There’s a battle going on in academia between the scientific journal publishing companies that have long served as the main platform for peer review and spreading information, and scientists themselves who just want to share and have access to the work of their fellows. arxiv.org launched the first salvo, allowing researchers in physics to self-publish their own papers, and has gained some traction in mathematics and computer science. The Public Library of Science journals focus on biology and medicine and offer peer review services. There are many others, and even the big firms have been forced to recognize the importance of open science publication.

But for many, that’s still not enough. The high prestige journals, and most past works, are stuck behind paywalls. Since 2011, Sci-Hub has taken science publishing open by force, illegally obtaining papers and publishing them in violation of copyright, but at the same time facilitating scientific research and providing researchers in poorer countries with access that their rich-world colleagues take for granted. The big publishing firms naturally fought back in court and won, and with roughly $20 million of damages, drove Sci-Hub’s founder underground.

Making Sci-Hub And A Fugitive

Surprisingly, Sci-Hub is largely the work of a single woman, Alexandra Elbakyan. Elbakyan studied computer science at university in Almaty, Kazakhstan. It was there where she gained a fondness for computer hacking. While working on her final-year research project at the university in 2009, she’d begun to experience frustration with paywalls due to her inability to afford to pay for the papers she wanted to read. Using her hacking skills she found ways around the paywalls for herself and her colleagues.

She graduated in 2009 and went to work on computer security in Moscow for a year. After earning enough money, she then spent a brief time working in Germany in 2010, followed by a short internship at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where she studied “Neuroscience and Consciousness”. She returned to Kazakhstan in 2011.

During this whole time, she saw scientists on web forums looking for research papers and happily got the papers for them. And so in 2011, she created the Sci-Hub website and automated it. The media soon took an interest and it grew to the point where in 2015 there were 42 million downloads, accounting for an estimated 3% of worldwide downloads from science publishers.

It is perhaps no surprise then that in 2015, Dutch publishing company Elsevier brought a US lawsuit against her for unlawfully accessing and distributing copyrighted papers. As a result, a $15 million injunction was granted against her. Sci-Hub’s domain name, sci-hub.org, was suspended but the site resides on Russian servers and so it quickly reappeared under a new domain name. A quick search shows that one of its current working domains is sci-hub.is. More recently, in 2017 another successful lawsuit by the American Chemical Society resulted in a fine of $4.8 million in damages.

She’s currently studying for a masters degree in history of science at an undisclosed location. Undisclosed because she otherwise faces the possibility of ruinous fines, extradition to the US, and imprisonment. She remains at large only because Russia has no extradition agreement with the US.

How Paywalls Affect Hackaday Readers

How many times have you seen a video or a brief mention on social media of some awesome thing which someone’s made and which you immediately want to reproduce, perhaps even improve on, only to find that the details are in an article hidden behind a paywall? Or perhaps it’s just a tech with which you’re intimately familiar and you’re just curious how they solved some tricky aspect of it.

This happened to me recently when MIT announced that they’d succeeded in producing the first sustained ion-propelled flight of a fixed-wing aircraft. This requires a high voltage power supply (PSU) but the high-level video and summary articles don’t go into any detail about the PSU. However, anyone familiar with the problem knows that the mass and the energy-to-mass ratio of the power supply are limiting factors. Sadly, details of the PSU are in the research paper behind Nature’s paywall. Fortunately, Nature publishes some of the figures from the paper, including the PSU’s schematic. It’s not detailed enough for direct replication, but enough to satisfy idle curiosity. If we could point you to the paper, it would make a great Hackaday article, but without the ability to dig in deeper, it would just be a press release.

Paywalls affect us directly as Hackaday writers too. We need to read widely to discover new research to write about, and this just isn’t possible with for-pay journals. Consequently, we cover less fresh science than we would otherwise due to paywalls.

Breaking Down The Walls

There’s clearly a public value to open science. My own daily breakfast is often eaten while reading papers on arxiv, reading the latest papers on astrophysics, computer science, mathematics, engineering, and biology. It’s hardly necessary to convince Hackaday readers that the public does, and must, have an interest in scientific progress.

Meanwhile, on the business side, the cost of publishing on the Internet is drastically lower than in the last century, when coordination among editors and reviewers was slow and the layout and physical distribution of pieces of paper was expensive. Less and less value is added by the old-school publishing houses. Maybe they are relics of the past and will fade away? Or maybe they’ll adapt as the music industry did post-Napster.

In the mean time, however, what Sci-Hub is doing is illegal. We’d like to see a day when freely sharing the results of science isn’t. Perhaps one day the walls will come down.