Open Source Academic Research Hub Resurfaces on the Dark Web
March 11, 2016
Academics are no strangers to the shadowy corners of the Dark Web. In fact, as the The Research Pirates of the Dark Web published by The Atlantic reports, one university student in Kazakhstan populated the Dark Web with free access to academic research after her website, Sci-Hub was shut down in accordance with a legal case brought to court by the publisher Elsevier. Sci-Hub has existed under a few different domain names on the web since then, continuing its service of opening the floodgates to release paywalled papers for free. The article tells us,
“Soon, the service popped up again under a different domain. But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.”
The open source philosophy continues to emerge in various sectors: technology, academia, and beyond. And while the Dark Web appears to be a primed for open source proponents to prosper, it will be interesting to see what takes shape. As the article points out, other avenues exist; scholars may make public requests for paywalled research via Twitter and using the hashtag #icanhazpdf.
Megan Feil, March 11, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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Open Source Academic Research Hub Resurfaces on the Dark Web : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search