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> “It was really disgusting to read they ask me to accept their EFF Pioneer award ‘on behalf of Sci-Hub’,” Elbakyan said in response two weeks before the awards were officially announced.

> “Why did not they want to give the award to me directly? Sci-Hub is my sole creation; it is not an organization and never had any team. In 1998 they awarded Torvalds, not Linux,” she added.

Definitely understandable, especially considering that the DOJ/FBI were investigating her directly.

Yeah, but this reason to hesitate (they didn't want to get in trouble for directly endorsing her) is the same reason why it was important to directly endorse her. I'm glad they made the right choice.
Elbakyan is a legend and this award is richly deserved. In terms of democratizing knowledge, her achievement is on a par with Wikipedia.
I know so many things I never could have without Sci-Hub. Its value in enabling access to scientific knowledge simply cannot be overstated.
EFF Award winners (linked from the article): https://www.eff.org/press/releases/electronic-frontier-found...

- Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan — EFF Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge

- Library Freedom Project — EFF Award for Information Democracy

- Signal Foundation — EFF Award for Communications Privacy

YSK : Scihub hasn't added any new papers since the trials began (2020) . If any one wants new papers there are alternatives such as the nexus project , there is a working bot on telegram that I use from time to time
No new papers since 2020? :( Maybe because of that I didn't find a paper I wanted to read. How does the nexus project work? I dont use telgram and dont want to download an app or create an account for one paper. Is it possible to access the nexus project thru the web and just simple download from there instead? Or is there any other web sites like sci-hub on the web that have newer papers than 2020?
> Is it possible to access the nexus project thru the web and just simple download from there instead?

Yes, it's possible. Their current web gate: https://standard--template--construct-org.ipns.dweb.link/

More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/13cms8m/how_to_use_...

This doesn't seem to be true. A quick search on their home page shows a bunch of articles from 2021 and 2022. I caught a few 404s and messaged Alexandra, she says this is some bug and she'll look into this.

Btw, using this opportunity to remind everybody about her donation page: https://sci-hub.ru/donate

I do recall there being a trial in India that paused uploading but I am pretty sure that was resolved a year or two ago
Even if Scihub will never add any new paper again, it will remain extremely useful, because it contains a large number of older papers that are very difficult to obtain from any other source.

For the new papers, a significant percentage can be found as preprints in arxiv or the like, or are published in open-access journals, so the difficulty in obtaining them is typically less than for older papers that are still important.

Moreover, even if I pay a non-negligible amount of money for the access at certain journals, I frequently prefer to search for their articles on Scihub, because I can get them so much faster, without wasting time with logins or with searching for articles in the wrong place, because they were published elsewhere.

Is there a public Torrent of the entire collection?
YSK: this is false
can you share the telegram bot, please
Elbakyan's about page is worth a read: https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra
She was so secretive for so long, it's crazy she's waving to us on that page. This interviewer flew to Kazakhstan to meet her and wasn't even sure she'd show up:

https://radiolab.org/podcast/library-alexandra

She probably lost any hope to live free and resigned herself to be forever hunted like a criminal by US administration and its international stooges. At least she's safe in Russia
This URL won't load for me, anything specific about it? I simply get secure connection failed, authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
Is your ISP blocking .ru domains?
This lady has probably done more to advance science than most Nobel winners. She deserves all that and more.
Previous discussion of the actual announcement from EFF:

Annual EFF Awards: Alexandra Elbakyan, Library Freedom Project, and Signal (248 points, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36899608

Oy, you've got a loicense to access that publicly funded knowledge? Look what Carmen Ortiz did to Aaron Swartz.
I can't remember the EFF ever doing/asserting something I disagree with.

I can't say that about many organizations.

I work for a Uni and remember back in the day compromised accounts ripping publisher content via our proxy. Enough that we wound up removing the proxy and forcing internal access.

A lot of the reason that Sci-Hub content has stalled in more recent users is security around accounts (MFA, SAML etc).

The reason there is still a lot of warnings floating around about using Sci-Hub is the threat that publishers hold over Unis in terms of licensing and the users understanding the threat to their accounts/personal data.

