Academic publisher Elsevier has stepped up the battle against "Pirate Bay for scientists" Sci-Hub, succeeding in getting a Chinese domain name registrar to suspend one of the website's most popular domain names.

Sci-Hub, which boasts 48 million peer-reviewed academic papers that can be downloaded for free, is the brainchild of Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who is now based in Russia. Her focus is on making all information free, breaking the monopoly of academic publishers and copyright holders, who often make it difficult for academics to access even their own work.

Most research papers are published in journals that restrict access to paid subscribers, and institutions tend to pay for access to different journals or libraries of journals depending on what they need. There's always a chance that a scientist might need a paper published in a journal that he or she is not subscribed to.

Elsevier brought a copyright lawsuit against Sci-Hub in 2015, claiming that the website was costing it between $75,000 and $150,000 in revenue due to the piracy, but even though a New York district court found in Elsevier's favour and placed a temporary injunction against Sci-Hub in the US, as well as suspending access to the website's main Sci-Hub.org domain, Elbakyan has no intention of giving up.

Two domain names down, many more to go

As Elbakyan does not live in the US, is not a US citizen and has no assets in the country, not much can really be done to stop her. As such, following the injunction, she simply got a new domain name – Sci-Hub.io – and moved the website's servers onto the Dark Web – a section of the internet not discoverable by conventional means, such as through Google or other search engines or by directly entering a website URL.

Press coverage about Sci-Hub in February assured that plenty of scientists, researchers, academics and students are aware of the Sci-Hub.io domain name, so Elsevier is taking advantage of the fact that the injunction gives it the right to demand that domain name registrars suspend Sci-Hub's domain names.

Elbakyan confirmed to Torrent Freak that Chinese registrar Now.cn has sent her a notice referring to a complaint from Elsevier, and that the Sci-Hub.io domain name is no longer resolving. It is listed as "reserved", according to the latest information available on WHOIS.

Of course, Sci-Hub has multiple domain names, similar to Pirate Bay's hydra approach, and Sci-Hub fans can still access the website on the domains Sci-Hub.bz, Sci-Hub.cc, the IP address 31.184.194.81 or its .onion domain on the Tor anonymity network.

How does Sci-hub work and who's using it?

Recently, Elbakyan shared Sci-Hub server log data for the period between September 2015 to February 2016 with the journal Science, who analysed it to get a clear picture of exactly who is using the website. Out of the 28 million download requests, the data shows that researchers from all over the world were searching for papers pertaining to most scientific disciplines, and that the website was most popular in Iran, China, India, Russia, US, Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia, Indonesia and Morocco.

Papers owned by Elsevier were downloaded the most, making up 32% of the 28 million download requests received, followed by Springer (9%), IEEE (8%), American Chemical Society (6%), Wiley Blackwell (5%) and Nature Publishing Group (4%). JSTOR papers (which were downloaded by internet pioneer Aaron Swartz in 2011) surprisingly only contributed to 1.2% of the download requests.

Since various universities in the world have paid subscriber access to different premium journal services, the website is able to automatically trawl through different university proxies to trick the relevant journal's website into believing that the user accessing the academic paper has the relevant credentials, similar to a paying customer.

Once the paper is unlocked, Sci-Hub then downloads the paper to its database and even looks for other missing papers on similar topics to download, so that all the researcher has to do is initiate a search, and the paper will come up, ready to be downloaded for nothing.

Some academic publishers have alleged that the only way Sci-Hub is able to access the premium journal services is because Elbakyan sent out phishing emails to trick researchers into giving up their login credentials, but Elbakyan told Science that all the logins have been donated voluntarily to Sci-Hub by academics.