[alco]

Have there been attempts at dispersing the whole collection of papers through torrents or IPFS? The goal here is not to have a central location with a pretty web page but to make the content freely accessibly everywhere by anyone. Distributing it over thousands of nodes would achieve that goal.

[pahool]

I believe that libgen torrents are available, which, as I understand it, are basically a mirror of the content available from scihub. I don't have a lot of information on it now and can't research it from work.

[petra]

Torrents are pretty bad at the archiving problem , i.e. maintaining copies of things with no readership over a long time. Not a great fit for this stuff.

[alco]

I agree. Setting up mirrors would probably be a better fit for this kind of content, but mirrors would be susceptible to the same dangers that the primary website may face: forced take-down by the hosting provider, domain blocking, etc.

The fundamental difference of content-addressed networks is their resiliency in the face a single authority trying to track down all of the sources that have copies of the content.

Even though IPFS is still in its infancy, one of its primary goals is to solve the problem of content suddenly disappearing from the Internet.

[Natanael_L]

Yes and no. You need servers that guarantee availability (but they could hide themselves pretty well if necessary). Then the torrents provide accessibility.

[daveguy]

That's a good question. I don't know if there has been an attempt to IPFS/Torrent the files, but it would be good. They are referenced by DOI on sci-hub so they are easily searched. It would probably be helpful to have a DOI -> IPFS/Torrent name. For IPFS a doi like 10.1037/rmh0000008 would probably work but I don't know if the '/' character will work as a torrent name.

I don't know that the sci-hub underlying database is available outside of the site. I expect with growth they will need to move to torrents or similar to minimize their bandwidth requirements.

[kanzure]

> the whole collection of papers through torrents

yes, although their bandwidth is horrible