Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world's best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It's time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

This, of course, describes the tale of the late Aaron Swartz. His situation captured the Internet’s collective attention as the data crusader attacked research paywalls. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he tragically committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.

But suddenly in 2016, the tale has new life. The Washington Post decries it as academic research's Napster moment, and it all stems from a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan (who's living in Russia). Just as Swartz did, this hacker is freeing tens of millions of research articles from paywalls, metaphorically hoisting a middle finger to the academic publishing industry, which, by the way, has again reacted with labels like "hacker" and "criminal."

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones." Search for it, download, and you're done. It's that easy.

"The more known the publisher is, the more likely Sci-Hub will work," she told Ars via e-mail. A message to her site's users says it all: "SCI-HUB...to remove all barriers in the way of science."

"Guerilla Open Access Manifesto"

Swartz found himself in the crosshairs of criminal hacking charges in a US court of law for being caught liberating the JSTOR research database. Elbakyan, by contrast, finds herself entwined in a US copyright and hacking lawsuit (PDF) brought by one of the world's leading scientific publishers, New York-based Elsevier. That's the same publisher Swartz named in his 2008 "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto," a brief paper extolling the virtues of illegally freeing scientific research stuck behind the paywall. Elbakyan says Swartz was not a direct source of inspiration for Sci-Hub, but she's happy to note the two share the same goal of open access to science literature.

"I also found the idea of open access in science very inspiring, and I even dreamed of start(ing) my own open access journal," she said. "That was a year before I created Sci-Hub. And it was not related to Aaron, [but if Swartz were alive], who knows—perhaps he would became one of my good friends and collaborators? His writing on open access is good."

The civil hacking and copyright infringement case against Elbakyan has been going on for months. To the consternation of Elsevier's attorneys, she altered the site's URL from sci-hub.org to sci-hub.io and changed others because of a court order blocking the .org domain. Elbakyan rarely even bothered to respond in court to the ongoing New York federal lawsuit—after all, she lives overseas and isn't worried about US law. For now, she said she'd only actively participate in the lawsuit if one condition was met: "If there will be lawyers who are interested in the case for the sake of idea, not money."

For Elbakyan, that's what this is all about—ideas. In her own words, here's why she built Sci-Hub in 2011:

I started the website because it was a great demand for such service in research community. In 2011, I was an active participant in various online communities for scientists (i.e. forums, the technology preceding social networks and still surviving to the present day). What all students and researchers were doing there is helping each other to download literature behind paywalls. I became interested and very involved. Two years before, I already had to pirated many paywalled papers while working on my final university project (which was dedicated to brain-machine interfaces). So I knew well how to do this and had necessary tools. After sending tens or hundreds of research papers manually, I wanted to develop a script that will automate my work. That's how Sci-Hub started. The first users of the script were members of the online forum about molecular biology. At first, there was no goal to make all knowledge free. The script was simply intended to make the life of researcher easier, i.e. to make the process of unlocking papers more fast and convenient. But this turned out to be such an important improvement it changed the way research was accessed in our community. After some time, everyone was using Sci-Hub.

Publishers of academic research made a combined $10 billion last year, much of it funded by university research libraries. Subscription fees range from the thousands for single titles to millions for bundled packages. Annual profits hover around 30 percent. Currently, Elbakyan's site freely doles out tens of thousands of journal articles per day to millions of annual visitors.

Elsevier says it's not the bad guy. It boasts all sorts of free-access programs for its literature, from allowing authors to share a link of the work for 50 days to providing free access to journalists. The organization also grants its university subscribers the option to allow free, walk-in access. Elsevier even comports with a rule requiring National Institutes of Health-funded research to be publicly available no later than 12 months after final publication. The company said it published some 20,000 open access articles last year that were not behind a paywall. Overall, it published 400,000 manuscripts in 2,500 journals via 700,000 peer reviewers.

Listing image by Flickr user: Jessica Lucia