SciHub - The Silent Disruptor of Academic Research

there's no doubt that the controversial site scub has become an integral part of research and finding research papers so this is how you use it the first thing you need is a research paper so you don't start using scub until you reach a bottleneck with what you can get Open Access so for example you would typically head over to something like Google Scholar and you could go in here and sort of search for whatever your research field is I've just put organic photo voltaics and then you end up with this list and you can see

that typically and whatever search engine you're using you've got uh HDML you got PDF PDF this tells you thatth you know the majority of the paper if not all of the paper is available to you so you don't need to use it on something like this but as you're scrolling through you'll probably see some options here that don't have any PDF or HTML down the side can't access it or can you that's where SI Hub comes into things so if I want to look here at this paper I'll click into it and I can see

it's by Wy it's advanced materials which is a good paper and uh I want to look at the organic photov voltex over three decades so I'm reading it I'm reading it and then oh where's the paper maybe I can get the the full text oh no what I have to spend money to access papers well maybe you could use something else something that you're not actually meant to use but everyone does so definitely don't do this because it is very naughty and you'll get a very hard slap on the wrist I'll come to your house

myself and slap you on the wrist if you do what I'm about to show you so what you'll notice is we reach the situations where we've reached the end of the line unless we're willing to spend money or we have access through our institution now one thing I like to do is take the DOI there's always a DOI even before we get to this page I'll go back one there's this DOI and so that's interesting to me and also I want to know the title of the paper so those are the two bits of information

that are important to take over to scub now if I'm going to scub I always access it by just going to Google and typing in si Hub I go to syub and then it's this top one that I always go for you're looking for SI hub. or whatever mirror is working at the time because you see this uh website is so hated that big Publishers with their billions of dollars of profit try to take it down all the time um and the layout Chang ches quite a lot so don't be afraid of uh the site

if it looks dissimilar to how it looked last time don't worry but ultimately you always end up with this it's a SI Hub and then You' got enter your reference and in there you can put things like the DOI and the title so we'll try both to see if it works let's go over here I'm interested in where did it go this one over here and I'm going to look at this DUI so I'm going to copy the link address Bon and I'm going to take it over to scub and I'm going to put it

in Bonk and I'm just going to click open open it's as easy as that and now we let the um servers find that paper for me and here it is I didn't have to spend all that money how much did they bloody want for it $115 for 48 hours access not on my watch thank you very much I've got it for free now you shouldn't be doing this they hate this so much and I'm not sure what the legalities are of it but look so many people are using this 125,1 four people in the last

hour those criminals stealing from those big Publishers so this is what you definitely shouldn't do because you're stealing money directly from the pockets of the CEOs of those companies how dare you scub was actually founded by this absolute hero of the scientific World in my opinion which is Alexandra elbakyan and this person is behind this website there she is waving sometimes she ends up just waving for hours and hours because I love looking at her and her like sort of like well what are you gonna do to stop me kind of face because this has

been going on for so many years and they can't take her down I'm just so so sort of amazed that it continues to exist you can find out more about Alexandra um here's a biography and I'm just amazed that she's been able to keep this going and I think that uh this part you know the communism the current system producing knowledge is a classical example of failed capitalist system so this is all about making sure that intellectual property and knowledge belongs to people and not just people with money so I think this is such an

awesome tool that you definitely shouldn't ever use look she's got photos look these cool photos I haven't seen these before what a champion all right that's it I'm done I'm done um you can use other options which we'll talk about in this video but those are the steps that you can use to actually find research articles for free there are a few other ones that you need to know about this is there another tool you should consider using is this anaz archive.org and it's got this bit sidb the side database because it says here scub

has paused uploading of new papers so if we go back to scub you can see that we've got access to 88 million papers or more than that but with Anna's archive we got 97 million papers so that is a thing where Anna's archive is now sort of like further ahead so if it's a newer paper I would consider going over to Anna's archive to see if you can find it there first rather than scub we've also got this one and by the way this is how you use it you just put the DOI here so

here we are we put the DOI and we click open and we end up with the similar sort of layout as um saub and you get the PDF here as with the other one you can go up here and download it or print it out so these buttons here and then uh yeah this is the information you can get it so that's really good we've also got scub and doi.org other sort of places you could potentially find this paper and then we've got these other options as well we've got the directory of Open Access journals

now this is only useful if the paper you're searching for is in Open Access you should be able to find it anyway without having to use scub and that sort of stuff archive is a place I love to go this is quite often really upto-date really sort of like um Leading Edge research that hasn't quite yet been fully peer reviewed but it's in the process of being peer-reviewed you can read people's comments and say it's really great you'll be surprised what's there um and the last thing is unpay war.com gives you open access to over

50 million free scholarly articles they harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 Publishers and repositories and make it easy to find track and use so you go and you get the extension you click here and then you add it and you end up with this little kind of like lock if you go to a page where there's um like a paper that you may want to download if it's available for you you get this little icon here and then it says unfortunately unay War couldn't find any illegal Open Access version of this article and it's

that legal aspect that really sort of like saub gets around so definitely don't use it because it's illegal but if you do use it that's how you use it perfect if you like this video go check out this one where I talk about my upto-date techniques for using Google Scholar I think you'll love it