Something Genuinely Good the Internet Has Allowed…

…is Sci-Hub, which hosts scholarly articles. SciHub, to be clear, is illegal in the US and other countries.

Sci-Hub can instantly provide access to more than two-thirds of all scholarly articles, an amount that Himmelstein says is “even higher” than he anticipated. For research papers protected by a paywall, the study found Sci-Hub’s reach is greater still, with instant access to 85 percent of all papers published in subscription journals. For some major publishers, such as Elsevier, more than 97 percent of their catalog of journal articles is being stored on Sci-Hub’s servers—meaning they can be accessed there for free.

Science, and scholarship in general, is supposed to be about the open sharing of information. What’s happened instead is that journals were bought up by a few companies, and access was made expensive. Getting a single article usually costs between $10 and $15 in my experience, and most are behind paywalls. University libraries have some access, though few can pay for all journals, but not everyone has access to university accounts.

(This is similar to accessing, say, Statistics Canada, which is also behind a paywall for most things. This limits who can effectively research Canadian subjects. Full access costs thousands of dollars. One can imagine what effect that might have on not just who uses the info, but in what sort of research is done with the information.)

Again, Sci-Hub is illegal. It is also entirely in the spirit of science and scholarship. Information doesn’t want to be free, but scholarly information should be, both because scholarship advances more quickly when everyone has access, and because (normative statement) everyone should have access to scholarly and scientific information.

Also, given that peer reviewers are not paid for by journals and that most research is done with public money, and, well, the internet now exists, the argument for subscription journals is weak. They restrict access to information in a way which is bad for researchers (who usually want their work read), as well.

So. This is one of the things the internet has done that is truly good. Note that it is illegal.

(Meanwhile Russia has made using VPNs and proxies illegal, which is far more important and harmful than expelling a few diplomats…well, as long as expelling those diplomats isn’t one of the steps towards a US/Russian war.)

Code is NOT law, but sometimes people can use it to the do the right thing.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.