SoylentNews

hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

The darknet [wikipedia.org] is where you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. An article [theatlantic.com] by Kaveh Waddell over at The Atlantic [theatlantic.com] describes how you can not only access illegal drugs, weapons, and other nefarious materials, but this now includes scientific research papers. Following Elsevier's [elsevier.com] successful crackdown and dissolution of Sci-Hub [soylentnews.org], the site owner, Alexandra Elbakyan, has moved it to the darknet.

There will always be techniques for accessing paywalled research for free, even without services like Sci-Hub. Some of them are much less complex than Elbakyan’s website: Researchers and scholars often use the hashtag #icanhazpdf on Twitter to ask fellow academics for paywalled articles. (There’s even been scholarly work published that analyzes the phenomenon—appropriately, the research is free online [rclis.org].)

But Sci-Hub’s ingenious methods automate the process, cut out middle men on Twitter, and don’t advertise the request for, essentially, pirated research. And Elbakyan says her website’s presence on the dark web will help keep it accessible even if legal action dismantles Sci-Hub’s new home on the easily accessible surface web.

Original Submission