All that is needed here is distributed storage. Whether or not it has anything to do with blockchain is immaterial. The value add, if any, of blockchain is verification of the provenance of the files stored on the blockchain, but if a third party is copying scientific papers in to begin with, the chain of custody has already been disrupted. Theoretically, scientists could digitally sign and upload their own work, but they can already do that. The reason they publish to journals instead is the actual scientific validity of published work isn't verified by being of known provenance, but by peer review.
So unless you have some idea of how to do peer review by blockchain.
I mean, that's probably not impossible, but good luck. Since the idea would be preventing anybody from making money off of it, it kind of goes against what blockchain is actually used for. Scihub is trying to create abundance, not scarcity.
A site that just publishes metadata and SHA-256 hashes for published papers could bootstrap this effort and might actually be legal, or at least would be an interesting court case to follow. I wonder if there have been any interesting legal decisions for that sort of thing?
Filecoin isn't really useful, is it? It suffers from the same lack of real censorship resistance as IPFS, on which it is based. It also suffers in that the barrier for entry for new nodes is incredibly high (I didn't know this until recently myself when I was considering throwing part of a NAS at it and found out they wanted me to have way more than just 16GB of RAM to participate). Freenet is more appropriate as it provides cover for people holding the information on their nodes that IPFS does not.
Additionally, IPFS has the same problem as torrent files in that it requires additional layers (which aren't all feasible or effective) to obfuscate the source of data. If sharing it has been declared, in some sense, illegal then IPFS will reveal who is sharing it. And once those nodes are forcibly removed (because governments are more capable of doing that than random individuals) then the data can disappear.
IPFS is what you're looking for, and there's already a IPFS site for LibGen so SciHub is probably not far behind.
Note: Filecoin despite advertising itself for years as an incentivisation layer for IPFS is not - it's two separate networks [1], so it lacks all the features of the mature IPFS protocol.
Yes, exactly. Would love being able to use Filecoin or any of the alternatives (Storj, Sia and those) but they are all very immature right now, both UX and stability wise. If it's not hard to get the files into the networks, it's hard to get them out again.
IPFS could work as it's not ruined by the whole blockchain mess, but then you might as well use torrents (which people are successfully using already for Sci-Hub).
Filecoin has massive overhead. It also relies on exchange of funds to keep the files around. If you want to VOLUNTEER to store the files for others for free, then Filecoin adds needless overhead!
Sci-Hub is not "A website" though. It's a archive, archive of scientific papers that can be served by a static file server, IPFS or torrents. Have the DOI be the filename of the paper, and now you even have a DOI-lookup functionality in your static file server.
Sure, you could do that over IPFS. But if you really want scale, censorship-resistance and wide-spread usage/storing of it, you'll use torrents (today, maybe future will be different)
IPFS is built on torrent technology so it has those same proprieties. The advantage here is that IPFS additionally handles the front-end - the website, search and any future features that might be added like a blog or forum.
IPFS is not "built on torrent technology", it does borrow some of the ideas that Bittorrent also uses. And no, IPFS won't automatically give you search and other things, you have to build those yourself, same as if you used Bittorrent.
So unless you have some idea of how to do peer review by blockchain.
I mean, that's probably not impossible, but good luck. Since the idea would be preventing anybody from making money off of it, it kind of goes against what blockchain is actually used for. Scihub is trying to create abundance, not scarcity.