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posted by martyb on Friday December 06 2019, @08:50AM   Printer-friendly

Meet the Guy Behind the Libgen Torrent Seeding Movement

Libgen and Sci-Hub, regularly referred to as the 'Pirate Bay of Science', are continually under fire. However, if all of the important data is decentralized, almost any eventuality can be dealt with. Today we meet the guy leading a new movement to ensure that Libgen's archives are distributed via the highest quality torrent swarms possible.

[...] [The] torrents used by Libgen were not in good shape so 'shrine' began a movement to boost the quality of their swarms. The project was quickly spotted and then supported by two companies (Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.com) that offer 'seedboxes', effectively server-based torrent clients with plenty of storage space and bandwidth available – perfect for giving swarms a boost.

The project gained plenty of traction and as a follow-up thread details, considerable success. Today we catch up with 'shrine' for some history, background information, and an interesting status report.

"Ironically this all started when I saw the TorrentFreak article about [Libgen] mirrors getting taken down. I immediately decided I wanted to find a way to preserve and protect the collection," 'shrine' says.

[...] "Scientists in the Reddit threads are sharing stories of how LibGen made their research possible. Unnamed cloud providers have pledged 100TB allocation on their servers. The response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone."

Previously:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday December 06 2019, @11:34AM (2 children)

    by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Friday December 06 2019, @11:34AM (#928794) Journal

    Here [wordpress.com] is some interesting background on Sci-Hub, and its connection to LibGen. Props to those who made it happen. It is a huge service to the academic community.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @12:06PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday December 06 2019, @12:06PM (#928797) Journal

    The Library Genesis project originally was dedicated to books only. In 2012, they started collecting research articles, too and indexed them by DOI. They wanted to include papers downloaded by Sci-Hub to their database.

    In the spring of 2013, Sci-Hub gained popularity in China. The number of requests exploded. It became not possible anymore to download each paper requested, so I started extracting DOI from pages and redirecting users to LibGen if paper was already available there. Thankfully to this, Sci-Hub survived.

    [...] Currently, the Sci-Hub does not store books, for books users are redirected to LibGen, but not for research papers. In future, I also want to expand the Sci-Hub repository and add books too.

    I always go for LibGen, which has keyword search and can be used to grab many ebooks. But Sci-Hub is an important piece of the puzzle.

    By Wikipedia rules, I cannot edit article about Sci-Hub myself

    Typical.

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    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday December 06 2019, @02:10PM

      by Coward, Anonymous (7017) on Friday December 06 2019, @02:10PM (#928830) Journal

      I always go for LibGen, which has keyword search and can be used to grab many ebooks. But Sci-Hub is an important piece of the puzzle.

      I have enough institutional access to take the legal route (for selfish reasons of risk-avoidance). But my occasional papers have been going to true open access journals. Hopefully, sentiment will shift toward the OA journals, and the rent-seeking powers of publishers (whether for-profit or "non-profit") will decline.

      "Non-profit" is in quotes, because non-profit academic societies often run journals as profit-centers to fund other society activities.