Accessing google scholar under extreme internet censorship: a legal avenue

Abstract

Internet censorship is pervasive across the world. However, in some countries like China, even legal, nonpolitical services (e.g., Google Scholar) are incidentally blocked by extreme censorship machinery. Therefore, properly accessing legal Internet services under extreme censorship becomes a critical problem. In this paper, we conduct a case study on how scholars from a major university of China access Google Scholar through a variety of middleware. We characterize the common solutions (including VPN, Tor, and Shadowsocks) by measuring and analyzing their performance, overhead, and robustness to censorship. Guided by the study, we deploy a novel solution (called ScholarCloud) to help Chinese scholars access Google Scholar with high performance, ease of use, and low overhead. This work provides an insider's view of China's Internet censorship and offers a legal avenue for coexistence with censorship.