My guess would be to donate to her. Near the bottom of the page is a BTC address (please check it yourself):
https://sci-hub.do/ https://sci-hub.st/ https://sci-hub.se/
All the domains have the same address for me: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns
Money (and Bitcoin is among the freest money) can be used on whatever she needs.
- https://mempool.space/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2m... shows a presumably-USD$ amount next to each transaction
- https://explorer.bitquery.io/bitcoin/address/12PCbUDS4ho7vgS... (select "Sankey", slide "Detail level" all the way to the right) shows how the money's mostly going elsewhere
I know it’s a lot, but legal fees eat up so much. Hopefully she can win the case without sacrificing her entire savings too.
I had a Coinbase account already from years ago but never linked it to any payment source. At the time the only options were my bank account, which didn't sit well with me.
Now PayPal is an option, which is also linked to my bank account, but the one level of indirection made me a bit less hesitant. Also, the combination of Coinbase and PayPal seems low(er) risk to me.
If you’re wondering how to get the public to support it, we need to start spreading the truth. The opioid crisis kicked off by Purdue? Wouldn’t have happened without USPTO. Big tech monopolists? They get their monopoly power from IS laws. The list goes and on. IS laws choke the flow of information through the nervous system of the world and we feel it’s consequences all over the place.
We need to extend those provisions to include all research that gets federal tax money
And it’s hilariously short sighted. Without patent and copywrite protections, you’ll instantly see innovation come out of places where people are paid for their work. US offloading it’s manufacturing in a short sighted move to cheap labor and head-in-sand environmental outlook - sure, let’s kill the design industries too now too.
There is a problem with how papers are shared and the orgs that control archiving and release. That doesn’t mean all patents must be thrown out.
https://questioncopyright.org/ http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Do you have any rebuttal to parent’s points on Purdue and tech monopolies?
Do you really think drug cartels need the IPTO? Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the opioids had been generics?
Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is alcohol addition a huge problem, or not?
Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on patents and not on massive spending power, political leverage, and other influencing mechanisms?
Do you not understand that if you have the spending power, you can open-source your code and IP without even remotely endangering that monopoly?
The reality is that patents are a relatively tiny element in cost of entry to markets.
It's honestly baffling why the anti-copyright crowd believes removing patents and copyright will be some kind of magic bus ride to utopia, when there is no rational reason whatsoever to believe that.
And none of this has much to do with making scientific papers public domain - because that isn't even the same class of issue.
The legal ones do, absolutely.
> Or that the opioid crisis couldn't possibly have happened if the opioids had been generics?
"get an audience for our patent infringement suits so that we are feared as a tiger with claws, teeth and balls, and build some excitement with prescribers that OxyContin Tablets is the way to go." Richard Sackler in a 1996 email. I do not see OxyContin situations in a world with intellectual freedom, no. No government enforced monopoly profits, no massive incentive to overprescribe and lie. No copyright, and you get far more honest media, education, and healthcare industries.
> Who has an IP monopoly on alcohol production? Is alcohol addition a huge problem, or not?
Maybe it's far more of a problem that is generally known, but that truth is not made apparent because we don't have true freedom of the press b/c of copyright laws.
> Why do you believe tech monopolies rely specifically on patents
On patents and copyrights. If we were to declare tomorrow that search engines did not have to respect copyright law, we would see far better search engines than Google in a year or less.
> The reality is that patents are a relatively tiny element in cost of entry to markets.
Patents deter a huge number of startups from forming. Nearly every successful startup I know of gets targetted by patent trolls, and must decide to play that game and go along with the system. This is very discouraging to a huge number of innovators, especially in critical fields like chip design.
> It's honestly baffling why the anti-copyright crowd believes removing patents and copyright will be some kind of magic bus ride to utopia, when there is no rational reason whatsoever to believe that.
Not a magical bus ride to utopia, but a doubling to perhaps 10x increase in human productivity and equality, yes.
If copyright was abolished, the GPL and all open source would lose all its teeth.
The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime.
The people who write books on here (and then have to fight to keep people from doing on demand pirating of them) would be given a big shrug when they try to go after them in court for copyright infringement.
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Its possible to argue about the term of the copyrights on different media or the threshold for what is novel for a patent... but trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives people who are creating material that is protected with copyright from sharing their material.
And let's face it... you'd have to rewrite the constitution to get rid of them. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
> [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
And they're right.
Do any authors of books actually manage to prosecute piracy in a way that makes them money? As best I can tell, artists lose money paying for lawyers to litigate supposedly lost sales, but whether they actually lose sales is very questionable.
> The photographs that I took and have up on the web (all rights reserved) could be printed and sold without me seeing a dime.
Yup, which is good! You put them up on the web without expectation of making a dime, right? Cool. Your expectations are fulfilled, and someone gets a cool image too.
> trying to remove copyrights completely disincentives people who are creating material that is protected with copyright from sharing their material
And yet, the majority of people who post instagram images and tik-tok videos don't even realize their work is protected by copyright I'd wager, but they're still happy to share their material.
People who write open source code apply such a license specifically because they want to share the material more broadly than copyright would normally allow.
If removing copyright means that we end up with fewer people who are seeking a profit producing content and then praying on others who share and remix it, that seems good to me. We have plenty of people who are willing to produce content and be happy when other people enjoy it, use it, and share it.
If I wrote a book, I would be overjoyed to have people read it and copy it to share with their friends. It seems like a very dark mindset to think that a profit-motive is the primary reason someone might produce anything.
