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Sourabh

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Free Access to Journal Articles
« on: February 24, 2016, 03:08:38 AM »
Guys,

In case you do not know, you can access scientific articles without paywall on www. sci-hub.io
This website is designed by a Russian scientist to protest against exorbitant prices charged by many publishers.

Neven

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #1 on: February 24, 2016, 09:16:13 AM »
Thanks, Sourabh. I did know about this, but forgot to bookmark the page. Can anything be found there (I ask especially in relation to cryospheric stuff).
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Sourabh

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #2 on: February 24, 2016, 10:08:41 AM »
Neven,

I am not sure about access to specific websites or data related to CT or Arctic ice through this website. I doubt if you could do that as the website is designed mainly to make scientific article accessible free of charge.

So far, I have been able to access almost all articles from Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Nature etc free of cost. So, if you need any peer-reviewed articles published in popular journals, you can immediately get pdf of that article through this website.

A-Team

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #3 on: November 25, 2017, 09:39:31 PM »
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.io
https://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.
« Last Edit: January 05, 2018, 11:28:05 PM by A-Team »

Neven

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #4 on: November 25, 2017, 10:26:05 PM »
Thanks for the info, A-Team.
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Martin Gisser

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2017, 10:50:07 PM »
Another site, dunno relation, advertises only 52 million articles: http://booksc.org/
For scientific books: http://b-ok.org/
Aggregator of sci-hub(s), booksc and possibly more: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

A-Team

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #6 on: November 26, 2017, 12:32:19 AM »
Thx for Genesis Library link above, I haven't used it but intended to mention it. Google books gives some idea, then cuts you off just when it gets interesting.

Also meant to mention that sci-hub does very well indeed on serving "the latest", even articles accepted but not yet typeset. Those of course are the very top priority for working scientists.

The academic paper linked above explains the past and present overlap between the two organizations. GenLib is run by anonymous actors. The two repositories are now independent and going off in somewhat different directions (books vs journals).

In the US, start-up principals would not share resources but rather go all out to monetize archives and crush adversaries with below-market fees using cash burn underwritten by private equity (like a cab company), then raise article fees to slightly less than what journals charge.

Here, the priority seems to be encouraging multiple mirrors and directions, though I don't know that it's an available download (however the list of available doi's is). She says it takes 25 kg of hard drives to store, more than I would want to carry around with a smartphone.

Alexandra Elbakyan is living proof that one person can take on the system and make a real difference, she can count me as a devoted fanboy.

What fascinates me is that she seems completely relaxed, comfortable with the disruption of a capitalistic enterprise business model, and fully enjoying each day (though now at an undisclosed location) despite losing various uncontested court hearings, most recently to one of the all-time bad actors, the 'non-profit' American Chemical Society. (The model there is selling pdfs to industry, not to academics; the difference is gouging pensioner shareholders vs gouging the general public that funds grants; both rely on OPM for those $39 pdfs).



That's an Armenian name, Kazakhstan residency. She made a curious comment recently about Moscow authorities, saying it was very auspicious that they had not been in contact. Frankly, the way relations are going with NATO et al, a crackdown cannot be expected any time soon, any more than the extradition of Snowden. Of course the archives and their keys are physically dispersed all over the global internet by now, no putting toothpaste back in the tube.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 02:21:46 AM by A-Team »

TerryM

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #7 on: November 26, 2017, 12:53:21 AM »
Thanks so much - the internet may yet live up to it's possibilities!
The democratization of knowledge.

Terry

Martin Gisser

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #8 on: November 26, 2017, 01:37:17 AM »
Yes, wonders of the internets. Now you can do research almost everywhere on the planet. Changed my life: Now I'm writing a math book... Wouldn't have thought to one day revisit/reanimate the stuff I left behind late last century in the grey disinspiring walls of my university...

Yet sometimes I still come across an article in some journal you can access only from inside a few university networks. Or, very old stuff which isn't even digitized.

A-Team

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #9 on: November 26, 2017, 02:37:10 AM »
Next up: streamed and archived meeting talks like AGU2107 and EGU2017. Posting abstracts of poster sessions but not the posters? Talks without their powerpoints? Does uploading a youTube present technological difficulties? Do 14,500 people need to fly to climate conferences in Vienna and New Orleans?

