Is there any word about when sci hub is going to start adding new articles again? It's currently only useful as an archive of old research articles. New papers from the last year are not available. I never understood the rationale for stopping new content, though I believe it had some relation to some court case in India...but I don't understand why that was a reason to stop adding articles, and why it hasn't been restarted yet.
I saw that tweet, but it doesn't change the material reality: try plugging in some DOIs from recent article from the last year, and they will not be there.
Scihub used to be a great resource, now it's only a resource for old research. Still useful for background material, but not for current work.
I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian. There doesn't seem to be any actual reason to stop adding new articles, other than some idiotic halfbaked point that only hurts the people who need the articles, like when Project Gutenberg banned anyone from a German IP, except this is much worse since there is no way around it for people who need new papers.
I have a hunch that the downfall of the "Plato" real-time downloader wasn't the Indian court case but rather the fact that it helped publishers trivially identify the university accounts through which the downloads were happening. Even if the appearance of papers were delayed by a random number of days, there are other pitfalls now, and most importantly, publishers started caring. In particular, Elsevier now slaps UUIDs onto all PDFs you download from them, and no, I'm not just talking of visible watermarks. Other publishers seem to be doing similar things (there was a recent twitter thread on this, retweeted by @textfiles, which I can't find). The rational solution for Sci-Hub seems to be to buffer their uploads and release them in yearly batches, maybe programmatically removing various kinds of watermarks and diffing against the same paper downloaded from a second IP. If this is what they are doing, I'm not surprised. Not sure how much of a winning strategy they have in the long run, though.
> I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian.
Because Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning the case. The court in question has previously backed a very broad definition of what constitutes fair dealing.
> Because Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning the case.
I understand that this is the party line that is parroted whenever this issue comes up, but it does not make any sense as a rationale for keeping new articles off the site. How is not adding any new articles (but, for example, keeping old articles accessible) assisting the possible winning of the case? And more to the point, why does it matter at all if it wins or loses the case? As stated, neither the owner or the infrastructure is Indian, so of what relevancy is this jurisdiction?
And further still, the case appears to have been delayed indefinitely. That last update claims that there was going to be an update a few days ago, but there was not. The proceedings are just now a list of one postponement after another [1]. Given that new articles are being held hostage, it thus very obviously benefits the legal system and the prosecution to continue to delay the case indefinitely.
The owner might not be Indian, but she's actively defending the case(through lawyers) in India. Not following the injunction would lead her to losing the case, which is why she followed through.
She didn't have to fight the case in India, but she chose to. Why keep old papers and stop adding new papers - that probably depends on the terms of the injunction.
That is not how scihub used to function. Scihub used to have an engine, named Plato, which would fetch papers automatically if not already in their database. For the last year now, this essential service has not been operational. This is what the issue I am raising is about.
I still have airgapped windows xp systems with one software package on them to do one job. Left alone Software doesn’t bit rot, it is the never ending stream of updates that cause it to cease working over time.
Think about it. Software like Plato downloads papers from around the web. If the environment around software (i.e the web) changes, software without updates bitrots.
What I read was that the Indian judicial system tends to be favorable to things like Sci Hub in its interpretation of copyright, and Sci Hub wanted to act in good faith with regard to that court, so as to have a fairly solid basis in international law for operating, should it rule in Sci Hub's favor. I might be off in this understanding, but that's what I understood.
Yeah, I have heard this reasoning, but it seems muddled. How is keeping the site online so old articles are available but no new articles are added acting in "good faith"? It's not like the old articles are any less copyrighted than the new articles, so this doesn't make sense to me.
The court case has also been delayed for over a year now, so if it is delayed indefinitely, like it seems to be, then we will also not get access to new articles, also indefinitely? That's ridiculous. The last update from the court proceedings claimed that there would be a new update over a month ago, which in turn got delayed yet again to a few days ago, and there's been nothing [1].
As I understand it, this was a sort of compromise the courts worked out in the interim. Seems likely that at some amount of delay, Sci-Hub would just break the injunction (I personally hope they don't, as the case seems to be wrapping up). I don't think any of this is ridiculous.
