and American Chemical Society, claiming copyright infringement.
#Is sci hub extension safe free#
The Delhi High Court on Thursday restrained Sci Hub and Libgen, two online repositories providing free access to paywalled research, from uploading, publishing or making available any article till January 6 on a plea by three global academic publishers, Elsevier Ltd., Wiley India Pvt. This entry was posted in Director's Reflections by Donna. eJournals) they need so that we can optimize the budgetary dollars available to us and maximize our ability to deliver the “right” content to our researchers, whenever possible. We also want to know, what information resources (e.g. We do our best to analyze STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) journals to determine which ones our researchers publish in, cite, and require in order stay on top of their area of expertise.įor now, we hope that our researchers will resist the urge to use Sci-Hub or any other third-party aggregator of this nature and instead choose to seek support from the library to better understand what resources are available to them. A large portion of the MSK Library’s annual budget is used to legally purchase legitimate access to the electronic resources that support the medical and research activities of the institution. As the controversies surrounding Sci-Hub continue to play out, only time will tell whether or not this website will continue to grow or get shutdown.įrom a librarian’s viewpoint, Sci-Hub usage brings up too many concerns, foremost of which is copyright infringement. Some researchers claim that it is more convenient to access Sci-Hub to get an article rather than to try and locate the paper via their library website. If you want to read a great piece about Sci-Hub and academic identity theft, you’ll find a recent blog post from The Scholarly Kitchen() most interesting.īased on an article published in Science (29 April 2016), the United States is the fifth largest downloader of papers from Sci-Hub, after Russia. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly contrary to typical I/S security policies within organizations – to not share with or reveal your personal login credentials to anyone! Although some users probably have donated their credentials, I doubt that this is the sole method used by Sci-Hub to amass the number of papers they currently have. From reading numerous articles about Sci-Hub, according to them, researchers are “donating” their personal login credentials to facilitate access and make scholarly articles freely available. Sci-Hub uses an individual’s personal login credentials (username/password) in order to access the protected servers where copyrighted articles are stored, and most of these logins come from academic institutional libraries.
#Is sci hub extension safe full#
So the question worth asking is – How are these copyright-protected full text papers obtained and made available on Sci-Hub? The website she developed now hosts 50 million (and counting) pirated scholarly research papers that can be accessed by all researchers (actually by anyone with an Internet connection)! While one can discover “open access” papers on this website, many, if not most of the papers are still under copyright and therefore behind pay walls. Sci-Hub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist, whose intent is/was to remove barriers that would impede progress in science. This was the incentive I needed to share some information about Sci-Hub and provide a librarian’s viewpoint on this controversial website. A tweet from one of our researchers was recently brought to my attention – it was regarding Sci-Hub and accessing full text articles.