Meetings are a big big business. People love junkets to exotic locales that take them away from the workplace. Talks fly by because scientists don't have any interest in non-selective sharing of work in progress when the business model is anti-social (competition for solo glory), even for medical and climate research.

Quote
The EGU General Assembly 2017 was again a great success with 4,849 oral, 11,312 poster, and 1,238 PICO presentations. 649 unique scientific sessions together with 88 short courses and 322 side events created an interesting program. At the conference 14,496 scientists from 107 countries participated, of which 53% were under the age of 35 years, 15,000 copies of EGU Today distributed, keen media presence and reporting, and thousands of visits to the webstreams as well as to the EGU blog GeoLog.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 05:15:51 PM by A-Team »

A-Team

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #10 on: November 26, 2017, 05:36:04 PM »
Quote
Thanks for the info
Jim Hunt reported elsewhere on a very interesting method for web site archival capture that synergizes with screenshots, tinyurl, sci-hub and other full access options.

Just go to http://archive.is/ and paste in the url. It will capture the web page, all its imagery and formatting at the time you click submit and save it online forever with a tinyurl-type short link. Should the original web page later be taken down, you still have it. As does anyone you shared the link with.

The image below just shows a capture of the most recent freeze season forum page which has many screens worth of text and graphics.

I tested it on an open source doi https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link/10.1002/2017GL075609 and got http://archive.is/wevFW in response which was a 504 Gateway Time-out though it did catch some of the intermediate content. So there's maybe an issue with pdfs or maybe one with what sci-hub currently allows. However if you click on the Russian text box сохранить статью with the download arrow, it seems that it will still retrieve the pdf even if sci-hub is down. Hmmm.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 09:18:56 PM by A-Team »

A-Team

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #11 on: November 26, 2017, 08:19:57 PM »
The other great tool out there is NCBI's PubMed, which today has 27 million searchable abstracts, mostly but not entirely life science journals and books. These sometimes link to free full text at PubMed Central, PlosOne or publisher web sites.

For the Arctic, topics such as under-ice algal blooms, methane-releasing and -consuming organisms, walruses, polar bears, food chain toxins and so on will have thorough coverage. These and a lot more will show up if 'pubmed' is the first term in a conventional google search.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=polar 64621 abstracts
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=arctic 14769 abstracts
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=arctic+algae 152 abstracts
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Arctic+sea+ice 1024 abstracts 411 free full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=methane 28804 abstracts
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=arctic+methane 203 abstracts
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=walrus 275 abstracts

However there's better control, consistency and filtering at Pubmed itself. For example, checkboxes allow easy subsetting to the most interesting articles, sorted say by date or author. Output can be restricted to just titles, just articles with free full text, or just PMID's which are unique identifiers like doi's.

If those PMID are listed with comma separators, a single url can be constructed (and shared) that will open say all 56 abstracts containing Arctic+ice+algae in a single tab. If not rendered invisible as an html link on highlighted text, it can be shortened to say https://tinyurl.com/y78vbpun.

If you need to shorten numerous long urls at one step, http://bulktinyurlgenerator.com/ can help, even if your IP server is blocked and needs a proxy bypass.

The first site below will convert a string of PMID to a column of doi; the second will take a single PMID and jump through the doi to CrossRef to the abstract on the publisher's site:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/pmctopmid/
http://watcut.uwaterloo.ca/tools/pmid2doi

Pubmed does quite well finding forum-applicable cryosphere abstracts outside of the life sciences, check this one out: https://tinyurl.com/y79s4nvy . However for 'Shakova N', only 5 abstracts show up whereas she has many more papers which Google Scholar would be better at finding.

Search for 'Semiletov I' has even more but only 8 of them surface. Box JE again has only a handful of the 221 items listed at his ResearchGate page. It appears though that PubMed has rapidly been adding journals since 2010 so these numbers may improve.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason_Box/contributions 221
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Natalia_Shakhova4/contributions 84
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Igor_Semiletov/contributions 331

In terms of citations of published papers by others, the current rankings are
Team, A   6,489
Box, JE   6,123
Semiletov, I   4,443
Shakhova, N   1,544
« Last Edit: November 26, 2017, 09:37:52 PM by A-Team »

Hefaistos

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Re: Free Access to Journal Articles
« Reply #12 on: June 03, 2020, 11:52:39 PM »
Currently working:

https://sci-hub.tw

ht to Nanning