Science paper piracy site Sci-Hub shares lots of retracted papers

arstechnica.com

Science @mander.xyz

misk @sopuli.xyz

7mo ago

Science paper piracy site Sci-Hub shares lots of retracted papers

arstechnica.com /science/2025/01/science-paper-piracy-site-sci-hub-shares-lots-of-retracted-papers/

10 comments

And?
It's supposed to preserve them, retraction is sometimes used as a form of censorship. It's a feature not a bug.
- Having access to retracted papers is nice but:
  Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn't necessarily have the ability to ensure it's kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.
  
  I think most people would use the publisher's website first and then resort to scihub, because scihub requires a doi or publisher's link to get the paper.
  I don't think this causes much concern, even if so, I believe a good amount of blame should still fall on the publishers and academic systems that encourages gatekeeping knowledge. Especially when these knowledges are generated by public money, then the public should rightfully have access to them.
  
  I wonder how hard would it be to build a extension for a browser that checks the doi of the paper youre looking at on scihub against the live version, to see if there's a retraction/update to the paper, and list the date of the changes. I assume that information wouldn't be behind a paywall.
  The reason for it being via an extension is to reduce load on sci hub, and for the lookup requests to be decentralised and live for the relevant paper
- There's a study on it here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10691350/
  And here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266651822100022X
  An article about a specific retraction of a study on mentorship: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/checkpoints/202101/the-bad-retraction
  The lancet removed (although not formally retracted) an article on covid-19 in Gaza https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/06/02/political-censorship-in-academic-journals-sets-a-dangerous-new-precedent/
  China has allegedly forced at least one person to retract a study about public opinion on it https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/10/author-blames-retraction-on-chinese-censorship/
This completely ignores the part where one does literature search, NCBI, check if it's open access and ONLY THEN, resorts to sci-hub. There's a myriad of opportunities to verify the paper has been retracted. It's a non issue.
Hasn't Sci-Hub been frozen since 2021?
The vast majority of papers that make serious errors and draw the wrong conclusions are never retracted. The sort of people needing to be told to check whether a paper was retracted before citing it are not likely to produce much that's of value even if they do so.

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