Save the noble robbers!
The largest archive of "pirated" scientific articles has thrown the SOS cry all over the Internet
Vasily Parfenov, Naked Science
Supporters of the Sci-Hub resource asked for help from all users of the global web. They urge anyone who wants to download part of the archive of scientific publications and stay on the torrent distribution as long as possible. For many years, this portal has provided thousands of scientists with free access to scientific articles from peer-reviewed journals and helped save huge sums on subscriptions. Now the copyright holders have dealt Sci-Hub another crushing blow – and the resource was on the verge of destruction.
A few days ago, a call appeared on the largest English–language Internet forum – the Reddit site - for the start of the "Sci-Hub Rescue Mission". The translation of the manifesto into Russian is also available on Habr. To put it briefly, supporters of the principles of "Open Science" ask all concerned to become archivists and save some of the riches of the "pirate" scientific portal for their computers. To do this, we have created several auxiliary resources that allow us to track the progress of the "Rescue Mission", search for the necessary articles in the archives and choose which torrent to download first. In order for the Sci-Hub legacy to exist as long as possible, of course, it is desirable to stay on the distribution forever.
The Sci-Hub portal appeared in 2011 through the efforts of Alexandra Elbakyan, who adheres to the point of view that scientific knowledge should be accessible to everyone. Its supporters replenished the collection of the resource with scientific articles that they downloaded from their own or institute subscriptions to peer-reviewed journals. The latter, which is quite logical, did not appreciate such a development of events. Elsevier, Springer Nature, John Wiley and Cambridge University Press publishers, as well as the American Chemical Society (ACS) have repeatedly initiated legal proceedings against Sci-Hub in different countries.
As a result, the "pirate" scientific resource has repeatedly "moved" from one domain to another due to blockages, and its founder is wanted by law enforcement agencies of several states. In early May, Alexandra posted a notice on Twitter that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had requested her personal data from Apple in 2019. Since Elbakyan is a suspect in the investigation of the department, the company could notify her about it only after the fact. In other words, the woman has been continuously monitored in cyberspace for almost two years.
The above fact could be attributed to another page of the sluggish struggle of copyright holders with Sci-Hub, but recent events show that this is a serious aggravation. For example, in January Twitter has blocked the official account of the portal used to publish statements of support for the project. This happened against the background of a campaign by Indian scientists who organized against the claim of copyright holders. The Delhi City Court sided with them, recognizing the Sci-Hub as socially important. At least in India, the blocking of the portal was postponed, but for a number of reasons, the replenishment of the archive of the "pirate" scientific resource has not been carried out for several months anyway.
Since the project has clearly entered a phase of acute crisis, its concerned supporters initiated a "Rescue Mission". It is supervised by the Library Genesis resource (LibGen), which has existed since 2008 and does about the same thing as Sci-Hub: collects scientific articles and provides access to them for free. Therefore, without the support of people organizing distributed storage on their computers, it is also at risk of destruction. This is only the first phase of the mission: at the next stages, it is planned to develop a full-fledged decentralized "unkillable" open database of scientific publications.
Of course, resources such as Sci-Hub and LibGen (and, by the way, a completely legal extension for Chrome Unpaywall – VM), cause an ambiguous reaction from others. On the one hand, they distribute "pirated" content, that is, de facto stolen from copyright holders. On the other hand, they help a lot of people get access to peer–reviewed scientific articles. Otherwise, many researchers engaged in scientific work would not even be able to get close to up-to-date modern data. This is especially important for developing countries and employees of institutions with modest budgets.
For example, in Russia, even the largest universities like MSU do not have a subscription to all major scientific peer-reviewed journals. That is, those employees who work outside the "mainstream" areas either have to ignore current publications, or pay out of pocket for access to them (the cost of one article usually ranges between eight and 35 dollars). Sci-Hub in general and Elbakyan personally in particular may have a controversial reputation, but the importance of the project is invaluable. Therefore, to support this resource or not is an open question, but it is definitely unacceptable to destroy it.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru