10 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
10 lines
2.1 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Science Hub"
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Science Hub, the "Robin Hood of access to science", provides public access to tens of millions of scientific articles that are protected by intellectual property law and legally available only to academic institutions and individuals that can pay exorbitant subscriptions or per-article prices. Science Hub was created in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakhstan computer science student, who a couple of years earlier developed a script to circumvent paywalls to access articles she and her school could not afford. After repeatedly being asked to share articles, she set up a website that functions as a search engine and a repository of all retrieved articles. Ten years later, it provides access to over 60 million, or around 85% of all articles behind paywalls, serving largely requests coming from low- and middle-income countries.
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Since 2015 Science Hub has been sued by the likes of Elsevier for damages running into tens of millions of dollars. Sci-hub has had a number of its domains revoked over recent years, and recently Twitter also revoked its account, following an injunction from an Indian court initiated again by Elsevier — the largest among the oligopoly of five commercial publishers, famous for the staggering 37% profits it makes from the articles that scientists write, review and edit for free. Losing domains is a given for "shadow libraries", but Elbakyan managed to keep the servers out of reach of the authorities where it was sued. Regardless of the massive support of the scientists and the public, the website has recently again come under a mounting legal pressure, motivating Redditors on r/DataHoarder to organise a rescue mission and create a distributed backup of Sci-hub.
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Elbakyan holds that the Mertonian ideals of science are grounded in the "common ownership of knowledge (i.e. communism)" and that the copyright should be abolished. By choosing not to hide but rather to speak out in the media and in her letters to courts, she has upheld the principle that the public has the right to knowledge and has chosen to act in the tradition of disobedience disrespecting the unjust laws.
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