For a long time, access to the articles and results of scientific research – which are often written in a way that is understandable by non-experts who are reasonably intelligent and have some basic knowledge – wasn’t possible for the overwhelming majority of the population. Accessing just one scientific article about a study from an academic journal costs an outrageous more than $30 on average. Despite millions of scientific articles originally written decades ago being digitized and available on the Internet, paying such fees was required to access them. There was minimal progress, with a small set of articles being published for free under “open access”. Students often needed to buy articles to research and add references for their papers, or their research was limited, if the university didn’t have deals with the specific publishers which allowed free viewing to students. Scientists often wanted their articles to be available for free, but due to restrictive publishers, were forced to put them up commercially. If scientists wanted their article to be accessible to everyone for free, publishers forced them to pay massive fees for that — a major publisher is charging $2000. Scientists saw little, or none of the money which the publishers were earning.

But this era is now over. Because one person couldn’t wait for the extremely slow deployal of “open access” in capitalism. That person is Alexandra Elbakyan, who set up a Web site called Sci-Hub where, through various tricks, over 50 million scientific articles are now available for free, by anyone, with a single click. Elbakyan was responsible for the concept and implementation, but getting to such a massive number of articles required help from various people. In one stroke, this backwards era in science was immediately abolished. She was inspired by communist ideals and branded Sci-Hub “communism for science”. We agree and thank Elbakyan. In communist society, science results would be available for free. But this has now been achieved in the now due this admirable action! Elbakyan has been struggling against the Elsevier corporation, which makes massive profits off restricting access to science and is now persecuting her. But while capitalist businesses hate it, the fact is that slowly but surely, the situation is progressing to a point where everyone is using Sci-Hub. The scientific and medical community is tired of having to buy articles in order to use them in research. There’s now a tacit understanding that basically any scholar or specialist could be using it, and nobody cares or sees it as wrong, other than a few backwards people. Over 60 major research institutions in Germany are now boycotting Elsevier, refusing to pay them. And more than 16,000 scientists are protesting and/or boycotting it.

Elbakyan: There are two reasons I became inspired by open access. The first one is practical, because I myself did not have access to research papers I need. And the second is more philosophical. I like the idea of communism, and the idea that knowledge should be common and not intellectual property is very relevant. […] I think that copyright should be abolished. […] I also got lots of negative feedback that concerned mainly the ideas and philosophy behind the project, not the website operation itself. What is especially disliked is the relation to communism. There were plenty of politically motivated personal attacks. Since the project became popular there are haters too. (Vox interview, 18 Feb 2016)

The fact that until recently almost every scientific article was available only for an outrageous price is a glittering example of the problems of capitalism. In an article published academically titled “Sci-Hub and medical practice: an ethical dilemma in Peru”, the example of one doctor is given. The doctor needs to treat a patient with several complex illnesses, but in order to do so he would either need to pay a massive amount of money he does not have in order to access research or just use Sci-Hub and access it for free. So the doctor has to either violate capitalist morality or maybe let his patient die. Sickening. Imagine just how much this backwards situation of science in capitalism has been stalling research progress, and killing people.

While reaching communism requires working-class organization, and is not possible through activities like the making of Sci-Hub – as praise-worthy as it might be, and we indeed have all our praise for it – Sci-Hub has successfully exposed just how backwards current capitalist rule is, and showed that people could work without it to achieve great things. We think projects like the GNU operating system, and the free software movement, disprove capitalist myths and give an example of how many things could be arranged in communist society, and show just how realistic it is by doing it in the now. But we are not utopian socialists, and therefore what we want is not to set up little utopian villages “outside capitalism”, but rather to change society so all of it works this way. We, however, call on everyone to oppose the persecution of Elbakyan by capitalism, cheer for this and related initiatives, and oppose capitalism’s attempts to destroy or stop them.