Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan: Sci-Hub and the Importance of Open Scientific Knowledge | LEAF
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz1Uj20tZvs


Alexandra Elbakyan – Science Should be Open to all Not Behind Paywalls | | LEAF
http://www.leafscience.org/alexandra-elbakyan/

Some facts on Sci-Hub that Wikipedia gets wrong | engineuring
https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/some-facts-on-sci-hub-that-wikipedia-gets-wrong/

Sci-Hub was created in September, 2011 and to the spring of 2013 operated without any repository. Research articles would be downloaded by users, and deleted 6 hours later. The user had to provide an URL of the paywalled page on the Internet, and Sci-Hub would open it through random university proxy. If the paper was still not available, user could manually switch to another university by pressing a green button. Even with that simple mode of operation, Sci-Hub gained huge popularity in a local research community, downloading a few research articles every minute.

The Library Genesis project originally was dedicated to books only. In 2012, they started collecting research articles, too and indexed them by DOI. They wanted to include papers downloaded by Sci-Hub to their database.

In the spring of 2013, Sci-Hub gained popularity in China. The number of requests exploded. It became not possible anymore to download each paper requested, so I started extracting DOI from pages and redirecting users to LibGen if paper was already available there. Thankfully to this, Sci-Hub survived.

Later in 2013 LibGen experienced problems with its hard drives, around 40,000 collected papers were completely lost. There was only one copy! I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers. Around one million of these papers was uploaded from Sci-Hub, the other, as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the Internet/Darknet.

Since I had my own copy now, I wanted to expand it. In 2014, I analyzed what publishers are most requested by Sci-Hub users, and created a list of papers that were not yet available in database. The code of Sci-Hub was rewritten from the beginning, and the ability to download papers automatically was introduced. Now Sci-Hub started to collect papers on itself. And users could enjoy much-awaited function: just point Sci-Hub to the article, and it will check all proxies and download the paper by itself. Before, users had to manually browse the publishers website through Sci-Hub.

In the end of 2014, few additional copies of the database was created. They became a mirrors from which Sci-Hub is serving content now. Those are Sci-Hub only repositories, separate from LibGen.

Efforts were invested to establish these mirrors so that papers could be served to Sci-Hub users quickly and without interruptions. Even further, people behind LibGen had a strong position not to contact journalists and work semi-underground. My view is different: to spread the idea that science has to be freely accessible by everyone. If Sci-Hub wasn’t autonomous from LibGen, and relied on LibGen infrastructure, perhaps I wouldn’t be able to spread the message.

In that sense, Sci-Hub technically is by itself a repository, or a library if you like, and not a search engine for some other repository. But of course, the most important part in Sci-Hub is not a repository, but the script that can download papers closed behind paywalls.

Currently, the Sci-Hub does not store books, for books users are redirected to LibGen, but not for research papers. In future, I also want to expand the Sci-Hub repository and add books too.

The next inaccuracy in Wikipedia article is:

in April 2016, Elbakyan told Science that many anonymous academics from around the world donate their credentials voluntarily, while publishers have claimed that Sci-Hub relies on credentials obtained by phishing

I did not tell Science how credentials were donated: either voluntarily or not. I only told that I cannot disclose the source of the credentials. I assume that some credentials coming to Sci-Hub could have been obtained by phishing. Anyway, Sci-Hub is not doing any phishing by itself. The credentials are used only to download papers.

Elsevier Wants $15 Million Piracy Damages From Sci-Hub and Libgen - TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-wants-15-million-piracy-damages-from-sci-hub-and-libgen-170518/

Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage - F1000Research
https://f1000research.com/articles/6-541/v1

The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these. Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected. Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons, and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record.

Scientists in Germany, Peru and Taiwan to lose access to Elsevier journals : Nature News & Comment
http://www.nature.com/...ists-in-germany-peru-and-taiwan-to-lose-access-to-elsevier-journals-1.21223

Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone

Steal This Show S02E08: Pirate Markets & Guerrilla Libraries - TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/steal-show-s02e08-pirate-markets-guerrilla-libraries/

In this episode, we meet up with economist and piracy researcher Balázs Bodó to discuss underground pirate markets in Europe and Russia and the “Guerilla Open Access” projects of SciHub, LibGen and Ebooks Farm.

Balázs delves into the rich history and culture of pirate librarians, and we wonder if peer-to-peer sharing can stay relevant in the age of content over-abundance. Plus: does anyone actually download books any more?

Balázs Bodó currently works at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam. Before moving to the Netherlands, he was deeply involved in the development of the Hungarian internet culture. He was also the project lead for Creative Commons Hungary.

Germany-wide consortium of research libraries announce boycott of Elsevier journals over open access / Boing Boing
http://boingboing.net/2016/12/15/germany-wide-consortium-of-res.html

In survey, most give thumbs-up to pirated papers | Science | AAAS
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/survey-most-give-thumbs-pirated-papers

In asking “Do you think it is wrong to download pirated papers?” a Science survey of over 11,000 respondents found that 88 percent answered “No.” The accompanying story explains, “A closer look at the survey data indicated that respondents in almost every category embrace the rebellion, even those who have never used Sci-Hub or are 51 and older—84% and 79%, respectively, had no qualms.” It seems fair to assume that a number of these respondents are also authors of works that are illegally posted on Sci-Hub, though that question was not posed in the survey.



What Do the Authors of Sci-Hub’s Most-Downloaded Articles Think About Sci-Hub? - The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Do-the-Authors-of/236469

interviews conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education with highly downloaded Sci-Hub authors reveal a shared comfort level with “pirated” articles being freely available. Professor Jordan Pober of Yale, “says he doesn’t mind that many people download his paper free since he didn’t make money from its publication.” He goes on to clarify, “I’m torn in the sense I think it would be better for the science community if findings were made freely available. But I’m not sure how to sustain functions of society journals.” His co-author Parwiz Abrahimi describes their article’s popularity on Sci-Hub as “an honor.” He further comments that “I never felt people were pirating my work,” acknowledging colleagues in Iran and Afghanistan who rely on Sci-Hub for access.

TADEAS: http://a2larm.cz/2016/11/boj-s-copyrightem-je-nutne-politicky/

rozhovor s a. elbakyan, scihub zakladatelkou

Борьба с копирайтом не может не быть политической — Сентябрь
http://september.media/archives/742

Google Translate
https://translate.google.com/...8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fseptember.media%2Farchives%2F742&edit-text=&act=url

What are your future plans?

A lot of plans. I want to collect a complete collection of scientific articles, add not only modern science, and historical manuscripts, such as alchemy, magic for - everything that science previously believed.

I also want to do something like that make the Watson the IBM . They have created an analogue of artificial intelligence and incited it to tens of thousands of scientific articles. Analyzing this collection program could open a number of new proteins that can be used in the development of drugs against cancer.

Collection of the Sci-hub currently has about 60 million scientific articles, they occupy about 50 terabytes. It's a whole bunch of mountain drives, weighing 25 kilograms. It is almost all the publications that have appeared since when articles began to appear in digital form. Of those that were published in major publishing houses, on the Sci-hub collected more than 90%. When the full array of scientific articles, it can be processed by means of artificial intelligence research, and automatically make scientific discoveries. One person alone can not read such a vast array of scientific papers and the car is under power, so a certain automation of the scientific work is possible and it can translate the science to a new level.