Their content is not illegal whatsoever. They are not like Sci-hub where the content is actually owned by someone else. On Academic Torrents, the submissions are made by people who have chosen to share their work on this platform rather than submitting to an academic journal.

Academic journals* rarely host large datasets (it's fairly unusual to even see some PDF supplements with vital summaries or results), and if you want to share data >10MB, you're mostly stuck doing it yourself through your own website or some institution's, or not sharing it at all.

Also, academic datasets aren't free of copyright concerns. Consider the famous Imagenet dataset for image classification. It's made of a million images pulled from Google Images. Did they get each photographs' creators' permission for such unlimited redistribution? Of course not. But there's no way the 'implied license' of posting a photo online extends that far... Like so much of the Internet, it's only possible in the absence of enforcement of copyright law.

* which is particularly frustrating because academic publishers make such enormous profits and hosting large datasets is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing if they were remotely interested in supporting science rather than making more money

Torrents don't mean illegal content.

In his defence, it doesn't really matter whether the content is legal or not. There are people out there who see the torrents as evil. These people have political power and have been known to disrupt and seize .com domains on the scantiest of evidence. A more resilient tld would be a good idea.

Do you have an example of a domain being seized for hosting legitimate torrents?

Why? Nothing indicates that this is illegal?

If it is as they claim well academically supported, you'd assume they'd be easily able to get a subhuman on someone's .edu or.ac.uk or whatever

I believe a .org would be most appropriate here.

Thinking about http://opendap.org/node/305 for context.

[What is OPeNDAP: http://opendap.org/about]

We have academictorrents.org too!

Hi Mr. Cohen (?). Thanks for taking the time to make this publicly available.

Dr. Cohen! But I don't care about titles. Thanks for posting about it! Do you know a hacker news post launched the site in 2014? I was chatting about it at an event in Boston and someone posted it on here and it went crazy. The machines we had hosting data had their 20Mbps connections maxed out for weeks. Now we are prepared and it's just another day!

Here is one of the plots from 2014: https://i.imgur.com/Ecr44AZ.png

Woah! That screengrab is a mess at that tail end- massive traffic, not to mention that this went on for weeks. Regardless, this is an amazingly useful tool that a n00b like myself finds useful(going forward). Thank you, Daktari (Swahili for "doctor").

PostDocs may have a bad rap, but 'subhuman' is going a bit far...

> PostDocs may have a bad rap, but 'subhuman' is going a bit far...

That may have been an autocorrect "correction" of the word "subdomain".

We have not had an issue since 2013. All the content "must be legal to share" as stated on our upload page.