Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Years Of Existence, With A Record 88 Million Papers Available, And A Call For Funds To Help It Add AI And Go Open Source
from the paypal-not-accepted dept
To celebrate ten years offering a large proportion of the world's academic papers for free -- against all the odds, and in the face of repeated legal action -- Sci-Hub has launched a funding drive:
Sci-Hub is run fully on donations. Instead of charging for access to information, it creates a common pool of knowledge free for anyone to access.
The donations page says that "In the next few years Sci-Hub is going to dramatically improve", and lists a number of planned developments. These include a better search engine, a mobile app, and the use of neural networks to extract ideas from papers and make inferences and new hypotheses. Perhaps the most interesting idea is for the software behind Sci-Hub to become open source. The move would address in part a problem discussed by Techdirt back in May: the fact that Sci-Hub is a centralized service, with a single point of failure. Open sourcing the code -- and sharing the papers database -- would allow multiple mirrors to be set up around the world by different groups, increasing its resilience.
Donations can only be made in cryptocurrencies -- Sci-Hub accepts most of the main ones. A short interview with Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, on the donations page explains why she moved away from PayPal:
in the past I used also PayPal account to collect donations from abroad. It worked well for a while, but when I posted a message on Sci-Hub urging people to donate, if my memory is correct it was in 2013, donations started to come at a cosmic speed... in a couple of days two or three thousands of dollars were collected. But then the account was frozen by PayPal. It turned out that Elsevier has complained to PayPal about Sci-Hub so they froze the account.
Later I tried registering another PayPal account, and use it carefully, but after some time it also got frozen. I have several frozen PayPal accounts by now.
The main Sci-Hub site claims to hold some 87,977,763 papers -- an impressive number. It's a reminder of just how much research has been funded by the public, and how much could be available for researchers across the globe to access if unjustified claims of ownership were not made by academic publishers desperate to preserve their 35-40% profit margins.
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Filed Under: academic knowledge, academic publishing, access to knowledge, decentralized, fundraising
Companies: sci-hub
