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For more than a decade, publishing research articles have been a lucrative business for research institutes. As a result, some sites such as Sci-Hub and LibGen have gained popularity because of offering free access to scientific articles obtained through web scraping.

For instance, Sci-Hub has more than 25 million articles, readily accessible by researchers from all over the world. But Sci-Hub and LibGen have come under intense pressure from academic publishers who are not happy with the service.

The academic publishers believe Sci-Hub and LibGen are pirate libraries which are a threat to their multi-billion dollar industry. The publishers have unsuccessfully drafted ways to shut the services down through lawsuits.

But on March 31, there was a victorious breakthrough for the academic publishers after the French Judiciary ordered several of the largest French ISPs to block access to the pirate libraries; LibGen and Sci-Hub.

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According to the Tribunal de Grande Instance (TGI) in Paris, the publishers have given enough evidence that the Sci-Hub and LibGen platforms are wholly or partially committed to the piracy of their articles.

In its ruling, the French court said that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.”

As a result, TGI asked several of the largest French ISPs; Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues Telecom to wholly block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen within a year.

However, this was not the first legal battle facing Sci-Hub. The site had previously lost its US court battles against Elsevier and the American Chemical Society.

Following that legal battle, the site didn’t shut but became even more popular, leaving academic publishers with limited option of having the site blocked.

France is the latest country to join the list of nations who have blocked or targeting to block LibGen and Sci-Hub due to piracy issues. Sweden and Russia have already taken the bold move.

But Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan believes that the blockade will only have some small effect and is determined that researchers will have an alternative route to her site.

In a statement to TorrentFreak, Elbakyan said, “The blockade will have some effect, though not very profound. The people who are using Sci-Hub because they need access to research can still unblock it using VPN, TOR, etc.”

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