The method of getting the papers was bad, even if the reasoning was good.

Hopefully more Universities continue focusing on open access of their research in line with BOAI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Open_Access_Initiativ...).

Copyrights and Patents were never intended for use by corporations.

How can I claim this?! When both copyrights and patents were invented the longest 'corporate charter' a company could hold was 6 months in total.

Patents and Copyrights were designed to aid fledgling businesses in America compete against the behemoth industrial machines of England, Spain, France, and Europe in general. Companies in those countries were expansionist and simply bought out any serious competition.

Our country's founders didn't want that system taking hold of American economics, so invented protections against such things occurring here.

Remove the copyrights and patents from ANY multinational corporation. If it's not an American-ONLY based company -where money isn't shipped wholesale overseas- then they can no longer enjoy patents or copyrights in America.

POOF... problem solved.

> Our country's founders didn't want that system taking hold of American economics, so invented protections against such things occurring here.

They had zero IP and were building a country on stolen IP, of course they wanted to play fast and loose.

Now that the US has IP and others dont, they are doing what they do best, The World Police.

I think you and GP are agreeing. GP says that they want to return to that initial form of copyright because they do not agree with how World Police US is operating.
Good stuff! Love free knowledge, it's important for all of us.
I hope someday she earns a Nobel prize. By inventing a paywall-proof electronic printing press she has the impact of a modern-day Gutenberg.
Seems it will be hard for her to attend the event on San Francisco, given that US decided to label her as Russian spy.
They'll get her a Snowden-Stand, no sweat.
An awesome and courageous organization gives an award to an awesome and courageous person. Congrats Alexandra!
Out of curiosity, does the EFF have any history of rewarding people for breaking laws, or is this the first time?
Thats a high bar
Does the award come with money?
Aw, I should at least get a participation badge for providing access to all my personal information via every hacked service I've ever signed up for.
Honestly, I think this is a bad idea in the long run. The EFF is the most vocal critic of DRM in the public sphere by far (the FSF barely registers).

Now the MPA and copyright holders can dismiss their testimony out of hand for being that group that gave an award to a copyright infringer. Not that the MPA or John Deere would’ve respected the EFF anyway, but I’m sure it’s going to be mentioned in future court cases as a way to discredit the arguments.

I care far more about the availability of scientific publications than about producers putting DRM on their own products.

The thing I'm against is the government telling me that I can't strip DRM. But I think it's everybody's right to wrap their creations in a puzzle; it's just cheating to get the cops to hit me with a stick if I try to solve that puzzle, or try to tell anyone else how to solve it.

That’s more the medium term than the long term, right? The hope is, in the long run, Elbakyan’s contribution to intellectual freedom will matter more
The EFF endorses piracy? This is like the internet archive library giving unlimited access to books without authorization for "emergency access" during covid.
Generally, almost nobody cares about IP infringement, but in the case of academic papers it's even worse. Even the authors and the peer reviewers of the work don't care about it 99% of the time. They don't see a single cent from the publication that's charging you $1000 per month to access their work.

Scihub saves you from finding the email address of one of the authors and waiting for a reply for your request for a copy of the paper.

I'd be surprised and disappointed if a party like the EFF would be against free access to scientific knowledge. That includes educational books on the Internet Archive.

Legality and ethics are often disjoint, and for many people Sci-Hub is pretty clearly a case where piracy is the ethical thing to do.

My personal opinion is this: tax dollars pay for a huge proportion of the research that is then reviewed by volunteers (whose pay also comes out of taxes) and then published in journals that charge insane prices to host a PDF of this taxpayer-funded research. Sci-Hub takes this publicly-funded research and makes it available to the public like it always should have been.

Ask the authors of those papers she "pirated". IIRC there's overwhelming support for what she's doing in the scientific community.

The pirates are Elsevier etc.

Endorsement is not the same as performance. I endorse peoples' right to use drugs or put obscene bumper stickers on their car. Doesn't mean I do the same.
> The EFF endorses piracy?

Q: Do content creators (the scientists and researchers) approve or disapprove of Sci Hub?