Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads
For those who support sci-hub's mission and would like to help ensure it can never be taken away, you may be interested in the following project to lay the groundwork necessary for a widely-replicated, decentralized version of the repository:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library_genesis_project_update_25_million_books/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library...</a><p>All of the documents accessed through sci-hub are archived by the library genesis project and made available as torrents. Currently there are just over 80 million articles included in these torrents. The total size of the archive is around 70TB. The link above also refers to the library genesis books collection, which is 33TB.<p>This effort has seen tremendous interest in recent weeks; the books collection (libgen) is now widely replicated, but around a third of the scimag articles collection (i.e. those from sci-hub) has only 1-2 reliable seeders and needs more before it can be considered safely backed up. If you have the resources available, I would encourage you to consider assisting. Previous discussion of this project is at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222</a><p>Looking forward, the next step is to find a suitable way of providing accessible, truly decentralized access, without relying on a single point of failure (i.e. a web interface). Some have been exploring IPFS as a potential mechanism, but there are many ways this could be done. This is a challenging but important problem to solve; with the data available, there is now an opportunity for developers to address the access issues. There may come a day when the sci-hub website goes offline, and it would be good if a fallback is already in place at that point.<p>Aaron Swartz may no longer be with us, but his spirit lives on. It's now up to us to carry on the fight for which he paid so dearly.