At first glance, 23-year-old Alexandra Elbakyan seems like a typical science graduate student. Born and raised in Kazakhstan, Elbakyan spent her childhood reading books about dinosaurs and evolution and later studied neurotechnology at Kazakh National Technical University, where she discovered her knack for computer hacking. In between homework assignments, she wrote blog posts, participated in multiple online feminist groups and designed science-based T-shirts for fun. On the internet, however, Elbakyan is known by the global scientific community under several infamous titles: the modern-day Robin Hood, Science’s Pirate Queen and the fugitive creator of SciHub, the world’s largest pirate website for academic papers (Science, “The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub,” 04.28.2016; The Verge, “Science’s Pirate Queen,” 02.08.2018). Ever since its creation in 2011, Sci-Hub has repeatedly demonstrated its influence as a force to be reckoned with. Now, with more than 50 million scientific papers in its database, the website has exploded with popularity in recent years as countless students, scientists and members of the general public rely on its service to access research papers that are normally locked behind expensive paywalls. According to an analysis of SciHub’s web traffic, more than three million unique IP addresses downloaded a total of 28 million documents between September 2015 and March 2016. While many of these users came from the United States, a significant portion came from poorer countries like Tunisia, Morocco and India (Vox, “Why one woman stole 50 million academic papers — and made them all free to read,” 04.28.2016). Naturally, Sci-Hub and Elbakyan quickly became the academic publishing industry’s most despised enemy. In December 2015, the billionaire publishing giant Elsevier filed a $15 million lawsuit against Sci-Hub for copyright infringement after numerous attempts to shut down the site for good (Nature, “US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub,” 06.22.2017). Yet, despite its status as an illegal enterprise, Sci-Hub resides in a curious ethical grey area in the eyes of the public. Admired by many as a symbol against censorship and corporate greed, SciHub represents a natural response to a fundamental crisis in the modern science era: the war between scientists and the academic publishing industry. To say that the current state of science has flaws is an understatement. Plagued by cutthroat competition and inadequate funding, the world of academia perpetuates a “publish-or-perish” culture that demands researchers to mass-produce scientific papers—or else lose their careers. In short, it serves as the perfect environment for the academic publishing industry to swoop in and capitalize on. Due to the current structure of science research, billion-dollar corporations like Elsevier are almost guaranteed to make large sums of profit, because the market for academic journals is practically bottomless— university libraries, research labs and individual scientists must obey their demands or else risk their livelihood. As a result, academic publishing companies have little to fear when they hike up prices to astronomical heights. According to the Association of Research Libraries, the cost of journals and other subscriptions has skyrocketed by 456 percent since 1986 (The Washington Post, “This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free,” 03.20.2016). Today, the cost of a typical subscription to a well-known scientific publication can range from $2,000 to $35,000 a year (The New York Times, “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” 03.12.2016). If users can’t afford to pay for the subscription plan, then they must face a $40 paywall, behind which are more than 114 million papers, or 75 percent of all articles (Wired, “It’s Gonna Get a Lot Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls,” 12.03.2017).

“Academic publishing is the perfect business model to make a lot of money. You have the producer and consumer as the same person: the researcher,” stated Brian Nosek, a professor at the University of Virginia and Director of the Center for Open Science (Medium, “Can’t Disrupt This: Elsevier and the 25.2 Billion Dollar A Year Academic Publishing Business,” 12.22.2015). It’s little wonder, then, that the academic publishing industry has become incredibly bloated with revenue. According to a 2015 study, a total of five corporations now control 50 percent of all the journal articles that are published, compared to just 20 percent in 1973 (Science Alert, “These Five Companies Control More Than Half of Academic Publishing,” 06.12.2015). Among them, Elsevier remains the world’s largest academic publisher, with control over 16 percent of a global market worth $25.2 billion (Medium; Financial Times, “Elsevier leads the business the internet could not kill,” 11.15.2015). The cruel irony is that academic publishing companies profit largely by selling back the content that researchers gave them for free. In most cases, scientists sign over the copyright and give their tax-funded research to academic journals just to fulfill the “publish-or-perish” quota. The publishers then proceed to sell that same content back to the scientists and the general public for a hefty fee. This effectively means that both the researchers and the general public are double-paying for scientific knowledge: Once to pay for the research and again to read the results (The Washington Post). It doesn’t end there. Once scientists’ research is locked behind a journal’s paywall, they must pay an additional, exorbitant fee if they want the publisher to lift that paywall so that the general public can read it (The Atlantic, “Academics Want You to Read Their Work for Free,” 01.26.2016). How exorbitant? Consider Cognition, one of Elsevier’s 1,800 hybrid open-access journals, as an example. Researchers who submit their papers to Cognition must either publish their paper behind the journal’s paywall or pay a whopping $2,150 article-processing charge to make their paper freely available to the public (The Atlantic). Additionally, academic publishing companies have recently started cracking down on scientists who have been distributing their submitted papers on their own personal websites or research-sharing platforms like ResearchGate and Academia.edu (TechCrunch, “Elsevier’s Research Takedown Notices Fan Out To Startups, Harvard, Individual Academics,” 12.13.2013). So far, companies like Elsevier have issued multiple copyright takedown notices to thousands of researchers who released their work to the public without the company’s permission.

“We can’t allow published journal articles to be freely accessible on a large scale…What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?” asked Elsevier’s Head of Global Corporate Relations Tom Reller (TechCrunch). Unfortunately, science’s current relationship with the academic publishing industry inherently holds back scientific progress. Advancements in research cannot occur without the exchange of ideas, theories and practices. With access to essential scientific information available only to those who can stomach the high costs, science is effectively chained to the corporate whims of companies like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley. If left unchecked, prices will continue to soar, and the end result will be a scientific community that cannot keep up with the distribution costs of its own research. In 2012, Harvard University, one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, announced that it can no longer afford to keep paying for the rising costs of academic journals, which amounted to around $3.5 million per year (The Guardian, “Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices,” 04.24.2012). “The prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care over the past 20 years, so there’s a real scandal there to be exposed. It’s important that Harvard is suffering when it has the largest budget of any academic library in the world,” stated Harvard’s Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication Peter Suber (The New York Times). Now enter Sci-Hub. First created by Elbakyan while attending graduate school, Sci-Hub was an angry response to the large number of research papers locked behind expensive paywalls. Frustrated with the greedy practices of academic publishing companies, Elbakyan wanted her website to help other students and scientists by distributing scientific knowledge that she believes belongs to everyone. When a Sci-Hub user requests a research paper, the site logs into the online portals of university libraries and individual scientists using passwords that were reportedly donated to Elbakyan. The website then makes a copy of the paper for its servers so that it doesn’t have to go through the portal again for that paper. And whenever the academic publishing industry successfully shuts down the website, Elbakyan simply reuploads Sci-Hub onto the Internet using a new overseas domain. Her goal: to collect all of the research papers ever published and make them free for everyone online (Vox). “The UN article says that a person cannot be excluded from participating in culture and scientific progress. I think that paywalls are doing just that, effectively excluding many people,” stated Elbakyan, now 30 years old. “As a devout pirate, I think that copyright should be abolished. At least some corrections to the laws should be made that prohibit prosecutions or injunctions against free distribution of scientific knowledge and educational resources” (Vox).