Cloudflare has stopped servicing Sci-Hub domain names.

Although the Sci-Hub pirate service is used by thousands of scientists and researchers around the world, the decision of the American court has irreversible effect. Rights holders are doing everything possible to erase the service from the face of the earth, or at least as much as possible to make access to it more difficult.

Obeying the legitimate demand of the American Chemical Society, the Cloudflare CDN provider was forced to stop servicing several domain names owned by Sci-Hub. Although in the past he had challenged such requests, but now he conceded without visible protests.

In May 2017, Elsevier, one of the largest scientific publishers, imposed a $ 15 million fine on Sci-Hub and activist and neurobiologist Alexander Elbakyan, and in November 2017, the American Chemical Society (AXO) won a lawsuit of $ 4.6 million (the amount is calculated as the number of downloads of 32 scientific works, multiplied by the price of scientific journals in which they were published).

It is clear that Elbakyan will not pay any fines, but the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia provided for other penalties. The toughest of them - the court agreed with the request of the AHO to impose an order on third parties. Now any search engines, hosters, providers, domain name registrars are required by AXO to block the Sci-Hub site. Hosters can not provide hosting Sci-Hub, search engines are forbidden to put links to Sci-Hub, and Internet providers are obliged to block access to the site, if the AXO requires this.

Shortly after the court verdict, the hunt began. Several Sci-Hub mirrors became unavailable, because domain registrars submitted to a court decision and divided some domains . In particular, three domains sci-hub.io, sci-hub.cc and sci-hub.ac have ceased to work. They were transferred to the “serverhold” status, which often means intervention by the regulatory authorities. Such status is obtained by domains where copyright infringement is detected.



Of course, Sci-Hub did not cease to exist, and began to use other domains. From November 2017, the scientific community switched to the use of the domain Sci-Hub.bz , where the service remained available. The site on the Tor network and other mirrors still worked.

In addition, on the VK page and on Twitter, Alexandra Elbakyan advised you to specify the IP addresses of servers 80.82.77.83 or 80.82.77.84 to circumvent the problem with domain names. These addresses are still working.

On February 3, 2018, on the VC page, Alexandra Elbakyan shared unpleasant news that Sci-Hub was being kicked out of the Cloudflare. In a letter to Sci-Hub, Cloudflare reports that it received a court order ( pdf ) and is forced to stop servicing Sci-Hub websites. Within 24 hours, Cloudflare removed the domains sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv and sci-hub.tw from their reputable DNS servers.



A court ruling states that it was sent by the very American Chemical Society.

“Bad [news] - they kick us out of Cloudflare,” Alexandra wrote. - This is “a geographically distributed network infrastructure that allows you to optimize the delivery and distribution of content to end users on the Internet.” Yesterday they received a ruling from an American court to stop serving us. I attach the resolution. This is not a critical thing, but there may be a small, not very noticeable pause in the work. ”

The pause was really small. Now all the domains in the system and function normally.

Today, Sci-Hub is one of the most popular sites in the scientific community. Millions of visitors per month get access to original scientific publications - just enter the DOI-identifier. The base Sci-Hub more than 60 million scientific articles. For many scientists from countries where access to the scientific press is limited, this is the only opportunity to read authentic scientific articles. Other independent researchers are simply not rich enough - they can not lay out a few thousand dollars to read articles on their research topic.

Working mirrors of Sci-Hub as of 06.02.2018:

http://sci-hub.la
http://sci-hub.tv
http://sci-hub.tw
http://sci-hub.hk
http://sci-hub.mn
http://sci-hub.name
http://80.82.77.84
http://80.82.77.83