This is a Reddit post, not my own work.

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Rescue Mission Links

• Quick start to rescuing Sci-Hub: Download 1 random torrent (100GB) from the scimag collection and download it. Seed forever.
• Mission Success Tracker, thanks to phillm
• Contribute to open source Sci-Hub projects: freereadorg/awesome-libgen
• Join /r/scihub to stay up to date

A Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science

Elsevier and the USDOJ have declared war against Sci-Hub and open science. The era of Sci-Hub and Alexandra standing alone in this fight must end. We have to take a stand with her.

On May 7th, Sci-Hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan revealed that the FBI has been wiretapping her accounts for over 2 years. This news comes after Twitter silenced the official Sci_Hub twitter account because Indian academics were organizing on it against Elsevier.

Sci-Hub itself is currently frozen and has not downloaded any new articles since December 2020. This rescue mission is focused on seeding the article collection in order to prepare for a potential Sci-Hub shutdown.

Alexandra Elbakyan of Sci-Hub, bookwarrior of Library Genesis, Aaron Swartz, and countless unnamed others have fought to free science from the grips of for-profit publishers. Today, they do it working in hiding, alone, without acknowledgment, in fear of imprisonment, and even now wiretapped by the FBI. They sacrifice everything for one vision: Open Science.

Why do they do it? They do it so that humble scholars on the other side of the planet can practice medicine, create science, fight for democracy, teach, and learn. People like Alexandra Elbakyan would give up their personal freedom for that one goal: to free knowledge. For that, Elsevier Corp (RELX, market cap: 50 billion) wants to silence her, wants to see her in prison, and wants to shut Sci-Hub down.

It’s time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.

Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub

If you have been following the story, then you know that this is not our first rescue mission.

• We protected the Library Genesis book collection
• We unlocked over 5,000 COVID-19 research articles
• We successfully petitioned publishers to unlock their COVID-19 paywalls
• bookwarrior, the founder of Library Genesis, took his library onto the de-centralized and un-censorable IPFS web
• Next? Make Sci-Hub un-censorable too.

Rescue Target

A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this.

Rescue Team

Wave 1: We need 85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total. Download 10 random torrents from the scimag collection, then load the torrents onto your client and seed for as long as you can. The articles are coded by DOI and in zip files.

Wave 2: Reach out to 10 good friends to ask them to grab just 1 random torrent (100GB). That’s 8,500 seeders. We are now the library.

Final Wave: Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future.

Heartfelt thanks to the /r/datahoarder and /r/seedboxes communities, seedbox.io and NFOrce for your support for previous missions and your love for science.