A grad student named Alexandra accidentally built the most subversive website in academic history.
It's called Sci-Hub.
This is the website Elsevier won a $15 million default judgment against, the American Chemical Society won another $4.8 million against, courts in India, France, Sweden, and the UK have ordered ISPs to block, and the entire $19 billion academic publishing industry treats as a direct threat to their business model.
It has been online since 2011. It takes no money from users. It runs no ads. Researchers on every continent except Antarctica use it. Nature named her one of the top 10 people who mattered in science.
Here's how it works.
Sci-Hub is a single search box. You paste in a DOI, a paper title, or a URL. The PDF opens.
The archive holds 88 million papers, roughly 100 terabytes of research.
→ Every Elsevier journal article without an institutional subscription
→ Every Nature paper going back over a century
→ Every Cell, Lancet, and Science article without hitting a paywall
→ Every NEJM article without a login
→ Every clinical study a doctor in Lagos or a nurse in Lima could not previously read
→ Every locked textbook chapter behind a course reading pack
→ 95 percent of every scholarly publication with a DOI up through 2022
→ Over 90 percent of everything in the top academic journals in the same window
→ Downloadable in full as a torrent, so no domain seizure can erase the archive
Alexandra Elbakyan runs the site. She launched it in September 2011 while writing her master's thesis in Kazakhstan and getting locked out of the papers she needed to finish it. She has lived in Russia ever since. She runs it publicly, under her real name, from outside every jurisdiction that has ruled against her. The two U.S. default judgments totaling nearly $20 million have never been paid. The site has never gone offline for more than a few days at a time.
Elsevier can't shut this down. Wiley can't shut this down. Springer Nature can't shut this down.
The entire $19 billion academic publishing industry, running profit margins higher than Google, Apple, and Amazon, is built on the assumption that a graduate student in Kazakhstan would never spend one weekend writing a script that broke the paywall.
sci-bot.ru/