Hoping to stop the unauthorized distribution of millions of academic papers, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub and several related sites last year.
While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, which obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall.
The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s operator to quit offering access to any Elsevier content, but this didn’t happen. Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit and the associated media attention only helped the site grow.
However, as part of the injunction Elsevier is able to request domain name registrars to suspend Sci-Hub’s domain names. This happened to the original .org domain earlier, and a few days ago the Chinese registrar Now.cn appears to have done the same for Sci-hub.io.
The domain name has stopped resolving and is now listed as “reserved” according to the latest WHOIS info. TorrentFreak reached out to Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, who informed us that the registrar sent her a notice referring to a complaint from Elsevier.
Elbakyan was also quick to add that several ‘backup’ domain names are still in play, including Sci-Hub.bz and Sci-Hub.cc. This means that the site remains accessible to those who update their bookmarks.
In addition to the alternative domain names users can access the site directly through the IP-address 31.184.194.81, or its domain on the Tor-network, which is pretty much immune to any takedown efforts.
The Ukraine-born Elbakyan has no intention of throwing in the towel and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.
Authorized or not, there is definitely plenty of interest in Sci-Hub’s service. The site currently hosts more than 51 million academic papers and receives millions of visitors per month.
Many visits come from countries where access to academic journals is limited, such as Iran, Russia or China. But even in countries where access is more common, many researchers visit the site, an analysis from Science magazine revealed last week.
Elsevier says it is still deliberating what steps to take next. The publisher recently informed the New York District Court that it’s researching what “potential additional remedies” it can take against Sci-Hub and its operator.
Meanwhile, academic pirates continue to flood to Sci-Hub, domain seizure or not.
