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Futurism has done an interview over e-mail with Alexandra Elbakyan who founded Sci-Hub ten years ago. Over that time, it has become both widely used and well-stocked, having picked up momentum in 2016. There are now over 87 million research articles in its database, though not evenly distributed over academic disciplines.
As of September, Sci-Hub has officially existed for 10 years — a milestone that came as a lawsuit to determine if the website infringed on copyright laws sits in India’s Delhi High Court. Just a few months prior, Elbakyan tweeted that she was notified of a request from the FBI to access her data from Apple. And before that, the major academic publisher Elsevier was awarded $15 million in damages after the Department of Justice ruled that Sci-Hub broke copyright law in the U.S.
But that ruling can’t seem to touch Sci-Hub. And Elbakyan remains absolutely unrepentant. She advocates for a future in which scientific knowledge is shared freely, and she’s confident that it’s coming.
Futurism caught up with Elbakyan to hear what’s next. Over email, she explained her vision for the site’s future, her thoughts on copyright law, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The article goes on to report that she had expected copyright law to be corrected long before so much time had passed. In many ways Sci-Hub can be seen as a form of push back against the academic publishing houses which are infamous for abusive practices and pricing. The cost of research, writing, editing, peer-review, and more are all borne by the researchers and their institutions with little beyond distribution borne by the publisher. The big publishing houses then sell access back to the same researchers and institutions at rates that a small and decreasing number can afford.
Previously:
(2021) Large Publishers Aim to Own the Entire Academic Research Publishing Stack
(2021) Sci-Hub Pledges Open Source & AI Alongside Crypto Donation Drive
(2018) Swedish ISP Punishes Elsevier for Forcing It to Block Sci-Hub by Also Blocking Elsevier
(2018) Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful
(2017) Sci-Hub Bounces from TLD to TLD
(2015) Elsevier Cracks Down on "Pirate" Science Search Engines
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday October 11 2021, @10:37PM (3 children)
I don't disagree with the principle. I do disagree with the method. Research already paid for by public funds should be available for free or at nominal cost to the public. Nominal cost isn't $50 for that particular article. Unless that sucker is 500 pages long and you want someone to make a print copy for you. At least the public that paid, I wouldn't necessarily expect scientific documents created with UK funds to necessarily be available for a US citizen for free and vice versa.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:55AM (2 children)
And while you're waiting for sound principles to change a goddamn thing about a broken system, she's doing "the wrong thing" in a way that does so much good for the world.
The world is full of choices where you must choose between the right thing the wrong way or the wrong thing the right way, and I believe it's a tragedy how often the latter wins.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:40PM (1 child)
Things take time, even revolutions. The problem is that Universities/Schools don't have Open Access policies. Well, at least, not enough of them do. In the event that those who are requiring the publish or perish model, would also implement an Open Access only policy. The problem would resolve itself. It might cause some trouble for the publishers (Springer/Elsevier/etc.), though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday October 12 2021, @03:01PM
The problem with this being that pay-to-publish has traditionally been viewed as a kind of academic vanity press with very low standards, as there is a perverse incentive to publish as much trash as possible versus rejecting papers with quality problems.
Certainly getting published in a big name open access journal like Plos still looks good on a CV, but I myself have seen plenty that will happily publish "Ghosts are real actually, look at this photo" alongside a desperate optics postdoc's real work while trying to make tenure.