I cannot say how useful Alexandra's work has been for me. Apart from the fact that subscription prices to scientific journals have increased significantly in the last years, in the same period Italy has severely cut research funding. As a result, my department's library has had to cut a number of subscriptions to journals that are very important in my field. (The funny part is that since a few years the Italian government is evaluating universities according to the number of articles published by the staff, their citation count, and the prestige of the journal where these articles have been published...).<p>Without SciHub, my research and my work would have been made much more difficult. Thank you, Alexandra!
Why Elsevier would feel entitled to the copyright of publicly funded research is beyond anyone's guess.<p>This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of failure, and if it gets closed, there won't be anything else to replace it. Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows, research paper sites aren't something that the average Internet users care about.
A lot of academics I know point people to sci-hub!<p>For example, the American Psychological Association has been issuing take-down requests to academics who distribute final article PDFs on their sites. As a result, there's been a fair amount of activity on twitter telling people that they can get them there.
Because of sci-hub, scientists such as myself no longer need anything more than food, an internet connection and some shelter to do first class theoretical work. It cannot be emphasized enough how much of a boon this is for scientists who don't have good journal access, <i>which is the majority of scientists</i>.<p>In creating it, Elbakyan has probably done far more for humanity than Musk will do in his life, and I am a massive fan of Musk. If it goes down, it will be a tragedy for our species.
The 2nd time in a week I need the wisdom of Pravin Lal in a thread about free information?<p>"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
What the academic publishing industry calls "theft", the world calls "research".<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...</a><p>Thank you, Alexandra, for your library.
Reminds me of:<p>Sci-Hub As Necessary, Effective Civil Disobedience<p><a href="http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effective-civil-disobedience/" rel="nofollow">http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/02/sci-hub-as-necessary-effect...</a>
If history tells us anything another Sci-Hub or more powerful reiteration will surface and will eventually "win." You can't contain ideas.
Elsevier is based in Amsterdam, Netherlands[1]<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier</a>
I had access through my job and through university to Elsevier and other paywalled repositories.<p>I avoid papers found in "ScienceDirect", not because of some moral position, but I found often that their abstract does no seem so useful for me.
Oftentime there are lot of jargon and it is hard to figure out what is new and what take home points there are. The reader may get the impression that they try hard to oversell their stuff.<p>I even prefer some free publishers who have a much lower reputation like Indawi.<p>I have a different but still related problem with IEEE: On every subject it seems there are tons of papers, so it is difficult to appreciate the relative value of each paper.<p>I have no problem with Nature and some other paywalled publishers.