
|
| Q: How open is the DOI system itself?
| remram wrote:
| It's mostly freely readable. It's closed to publishing
| (gotta pay CrossRef or other licensees) and otherwise a
| pain to interface with.
| cassonmars wrote:
| If the argument holds that a hash is equivalent to
| holding/sharing the file, there's some big problems for
| PhotoDNA given strict liability laws.
| generalizations wrote:
| All you really need is a searchable database that points you to
| the torrent containing the paper you want. Then just download
| the part of the torrent that you need.
|
| Long as the seeders stick around, this is decentralized,
| simple, and very hard to block.
|
| Pretty sure this already exists, too, though it's extremely
| unpolished.
| bluedays wrote:
| I think utilizing Chia coin would actually be a better idea.
| Incentivize people to donate their hardware space with real
| money.
| andai wrote:
| Couldn't we just use something like LimeWire? (Does anything
| like that exist now?)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| See lib gen and r/datahoarders, there are torrents available
| split into chunks, I think it was 77 terabytes last I checked
|
| An interesting question I think, is what value add does Sci-
| Hub provide, because obviously it wasn't happening before
| Alexandra made it happen, does it outgrow her or is she
| holding it together?
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| How about creating SciPubCoin, a blockchain where you get
| one coin from each published paper you submit!
| beckman466 wrote:
| > SciPubCoin, a blockchain where you get one coin from
| each published paper you submit!
|
| Probably better to create a system that includes a
| reputation currency, since you can't 'spend' your
| reputation: https://medium.com/metacurrency-
| project/reputation-is-orthog...
| 6510 wrote:
| First the interface problem needs to be solved, after
| that we get a good picture of adoption.
|
| That there are gigantic torrents available is almost
| useless. A popcorn time type of GUI client is needed that
| allows search, can dl the right chunks reasonably fast,
| seeds the rare chunks, has tit for tad implemented for a
| group of torrents. Could even do full text search by
| downloading all possible candidates after applying some
| bloomfilter.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future. I
| know that in the UK you basically _have_ to post your accepted
| papers in publicly accessible repositories if you want your
| papers to count for the Research Excellent Framework exercise
| (which basically compares Universities every 5 years). I know
| many grants now have openaccess requirements. Plus in the field
| like physics, basically everyone posts the papers to arxiv
| anyway.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I don't think scihub is the future. OpenAccess is the future.
|
| It seems you are claiming that the future isn't making all
| scientific content available, period - but rather only that
| content whose copyright holders have decided to make available.
|
| I whole-heartedly disagree. We must not submit to arbitrary
| restrictions on the copying of information; and we certainly
| cannot and should not wait for Elsevier, Springer, IEEE et alia
| to grace us with access to articles.
|
| Also - if "Open Access" means authors have to pay a large wad
| of money to have their papers published - that's not tolerable
| either.
| crazygringo wrote:
| OpenAccess can be _part_ of the future, but it 's certainly not
| doing anything about all the papers published in the past. How
| are you going to address that?
| orzig wrote:
| "In the long run, we're all dead" - John Maynard Keynes
|
| You might be right about the far future, but there's still a
| lot of human flourishing that fails to happen every day until
| then. Or you could be wrong, and I'd hate to /start/ having
| this conversation once we realize that.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _OpenAccess is the future_
|
| Yes, but the perfect can be the enemy of the good.
| jmcgough wrote:
| I just don't see things changing in bio sciences because the
| people who benefit from it don't want it to change, and the
| people who want it to change (labs without a lot of money, grad
| students, post-docs) have the least power change it.
|
| Scihub is at least levelling the playing field and forcing the
| conversation to happen.
| esalman wrote:
| One problem with open access is that the cost is prohibitively
| high. It can range from $2500 in decent peer-reviewed journals
| to $10,000+ in Nature. Recently we decided not to pay for open-
| access for one of our articles (as we already had the preprint
| out). One solution could be that the funding agencies take care
| of the fees.. because I can't see publishers charging less for
| it.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yes, it all has to be paid for some how. Proofreading,
| copyediting, typesetting, handling the logistics of physical
| printing and distribution, usually an honorarium for the
| journal editor, and probably other costs... It all takes
| resources that have to be paid for somehow.
|
| Personally, I think part of the solution would be to have
| grants that are in some way publicly funded (taxes) to have a
| portion set aside to pay publishing costs, and require
| publishing in some way. This would both make open access with
| well-polished articles more accessible, it would also help
| solve the issue of negative results rarely being published.
|
| Not perfect, not a.silver bullet, but at least an incremental
| improvement.
| [deleted]
| Dayshine wrote:
| Perhaps they should just stop wasting money on physical
| journals and stick to the web format that 99% of people
| read?
|
| Claiming $10k for a bunch of unnecessary work is
| outrageous.
|
| The cost of prestigious journals are the curation and high
| standard of peer review. Except they don't actually pay
| their staff for those things...
| IshKebab wrote:
| > Proofreading, copyediting, typesetting, ... physical
| printing...
|
| Uhm, I don't know if you've published a paper since the 90s
| but none of those are costs that modern journals incur. Or
| if they do, nobody asked them to.
|
| The main thing journals do is peer review and that is all
| done for free by other academics. Authors do basically all
| of the typesetting, and although journals still insist on
| printing issues there's really no need for them to do so.
|
| The only really important thing that journals do is finding
| and hassling reviewers.
