There's a paragraph that talks about Sci-Hub doing a dictionary attack against a university and then downloading 45k PDFs. The same paragraph then talks about unknown criminals changing data and planting malware. There is no correlation between these incidents other than that the author puts them in the same paragraph, implying that they are related.

Same in the next paragraph: The author is implying that Sci-Hub uses keyloggers, but upon more careful reading there is no relation.

Then a few paragraphs later the author talks about articles being stolen as well as social security numbers and other personal information. "Sci-hub must have thousands of these" - pure speculation. Also no evidence that Sci-Hub sold them.

Can someone offer some perspective on why opening up all this knowledge to the web would be an effective attack on western civilization (as is speculated in the comments of the article)? I'm not concerned about the legality of their operation, just curious that if, some larger criminal institution is behind this, why would it be an effective attack on Western civilization to publish tons of research, journals and articles for free?

My view on it is probably wayy too naive, 'free and open-access is better', but I see non-academics and enthusiasts all over the web using sci-hub for all kinds of research.

Who's being hurt here?

In theory you could operate such a service maliciously. For example you could withhold all papers advocating some viewpoint. If for example all papers advocating that sugar is harmless are freely available and all papers advocating that sugar is harmful can't be accessed, that might shift the perceived consensus. Or much more advanced and also more insidious: you could serve modified versions of some papers, either making them less credible or changing their conclusions completely.

However, there is no indication that sci-hub is doing anything of the sort. And the more researchers are using sci-hub, the quicker such a thing would become obvious.

It would also be telling if certain types of papers known in the field and findable with Google Scholar or similar indices were missing from Sci-Hub.

Anyone researching the health effects of sugar would conclude that some research was being withheld from them, not that research concluding that sugar is harmful doesn't exist.

This is just a hit piece on Sci-Hub.

> bulk theft of intellectual property from academic institutions

Is a most apt description of scientific publishing, but is instead being applied to Sci-Hub.

It recommends libraries block access to it, on spurious technical grounds, but never stops to wonder why people would be accessing it even from within university libraries.

I imagine it might be because sci-hub has a better selection of academic content. Content that is produced, reviewed, and curated for free by academics, then appropriated by publishers due to their historical usefulness. I imagine it also has a nicer interface than most publishers' websites, which generally do not set a high bar.

What librarians should be doing is lobbying to stop free peer reviewing for paid journals and then unsubscribing from them as the dry up. Academic publishing is a racket.

Also, if you were caught, erm, donating content to Sci-Hub, you might lie and say your password was stolen...

Can't create an omelette without cracking some eggs. I have little sympathy for most of the arguments presented here, some are claims of rampant criminality attributed to individuals without evidence.

Regardless the overall benefit to humanity is undeniable and I doubt history will look favourably on articles like this.

The big publishing houses can dig in if they want, the writing is on the wall for their ilk, adapt or go extinct, it's happened in a multitude of other industries, why couldn't the gatekeepers of worldwide scientific effort see that coming?

This article has zero substance and makes me wonder very hard how it passed review. Shame on you Andrew Pitts for spreading fear mongering, and double the shame for doing a poor job at it.

I was wondering who in their right mind would publish this article, and then looked at the About Us page, and the whole articles makes more sense now, see https://www.sspnet.org/about-us/organizational-members/

> "Let me be clear: Sci-Hub is not just stealing PDFs. They’re phishing, they’re spamming, they’re hacking, they’re password-cracking, and basically doing anything to find personal credentials to get into academic institutions."

And goodness for that.

It took me too many paragraphs until I realized he wasn’t being snarky and ironic.

It’s interesting reading these posts where the facts are agreed too and the value systems produce very different viewpoints.

I read this and thought these were positives. The ability to view library info and history is likely understood by the consenting posters. I expected some evidence of misuse rather than the typical “in the hands of a criminal” type hypotheticals where paper reading history might help some spear phishing attack.

This reminded me of the 2010 “if you post your vacation pictures to twitter thieves might more easily rob you.” I mean, that did happen, but it was rare and posters were aware of that small risk.

Universities should more to decrease demand by making all old and publicly funded articles free.