If every scientist published their work on open access platforms, Sci-Hub wouldn't need to exist in the first place.
Does anyone know?
which is an attempt to organize researchers to boycott Elsevier due to its practices. Elsevier is one of the journal publishers that has (or had) issues with preprints like arvix. I do think efforts like this are gaining traction, such as the agreement between the UC system and Elsevier mentioned at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/california-universit...
1) Older collaborators with more power are being 'scared' of getting scooped when they post preprints. They're slowly coming around as the argument makes no real sense, preprint = published to the younger generation.
2) Funding bodies, i.e. the people who pay our bills and have all the power. The Australian Research Council, the biggest non-medical funding body here, does not allow mentions of preprints in grant applications. They give no reason for that rule.
3) Again, money. You want your research to go into the journal with the highest impact factor since that mostly decides whether you get to keep your job, get that new position, or get that grant. Some journals still don't allow preprints. You also get no feedback when a top journal rejects your paper, could the rejection be because others have seen your preprint, published papers built on top of the preprint, and now your paper submitted to the journal is not so novel any more? You have no way of telling.
4) Fear. Sometimes, after your paper has undergone peer review it's a little bit better. A few select people see the embarrassing errors in your paper and help you fix them before the paper is widely accessible. If you post a preprint the world sees your glaring errors.
If there are changes to your paper due to peer review, can you post the changes to Arxiv too later?
If you not post the preprint and submit, you're defeating the purpose of preprints, isn't it? We're back to square one!
Normally yeah, people submit an updated preprint based on peer reviewers' comments. Biorxiv has a nice 'see the newest version of this paper' button for that.
1) medRxiv was relatively new, and while the COVID-19 pandemic was its moment, there are a lot of concerns about pre-peer review stuff, and the public, press, etc. not treating it with appropriate caution.
2) Some journals heavily penalize or won't consider preprints, and some of these journals are quite good. This has gotten a little pushback recently as well.
The existing "prestigious" journals are prestigious because of the peer-reviewing process. How do we solve this problem with Sci-hub? I mean, you can publish your research anywhere (like your homepage) already if you choose to.
But cloning the top journals’ peer review process wouldn’t make you a top journal. Many mid and low tier publications use the same peer review process as the high tier ones.
It’s more of a bit of a tautology: the most prestigious journals are the most prestigious because they’re seen as the most prestigious - which means they get all the best submissions, the best people volunteer to be organizers, speakers, reviewers, and people pay attention to their proceedings increasing their citation numbers.
This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.
I think that this is also means that it will be slow moving and very fragile to a new system that could incentivize people to undertake all the listed actions above that don't go thru/reliant upon the traditional process.
Not saying that we are there yet, nor do I think willingly choosing to submit to any particular jurisdiction in hopes of a favorable outcome will have much effect in the long run (I think systems really change when old systems that served similar functions in some capacity are made obsolete), but as long as tech becomes cheaper, more people become knowledge able about the system as a whole and the incentives involved, more ways of pursuing research will emerge that will be more resilient than hoping for nation state judiciary approval.
I think ultimately the problem of academia publication isn't the openness of access (which obviously is good if we can have), but the whole system as you mentioned.
They seemed to be saying that people should only publish in Sci-Hub, making it a prestigious publication (that would appear in press releases, one assumes) instead of just a mirror.
Pool money with everybody you know and hire a lobbyist.
Weird thing to say - like you think 32 is a child or something? That’s someone well into their second decade of adulthood.
Otherwise, write to whatever lawmaker represents you to talk about it, to ask for a change of law and to support asylum for her if she ever asks it. But for now Russia seems to protect her.
I agree with you that she will probably fail but I think that's more about this project moreso than whether this project hurts capital. remember, the true point of vulnerability of the system is the point at which wages are paid and profits are earned. labor must strike to starve capital because anything else can be recuperated and commidified.
lastly, yes, the intent of the law is to preserve existing capital, but as this board can attest, "existing capital" is a term constantly in flux, and laws change quickly to support the changing makeup of capital. otherwise, what has happened with uber would be impossible as governments fought to protect taxi companies - this happened but now uber no longer resides in a gray area. you'll note that what actually happened here was that finance capital extended it's reach and no new capital was actually created - it merely changed forms. that should also tell you how scihub might go from blacksheep of the bourgeois family to darling, especially once it's purchased and brought under the aegis of existing capital entities. however, for this to happen, Alexandra must play ball with investors, the legal system, etc., and as she has thus far resisted doing so, she will likely fail. projects like hers must either have secret and undiscoverable provenance, or be so distributed that legal force can only be brought to bear on a multitude of actors of no significance to the operation of the project - the hydra with many heads.
so it's not legal tenets I look to but rather an analysis of capital itself.
1. She will be destroyed, one way or the other. Since she is eastern European the possibilities are vastless: Russian asset/ Spy/ Dangerous Hacker/ Covert Operation/ Putin enabler, etc, etc
2. Expect hundreds of "insightful" comments on here how she was actually wrong because X, Y, Z, the same points produced by mainstream media and the establishment politicians.
3. She will be shunned, forgotten and even jailed if she puts a foot in a "wrong" country, and by that I mean 80% of earth,
Anybody who has ever supported their research using Sci-Hub (or Library Genesis) should consider helping back. I certainly do, but I don't know how to best support her. Any suggestions?
She's not very communicative lately: https://twitter.com/ringo_ring