| threatofrain wrote:
| But then SciHub can be the makeshift bridge between now and the
| open access future.
| amelius wrote:
| You are forgetting that a significant chunk of science is still
| locked up behind paywalls.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Open access should be the yesterday. I don't mind if they have
| to charge $2000 for a paper (but not $5000 to open the paper
| one year later), but publishers should be _forced_ to open up
| all existing papers to open access as well . But it is not
| happening largely because academia is stuck in the chicken-and-
| egg situation where open access cannot become prestigious while
| people keep publishing in prestigious journals, and academics
| have not been able to replace journal prestige with something
| better
| logifail wrote:
| > I know that in the UK you basically have to post your
| accepted papers in publicly accessible repositories (..)
|
| How does that _actually_ work, though? Can anyone download the
| final, published PDF from "publicly accessible repositories"?
|
| (Full disclosure: ex scientist with published papers, still no
| idea how I can legally share _my_ work with anyone who might be
| interested...)
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Have a look at this
|
| http://lesscrime.info/post/how-to-stop-hiding-your-research/
| akvadrako wrote:
| You should checkout libgen-seedtools
|
| https://github.com/subdavis/libgen-seedtools
|
| The sci-hub archive is partly supported by libgen.rs. To ensure
| that their content remains accessible, they have thousands of
| very large torrents, many of which are not well seeded. If you
| have a few TB of disk space and bandwidth to spare, it's a good
| way to help out.
| jszymborski wrote:
| It's worth disclaiming that you may or may not be incurring
| legal risk depending on your jurisdiction.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| For all the cryptocurrency, distributed, anti-censorship,
| anonymous filestorage projects from the past few years, where the
| hell are they all?
|
| Cryptocoin community: hosting SciHub should be your platform's
| Litmus Test. If you can't do this one thing, your anonymous,
| decentralised, anti-censorship platform is a scam, so GTFO.
| 533474 wrote:
| Authors, publish your papers in your personal webpage. Do not
| promote paywalls. To all others, donate and support
| decentralization efforts. To those that are particularly wealthy,
| please think about supporting financially too
| logifail wrote:
| > publish your papers in your personal webpage
|
| Q: Do authors actually _have_ the right to republish the final
| published version from the journal they submitted their work
| to?
| goerz wrote:
| All journals I have ever published to (in theoretical
| physics) explicitly allow the authors to put the journal PDF
| of their article on their personal or institutional websites.
| They also allow to have a "reprint" (identical content to
| published version, but not the exact same PDF) to be on the
| arXiv. I'm not aware of any journals in the field that don't
| allow this. I'm sure they exist, but I would not consider
| them for publication.
| logifail wrote:
| > explicitly allow the authors to put the journal PDF of
| their article on their personal or institutional websites
|
| Q: Where is an author supposed to _obtain_ the final,
| "official" journal-approved PDFs in order to republish
| them?
|
| Unless I head for sci-hub, I don't have any of mine :(
| goerz wrote:
| You usually have institutional access. If not, I suppose
| you can ask the publisher to email you the pdf. Or you
| might be able to download it from the the submission
| website. I don't understand: you really don't have PDFs
| of your own papers? Did you leave academia and delete
| your data?
| einpoklum wrote:
| They can easily obtain this right using the "Standard Trick":
|
| https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| There is no need for publishing papers on personal websites
| when arxiv exists and is better.
| kensai wrote:
| Arxiv is preprint. Not peer-reviewed. Most times reviewed
| articles have critical changes before they reach their final,
| journal version.
| petschge wrote:
| Most if not all journals in my field allow you to upload
| the final accepted PDF that you have typeset in latex
| yourself to arxiv. We even put "accepted in $journal" and
| the DOI in the comment field. This includes all the changes
| you have made in response to referee comments. What you can
| not upload is the finial language-edited and nicely
| layouted version that the journal has build from your
| submission.
| [deleted]
| remram wrote:
| arXiv is not only for pre-printed. Whatever paper you
| legally put on your website can and should go there (or
| Zenodo, Figshare, OSF, etc).
| 6510 wrote:
| Do both.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Authors, publish your papers in your personal webpage. Do
| not promote paywalls. _
|
| This plea to authors to change their behavior _ignores_ why
| they submit papers to paywall publishers: The prestigious
| journal 's acceptance of their paper helps _promote their
| career_.
|
| Academic publishing is not a _web host server for pdf files_
| type of problem. Therefore, suggesting authors to upload their
| pdf to a public Dropbox url, GoogleDrive, Github repo, or their
| university faculty homepage doesn 't solve the real problem. So
| even if Scihub had a "direct upload pdf" option, that still
| doesn't solve the underlying problem for getting their paper
| _recognized_ for good work which spurs citations.
|
| Scihub is a _distribution mechanism for pdfs_ but not a
| _recognition and impact filter for which papers are
| _important__. This is why scientists keep doing contradictory
| behaviors: On the one hand, they praise Scihub because it gives
| them access to papers -- but on the other hand, they keep
| submitting to paywalled journals to help their career.
|
| Think of _game theory incentives_ instead of hosting pdf files.
| Journals have the _respected editorial staffs_ to look at their
| submitted paper and _forward it to other peers for review_.
| OpenAccess is a possible option but most OA journals don 't
| have same prestige as the paywalled journals. That may change
| but it will take a long time.
| [deleted]
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