[Infowarrior] - Sci-Hub is providing science publishers with their Napster moment

[Richard Forno]

Sci-Hub is providing science publishers with their Napster moment
Devin Coldewey

https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/29/sci-hub-is-providing-science-publishers-with-their-napster-moment/

A report from Science shows that academic paper piracy site Sci-Hub is not a niche product catering to cheapskates and isolated mad scientists: It’s as popular as it is illegal, and its millions of users span the globe, from Tehran to Boston.

For those not aware, Sci-Hub is, in the X for Y startup lingo of our days, The Pirate Bay for research. Millions of papers, many of which require a fee or institutional subscription of some kind to access, have been downloaded in full and added to the Sci-Hub database. You can get just about any paper you want with a few keystrokes — and, naturally, publishers are furious.

Alexandra Elbakyan, the young Kazakh grad student who founded Sci-Hub in 2011, provided Science reporter John Bohannon with six months of usage data — which, incidentally, the journal is kindly providing for anyone to download themselves.

The stats, which have been scrubbed of personally identifying information, are impressive: There are more than 50 million papers stored, with between 4 and 6 million downloaded a month. There are users on every continent but Antarctica — but I’m sure someone down there will fix that before long.

This contrasts with the ideas some had about the conditions when researchers were likely to turn to Sci-Hub instead of ordinary legal access. One would expect people in economically unsound countries with no university affiliation to pirate these papers. But what’s with the 110,000 downloads or so from Fremont and Mountain View? Not exactly impoverished regions!

The pattern isn’t that hard to figure out. There’s no pattern; everyone is doing it. And they’re doing it for the same reason they started pirating music back in the 2000s (or earlier, if you were cool): It’s easier.

Having had to wrangle a few institutional permissions and the like before, myself, and hearing my dad talk about the administration at the university he worked at for nearly 40 years, and considering how overworked most professors and grad students already are, I’m not surprised at all that this simple, effective tool has found purchase in the academic community here and worldwide — anything you can do to save a few hours or bucks, avoid a laborious back-and-forth with the department head and generally accelerate the process of actually doing research.
Although Elsevier, the publisher whose papers seem to be by far the most pirated, has filed a lawsuit, and although Elbakyan must remain in hiding for the present in face of potential indictment under U.S. law, Sci-Hub is proving to be as powerful and divisive a tool as, surely, it was intended to be from the start.

The site had its original URL removed, but you can still find it easily. And Elbakyan has taken measures to make sure it stays up should she be arrested or if it is otherwise interfered with. And anyway, the data’s already out there: Several copycat sites already exist. The cat’s not going back in the bag.

Be sure to check out the full report over at Science; the journal’s editor in chief also wrote an editorial on the topic, and Bohannon profiled Elbakyan. All worth reading today — or you could wait and download them from Sci-Hub tomorrow.

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