Archivists Want to Make Sci-Hub 'Un-Censorable'

[Chewy_fox]

For roughly the past decade, Sci-Hub—aka, the “Pirate Bay of Science—has been giving researchers, reporters, and open-source advocates unfettered access to countless scientific papers across every discipline you can imagine. In return, it’s been hit with multiple lawsuits, a suspended Twitter account, and an investigation from the United States Department of Justice.

Now, people are trying to rescue the site before it’s wiped off the web for good. A collection of data-hoarding redditors have banned together to personally torent each of the 85 million articles currently housed within Sci-Hub’s walls. Ultimately, their goal is to make a fully open-source library that anyone can access, but nobody can take down.

“It’s time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science,” the moderators of the r/DataHoarder subreddit wrote in a post on Thursday. “We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.”

There are many papers that need to be downloaded. Sci-Hub is built out of 850 separate torrents housing 100,000 articles apiece, making the site’s entire database take up a whopping 77TB of data. While there’s a handful of torrenters working with Library Genesis to catalog as much as they can, the collective is trying to recruit at least 85 more data guzzlers to store 10 torrents apiece, adding that they should “reach out to 10 good friends” and ask them to torrent what they can. With enough people on board—the goal is 8,500 torrenters total—they’ll be able to siphon off the entire library.

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This isn’t the first time that a Reddit community’s gone on an open-source rescue. In 2019, a group managed to pull off a nearly identical mission to onboard 33TB of scientific papers and books from Library Genesis, a site that’s faced legal troubles similar to Sci-Hub. At the start of the pandemic, archivists compiled close to 5,000 studies on covid-19 and put them out to the public free of charge. 

While Sci-Hub’s site is still on the web, the r/DataHoarder post notes that it’s essentially defunct—it hasn’t uploaded any new papers since December of last year. Meanwhile, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan reported last week that Apple had given the FBI access to her account data.

Edited May 21, 2021 by Chewy_fox

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