A saving grace for students across the world, Alexandra Elbakyan’s portal, Sci-Hub, pools millions of expensive academic papers published in online journals for free. At the center of a potentially multi-billion dollar court battle with US courts, she has vowed to continue her work.

“There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge, I believe,” she told RT in an email interview, echoing her earlier reference to Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: that “everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

Whether you’re a young Master’s student, an ambitious postdoctoral researcher or a seasoned professor, you rely on other people’s research to supplement your own as a lifeline. But it has become so that while the scientists writing the papers are paid next to nothing, they are essentially faced with a middleman in the form of money-hoarding online publishers – academic hubs where all that research resides, sometimes costing $30 per paper to download. Now, imagine having to download at least 10-20 such papers – and that is for a scarcely popular topic. Researchers may have to go through dozens for other ones.

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Elbakyan, a Russian neuroscientist from Kazakhstan, was among the many victims of this academic capitalist monopoly on knowledge. Writing her thesis on the lesser-researched areas of biometric scanning for consumer electronics, she was faced with $300 at the very least for papers she would probably never again have to read.

“For me, even the purchase of one such article would be a financial setback,” Alexandra told RT in an email. “So I had to go about acquiring all the articles by pirate means.”

A year or two after 2009, when Alexandra took part in a large online forum on molecular biology, she was introduced to Fulltext – a hub where researchers could file requests for academic papers to help with research. Already an expert coder, it did not take Alexandra long to write her own, improved script a year later.

Called Sci-Hub, it circumvents university server security using access keys provided by sympathetic researchers with online resource access at those universities. Every time there was a search, Sci-Hub would locate the work, and it was on its servers forever.

Now the portal boasts close to 50 million papers and growing. If before, it was a mere search and extraction tool, it now automatically searches for missing articles on important topics, and downloads them to its database. “In the end the system got to its feet and started self-adding up to a million articles each month,” Alexandra says.

Akin to an anonymizer website, it looks for the link and, using university proxies, sends it back to the student unlocked. “That the original anonymizer codes were open-source was a huge blessing. But university proxies function slightly differently, so I had to alter the source code,” Alexandra says.

“The entire development, including testing, took only about three days,” she says. “I was surprised myself that the thing actually worked and people were using it… the ‘thank you’ button was clicked 316 times as soon as the service was announced.” Other scientists on the microbiology forum became the site’s first users.

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There were one or two other portals dealing with such requests, (Library Genesis, or Lib-Gen, remains the only one similar to Sci-Hub), but with only 100 requests per day at the start, Sci-Hub now gets anywhere from one to several thousand. Having undergone some minor and major rewrites over the four years, Alexandra’s website really is the best viable alternative to paid sources today.

Fighting the establishment

Unsurprisingly, this quickly increased its capacity for interfering with huge payoffs enjoyed by science publishers – sources that basically make scientists buy back their work.

This infamy led to popular scientific publisher Elsevier filing a lawsuit, which was successful late last year in getting a temporary injunction against Sci-Hub’s activities. This was after in 2012, a large community of scientists boycotted it; so much so that even Harvard University complained it didn’t have enough funds to keep paying Elsevier.

The publisher estimated its losses to be in the area of $75,000-150,000, court records stated. It now wants this figure paid out for each and every pirated article. There are hundreds of thousands. Its reasoning is that monetizing access to academic knowledge helps bring in funding for academic research. But Elbakyan and others say most study authors don’t actually get paid for published work – and that is why Sci-Hub is so different from some illegal music or movie download service.

Currently, Elbakayn says she’s been served with a temporary injunction. It could still go either way for Sci-Hub, but it is unlikely that a US court would rule in favor of free information, she believes.

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Either way, American courts can’t really cause much more damage to Sci-Hub than ruling in Elsevier’s favor. Firstly, because Sci-Hub servers are outside the US, in Russia. The New York district court can’t prosecute Elbakyan, because she has no US assets; secondly, because an ever-growing body of scientists actually support the initiative and increasingly turn against the capitalizing publishers; and third – because even if someone tried to target Sci-Hub, they couldn’t: its servers have moved to the dark net– that concealed corner of the internet normally reserved for buying drugs, ordering hits on people or trading in child pornography.

“Even if legal access to [Sci-Hub] is blocked, the user can still get in through the TOR network and immediately gain access to all the articles. However, we intent to fight for free access to all information. After all, using TOR still provides obstacles. And I believe there should be no obstacles on the way to scientific knowledge.”

After Elsevier’s court victory last year, many scientists who had already previously boycotted the publisher wrote an open letter in support of Sci-Hub and the Netherlands-based Library Genesis.

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“There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37 percent profit margin stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for the adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer,” it writes.

The scientists called Elsevier’s lawsuit “a big blow” and described how online forums, IRC channels and chatrooms “have been filled with [academics’] distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications.”

But Elbakyan herself refuses to give up, despite the mounting risks of picking a fight with the establishment. And she says that, as long as such overwhelming support from fellow scientists continues, her idea has a fighting chance. It already appears to be changing the entire approach to knowledge-gathering and challenging the capitalistic greed that seeks to privatize it.