Just an update on Sci-Hub access. We have a broad need on these forums to look at the published scientific record. Abstracts + title alone do not always give an accurate idea of what is inside. By this I mean journal full text (skipping arcane Materials & Methods) and locating / reading subsequent articles that cite it.
There've been some positive developments that have put more articles in the public domain, for example authors choosing to publish open access journals or to pay massive fees (other people's money) to make them available at normally paywalled journals. ResearchGate has also incentivized authors to put up the latest version for which they still held copyright, plus provides convenient reprint requesting.
Google Scholar does so-so at finding full text pdfs. Search is getting increasingly swamped out by phony abstract aggregators that offer nothing whatsoever by way of content (eg proquest and harvard abstracts). There is also a lookalike site called scihub.org which appears to be a faux journal foundary.
Browser plugins like Unpaywall and oaDOI can scan for open access full text. The result is likely a superset of google, researchgate and author/institution search.
Living as I do in the US, it would be very unfortunate if my activities fell under legal purview of the Cocos Islands or Vatican canon law. What if I could be sued or even extradited to a Canadian prison for violating a lobbyist-inspired IP law in the far north that I'd never heard of? Thus it is very puzzling how the US could think its picayune statures are asymmetric: the final binding law for every jurisdiction on the planet.
Russian sovereign authorities have not identified any issues under their legal system associated with the Sci-Hub site. This provides 62,000,000 journal articles in response to doi or title search. It is fast and free, though the url changes rapidly in response to efforts of foreign journal publishers to block the supposedly neutral global internet domain name server system (an ability the NSA/GHSQ call the home court advantage). Ironically, Sci-Hub has made a fortune on the recent run-up in Bitcoins donated by users so is here to stay.
Evidently the site fills a need as 59,860,000 pdfs per year are currently being downloaded by academics all over the world, saving them $2,334,540,000 at typical journal prices. That's enough to put 10 new icebreakers out in the Arctic all year, a far better use of taxpayer money than repurchasing research it had previously funded.
Here are some links that can prove useful in locating a currently active Sci-Hub server:
https://www.facebook.com/sci.hub.org/ current situtation
https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/7ioo0m/working_scihub_domains_10122017/https://sci-hub.la/ Laos rents out its country domain!
https://www.sci-hub.iohttps://sci-hub.bz https://sci-hub.cc/https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion Tor
http://31.184.194.81/ direct
http://80.82.77.83 DNS server
http://80.82.77.84 DNS server
https://greenelab.github.io/scihub-manuscript/ academic paper
https://scihub.org/ faux journal lookalike link unrelated to Sci-Hub project
The other big breakthrough is paper-archiving sites like bioRxiv that do not charge for publishing preprints or retrieving them. This is supported by a Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative grant to Cold Springs Harbor. Note govt-subsidized journals like Plos charge thousands to process a submission.
These are screened for nonsense but not peer-reviewed and importantly, assigned permanent doi. There is also a direct mechanism for pass-through of a user's article to peer-reviewed journals that might be interested. For example, someone could pull together a review of methane-generating biological processes too large or technical for these forums and have their research online for the long term at something more credible than self-hosting.
