| As we can see by the fact the above URL is currently not working, there's a high risk associated with the centralized nature of sci-hub. It's already been the target of a major court case in the US and the only reason it's still running is because the site and it's founder (Alexandra Elbakyan) are outside of the court's jurisdiction. But there's still a chance it could disappear one day, and what sort of impact would that have on the productivity of researchers, many of which will be unable to access the articles they need? If you have the disk space and bandwidth, I would strongly encourage you to participate in this torrent seeding effort: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library... The library genesis project maintains the full collection of all articles archived by sci-hub. At http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/ there are links in the download menu for both the torrents and database dumps. For the full thing, you're going to need just over 70TB. The database dumps are updated weekly are are about 10GB each, compressed. As of today there are 81,000,000 articles in the collection. However, the collection is split up into many different torrents (100,000 articles each) so you can just grab a subset and seed those. If sci-hub ever disappears, a highly-replicated backup will ensure that access to the articles is not lost, and a new frontend can be set up fairly easily. This won't help for new articles or those that haven't been archived, but it will preserve those that have. As for the case against paywalled journals and the for-profit publishing industry, I can't make a better argument than that put forward by the editors of the Journal of Informetrics, who collectively resigned from Elsevier and published the first issue of their new open access journal just this week: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/qss_e_0... As for the case for liberating paywalled articles: Aaron Swartz gave his life for this fight. It's now up to us to continue it. |