Redditors Launch A 'Rescue Mission' For Embattled Sci-Hub, With The Ultimate Aim Of Building A Decentralized Version

from the but-what-about-protecting-Elbakyan? dept

Techdirt has just written about belated news that the FBI gained access two years ago to the Apple account of Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub. This is part of a continuing attempt to stop the widespread sharing of academic papers, mostly paid for by the public, and currently trapped behind expensive paywalls. You might think somebody helping scholars spread their work to a wider audience would be rewarded with prizes and grants, not pursued by the FBI and DOJ. But of course not, because, well, copyright. It's easy to feel angry but helpless when confronted with this kind of bullying by publishing giants like Elsevier, but a group of publicly spirited Redditors aim to do something about it:

It's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.

They have initiated what they term a "Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub", in order to prepare for a possible shutdown of the site:

A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this.

The Redditors are calling for "85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total". The idea is to download 10 random torrents, then seed them for as long as possible. Once enough people start downloading random torrents using these seeds, the Sci-Hub holdings will be safe. That would then lead to the "final wave":

Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future.

The centralized nature of Sci-Hub is certainly its greatest weakness, since it provides publishers with just a few targets to aim for, both legally and technically. A truly decentralized version would solve that problem, but requires a lot of work, as the Reddit post notes. Still, at least this "rescue plan" means people can do something practical to help Sci-Hub; sadly, protecting Elbakyan is harder.

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Filed Under: academic papers, alexandra elbakyan, censor-proof, copyright, distributed
Companies: sci-hub

Building A Censor-Resistant Web?

from the one-option dept

With recent efforts to take down various websites, which we've been documenting here on Techdirt, there's been increasing discussions about ways to create a more "censor-proof" internet. We've discussed the idea of a decentralized DNS system and now Aaron Swartz is proposing a "censor-resistant web" system that makes use of hashes and authentication certificates. It's an interesting idea, though it does seem like there are a lot of moving parts, which might make it more difficult to implement. Either way, as we've been predicting for a while now, a lot of the events of the past few months have really only served to expose bottleneck intermediaries and to alert people to infrastructure that needs to be more decentralized.

Filed Under: censor-proof, censoring, distributed, free speech