Anyone who cares about research surviving beyond the commercial life of a journal supports piracy full stop. It is the only means of making that happen.
@jer_gib odd assumption that someone posting about scholarly archiving hasn't heard about CLOCKSS, but yeah definitely addressed in the thing that i was referring to here: https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/id/16288/ by MPE, who is one of the few people who actually does think deeply about pirate archives in this space. the fragility of legal archives like CLOCKSS doesn't come from a technological weak point (though LOCKSS is ancient and inefficient), but from the intrinsic limitations of intellectual property law that bind them.
@UlrikeHahn@jonny@tdverstynen Sci-Hub/LibGen scrape journals using access credentials to get pdfs, and add more when a document is searched for but not found in it's database. Peer-to-peer is just giving remote access to your documents or whichever folder to anyone with a program like Soulseek or whatever people use nowadays. Neither of these are affected by citation count, and I've found papers that have 0 cites according to goog scholar
"as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.1% of articles published in toll access journals" 10.7554/eLife.32822
It's missing some articles but way less than the amount without citations
@axoaxonic@UlrikeHahn yes and re: the comment below about 'not even the authors have a copy, so why would pirates' - there's an interesting analogy to music here, where a lot of musicians also don't own their masters or have copies of them, but the pirates often do. pirates are obsessive archivalists where completionism often has nothing to do with popularity/etc.
@jonny yeah so honestly we almost think anarchist collectives are, like, the ideal form of archival. like it's good that there are "proper" institutions for it too, but they always have their hands tied by one power structure or another.
but sci-hub has like at best 20% of the stuff we go looking for, so it is pretty clear they could use more resources and cannot carry this weight on their own
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