Last month a New York District Court issued a preliminary injunction against several sites that provide unauthorized access to academic journals.
As a result the operators were ordered to quit offering access to any Elsevier content and the associated registries had to suspend their domain names.
After a few days the registries did indeed disable the domain names mentioned in the lawsuit which are currently all unavailable, much to the disappointment of the sites’ users.
However, the operators of Sci-Hub, BookFi and LibGen have no intention of complying with the U.S. court order. Instead, they’re rendering the domain suspensions ineffective by switching to several new ones.
At the time of writing LibGen is readily available again via several alternative domains. Except from a new URL, not much has changed and the site is fully operational. Similarly, BookFi is also accessible via various domains including Bookfi.info.
The same is true for Sci-Hub, which changed its address to a .io domain. TF spoke with the site’s operator, Alexandra Elbakyan, who confirmed the move and is still hopeful that she can get the original domain back.
“Several new domains are operating already,” Elbakyan says. “For some reason, I think that in future justice will prevail and all our domains will be unblocked.”
To make sure that the site remains accessible, Sci-Hub also added an .onion address which allows users to access the site via Tor, and bypass any future domain name suspensions.
Despite the domain problems and a disappointing court order, Elbakyan is glad that the case brought attention to the paywall problems academia faces.
“In some sense, this case was helpful: more people now agree that copyright should be destroyed, and that academic publishing needs serious reform,” Sci-Hub’s operator says.
“Before, many people would say: why bother acting against copyright laws if they can be so easily bypassed? Or what is the point in an open access movement if anyone can download any paid article for free?”
Elsevier may have the law on their side, but the largest academic publisher can’t count on universal support from the academic community.
In recent weeks many scientists and scholars have come out in support of Sci-Hub, BookFi and LibGen, arguing that access to academic research should be free and universal.
For Elbakyan and others this support offers enough motivation to continue what they do.
