Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

Alexandra Elbakyan, a 20-something grad student, is operating a free “searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers”—”an awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on whom you ask.”

Now up to “60 million papers,” providing “access to nearly all scholarly literature.” Via its websites sci-hub.cc, sci-hub.io, and sci-hub.ac, sci-hub has been able to fill 99.3% of articles requests, all for free. A sister site, Library Genesis, at libgen.io, distributes scientific books and textbooks for free, more than a million of them, also illegally.

“Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone,” concluded this feature in the prestigious journal Science. A survey of potential users suggests for most it’s not some grand political statement, but rather that’s the only way they have access, or feel it’s just so much quicker and easier. Even those who have legitimate institutional access may still choose to use sci-hub, because there’s just so many fewer hoops to jump through.

So, you can imagine how sites like sci-hub may be “filling…publishers [that charge for access] with roaring, existential panic.” And they’re not taking it lying down. Elsevier, the largest publisher, notorious for demanding researchers take down free copies of their own work, sued sci-hub, the Library Genesis project, Alexandra, and 99 John Does for copyright infringement, a “willful… disregard of…Elsevier’s rights.”

Kinda hard to take the moral high ground, though, when you’re effectively an international arms dealer. “Can you imagine a tobacco company publishing health journals?…[S]urely, the company’s business mission would be impossibly confused: would the company be in the business of killing people or keeping them alive? But, if you can’t imagine that absurdity,” well welcome to Elsevier, which, in addition to publishing medical journals, is also involved in the global arms trade: running arms fairs where things like cluster bombs are sold, leading to medical journal editorial boards calling for a boycott of Elsevier’s “warmongering [and] health damaging business [practices].”

In response to the lawsuit, Alexandra wrote a letter to the judge. She wanted to make it clear that not only did Elsevier not create those papers, but that they don’t pay researchers a penny. So, it’s not like a pirated movie or song where the content creator is losing out—noting that no researcher had ever complained that she was handing out their research.

In fact, “[s]cientific authors are typically thrilled when their work” gets more out into the world. That’s the whole point of science, to be shared and built upon. And, “[i]n one fell swoop, [Alexandra created a portal likely offering] a greater level of access to science than any” institution on Earth in history, “literally [opening up] a world of knowledge.”

And, she’s not backing down, citing in her defense Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that “[e]veryone [should have] the right [to] freely…participate in the cultural life of the community, [including] shar[ing] in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

She realizes she could be arrested and extradited to the U.S. to face charges. She is “fully aware that another computer prodigy-turned-advocate, Aaron Swartz, was arrested…on similar charges after mass downloading academic papers. Facing devastating financial penalties and jail time, Swartz hanged himself.”

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