Sci-Hub: the Pirate Bay of science. The black sheep of academia. Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions. When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version. Pro Sci-Hub The sci hub links of journals, as some have claimed, may be with their barriers. To put it bluntlythe journals are too expensive- and as a result impede access to the scientific knowledge contained in their databases. This is no issue for students, researchers and professors at big universities in the Western world- affiliates with Harvard or Cambridge will have little difficulty obtaining the information they need. However, when it comes to smaller universities, more remotely based researchers or researchers based outside of Europe and North America, there may not be a budget available to pay the big publishing houses the fees they charge, either per paper or for a yearly, university-wide subscription. This is where Sci-Hub comes in. Sci-Hub makes all of these papers freely accessible to anyone interested- without barriers, without paywalls, without the condition that they come from an elite academic background. Con Sci-Hub Though it appears to be something of a romantic story- the rogue hacker going up against a bigger, stronger, wealthier corporation- not everything is so clear cut. One of the arguments against SciHub, and sites like it, is that it removes the agency from the researchers- they are unable to have any control over their work when it is distributed without their knowledge or permission. It has been speculated by several publishers that this could be - emails sent to sci hub links to obtain their logins without their knowledge. Elbakayan has stated that she has not personally sent any phishing emails. Further, sites like Elsevier are aware of the problem, and both their image and their approach, by offering more and more free programs, and by enabling some research to become public after a set for instance, 12 months. Interestingly, many researchers affiliated to universities, who thus should have proper access, also use Sci-Hubs services. Mission Sci-Hub was created in 2011, in response to the increasingly high cost of accessing scientific research online. Big Publishers Revolt In 2017, Sci-Hub lost two court cases in the United States. The first waswho claimed copyright infringement, and subsequently took control of the SciHub. The other was against the American Chemical Society, which arguably had a bigger impact- to stop linking to the new Sci-Hub domains. Sci-Hub, despite losing the court case last year, remains active, albeit under a different domain name. The servers that power the site are based in Russia, and are therefore unaffected by laws, court cases or lawsuits that may occur in the United States.
