There are thousands of pirate sites online today and many more have come and gone over the years. In their own way, most are loved by their specific audiences but few reach achieve truly iconic status.
Due to its colorful history and original ethos that information wants to be free, The Pirate Bay is an obvious outlier but there is another site, one that has managed to capture the imaginations of an even broader audience seeking access to learning and knowledge.
Sci-Hub was never meant to be the giant it is today. In fact, it grew from the personal needs of a single person – researcher Alexandra Elbakyan.
“When I was working on my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not subscribed to anything,” Alexandra told TF.
In order to solve this problem, Alexandra says she began looking for tools and services to bypass the paywalls, information she shared with other researchers who found themselves in the same predicament. Buoyed by the response to papers she shared, Alexandra developed software that could allow anyone to search for and access papers. On September 5, 2011, Sci-Hub was born.
Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Year Anninversay
Over the past decade, Sci-Hub has grown to become a formidable force. From very humble beginnings it today offers a staggering 87.97m research papers and serves up hundreds of thousands of them to visitors every day. These include many thousands of students but also scientist and academics, who regularly add Sci-Hub DOI links to their publications to make learning easier.
Yesterday Sci-Hub celebrated its 10th anniversary with an announcement from Alexandra on her personal Twitter account. That’s her only outlet these days after the site’s official account was banned following yet another intellectual property complaint.
Today is Sci-Hub anniversary the project is 10 years old!
I'm going to publish 2,337,229 new articles to celebrate the date. They will be available on the website in a few hours (how about the lawsuit in India you may ask: our lawyers say that restriction is expired already) pic.twitter.com/ynF1sMsAuf
— Alexandra Elbakyan (@ringo_ring) September 5, 2021
The publishing of more than 2.3m new research papers is perhaps the most fitting way to mark the celebrations but the fact they weren’t published sooner is a sign of how unrelenting legal action has affected the site’s ability to continue its work. In her tweet, Alexandra references a legal action that may yet prove an important milestone in the site’s history.
In December 2020, publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society filed an injunction application in India to have Sci-Hub and partner site Libgen blocked by ISPs via a so-called ‘dynamic injunction’. In the appropriate forum and at the right time, these can be open-and-shut cases but in January, a High Court judge ordered a delay and declared the case “important”.
This was in response to intervention applications filed by nineteen scientists, including a virologist and several physicists specializing in multiple research areas, plus the Delhi Science Forum and Knowledge Commons.
Together, they summarized why Sci-Hub has become such a success and why publishers hate it so much. Open access to scientific research is absolutely vital for the advancement of scientific knowledge, they said, but publishers are only interested in making excessive profits by effectively restricting access only to the “elite institutions” that can afford their prices.
The India case is still pending but the judge did see fit to hand down an interim injunction that prevented Sci-Hub from uploading new content to the site. Perhaps surprisingly (or less so, given the importance of the case), Sci-Hub chose to abide by the ruling but according to Alexandra, that order has now expired, something that allowed the massive anniversary data dump.
Sci-Hub Hounded Around the World
While the unique elements of the Indian action may yet provide a surprise and even hope to the open access movement, lawsuits and other legal action affecting Sci-Hub and Libgen in other regions of the world have been predictable if nothing else.
Applications for blocking injunctions requiring ISPs to disable access to the platform have been successful in the UK, Germany, Denmark, France, and Russia, while in Sweden ISP Bahnhof retaliated to a court-order blockade by banning Elsevier’s own website.
Back in 2017, a New York District Court ordered Sci-Hub to pay Elsevier $15m in damages and the same year, American Chemical Society won a default judgment of $4.8 million and a broad injunction that required search engines and ISPs to block the platform.
None of these efforts achieved their goals of shutting down the site. Sci-Hub occasionally publishes new domains to help people access the platform but if all else fails, its Tor version remains up. That cannot be censored by ISPs meaning that the show will go on, at least for now.
