research paper pirate sites

the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers

If it were not for Sci-Hub – I wouldn't be able to do my thesis in Materials Science (research related to the structure formation in aluminum alloys)

Alexander T.

We fight inequality in knowledge access across the world. The scientific knowledge should be available for every person regardless of their income, social status, geographical location and etc.

Our mission is to remove any barrier which impeding the widest possible distribution of knowledge in human society!

We advocate for cancellation of intellectual property , or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources.

Copyright laws render the operation of most online libraries illegal. Hence many people are deprived from knowledge, while at the same time allowing rightholders to have a huge benefits from this. The copyright fosters increase of both informational and economical inequality.

The Sci-Hub project supports Open Access movement in science. Research should be published in open access, i.e. be free to read.

The Open Access is a new and advanced form of scientific communication, which is going to replace outdated subscription models. We stand against unfair gain that publishers collect by creating limits to knowledge distribution.

Send you contribution to the Bitcoin address: 12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns

Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in today science. The goal of Sci-Hub is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge ever published in journal or book form.

Today the circulation of knowledge in science is restricted by high prices. Many students and researchers cannot afford academic journals and books that are locked behind paywalls. Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to tackle this problem. Since then, the website has revolutionized the way science is being done.

Sci-Hub is helping millions of students and researchers, medical professionals, journalists and curious people in all countries to unlock access to knowledge. The mission of Sci-Hub is to fight every obstacle that prevents open access to knowledge: be it legal, technical or otherwise.

To get more information visit the about Sci-Hub section.

Sci-Hub Pirate Paper Portal

Mike cadogan.

• May 12, 2022

We fight inequality in knowledge access across the world. The scientific knowledge should be available for every person regardless of their income, social status or geographical location

Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in modern science. The goal of Sci-Hub is to provide  free and unrestricted  access to all scientific knowledge.

Sci-Hub is a part of the Open Access Movement in science. The movement emerged in 1990s as a reaction to increasingly growing prices for academic journals: university libraries could not afford journal subscriptions. Librarians and researchers argued for making access to knowledge  free or cheap .

Alexandra Elbakyan launched Sci-Hub on 5th September 2011 to challenge the status quo. Sci-Hub is the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers; >83,000,000 articles to date, see updated statistics on Sci-Hub usage

The Sci-Hub project supports Open Access movement in science. Research should be published in open access and be free to read, by anyone, anywhere, anytime…

At this time the widest possible distribution of research papers, as well as of other scientific or educational sources, is artificially restricted by copyright laws. Such laws effectively slow down the development of science in human society.

Sites and mirrors

Often on the move, there are multiple access points listed below – for up to date URL check the Sci-Hub Twitter page ( @Sci_Hub currently blocked ) or Facebook page . or check ‘ Where is Sci-hub Now? ‘

Original Sci-hub project mirrors

Download Sci-Hub

To get full listing of Sci-Hub contents see:

• a full list of Sci-Hub dois  updated on 2022-02-12.
• an SQL table with metadata for every article  from 30 May 2020 made by  Library Genesis  project.

To get Sci-Hub contents:  Since 2015 the full Sci-Hub database is available on torrents for download. Torrents are technology that enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner.

You can  download the torrents here . Torrents are provided by the  Library Genesis  project.

Legal Battles

Sci-Hub has been hit by many lawsuits from academic publishing companies. They insist that Sci-Hub is not legal and accuse Sci-Hub of copyright violation or piracy. As the result of lawsuits access to Sci-Hub is being blocked in some countries.

The position of Sci-Hub is:  the project is legal, while restricting access to information and knowledge is not . The current operation of academic publishing industry is massive violation of human rights.

Alternate databases

These databases are useful for analysis of scientific publications:

• Crossref  metadata – a gigantic database that indexes research documents by DOIs, providing information about authors, year, title and other metadata for every item. The database contains 120+ million records,  has API  and is availabe for download on  torrents .
• Carl Malamud’s General Index  – a gigantic dataset that indexes 107 million academic papers by n-grams
• OpenCitations Corpus  a free and open database that has information about papers citing each other
• Scopus  – the database is not free, but has freely accessible table with information about scientific journals that can be downloaded after registration
• SCImago Journal & Country Rank  – a freely accessible database with information about scientific journals
• Bendezú-Quispe G, Nieto-Gutiérrez W, Pacheco-Mendoza J, Taype-Rondan A. Sci-Hub and medical practice: an ethical dilemma in Peru. Lancet Glob Health. 2016 Sep;4(9):e608
• Himmelstein DS et al. Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature . Elife. 2018 Mar 1;7:e32822.
• Till BM, Rudolfson N, Saluja S, Gnanaraj J, Samad L, Ljungman D, Shrime M. Who is pirating medical literature? A bibliometric review of 28 million Sci-Hub downloads . Lancet Glob Health. 2019 Jan;7(1):e30-e31.
• Boudry C et al. Worldwide inequality in access to full text scientific articles: the example of ophthalmology . PeerJ. 2019 Oct 30;7:e7850.

BA MA (Oxon) MBChB (Edin) FACEM FFSEM. Emergency physician, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.  Passion for rugby; medical history; medical education; and asynchronous learning #FOAMed evangelist. Co-founder and CTO of Life in the Fast lane | Eponyms | Books | Twitter |

I also recommend the Telegram bot @scihubot Just paste the DOI and the bot will send you the PDF. https://t.me/scihubot

new working link: https://sci-hub.it.nf

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How to use Sci-hub to get academic papers for free

• Post author: Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
• Post published: 10. April 2018
• Post category: Science

I regularly tell people on Twitter to use Sci-hub when they say they can’t access papers:

Yes you can, use Sci hub like normal people do. — Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) April 10, 2018

However, it seems that people don’t really know how to use Sci-hub. So here is a simple, visual guide.

1. Go to the Sci-hub website

The URL may change to the website because the lobbyists of Big Publish (Elsevier, SAGE etc.) constantly try to get government to censor the website as it cuts into their rent-seeking profits . You can find the latest URLs via this handy website called Where is Sci-Hub now? (alternatively, via Wikipedia ). Currently, some working URLs are:

• https://sci.hubg.org/
• https://sci-hub.yncjkj.com (global)
• https://sci-hub.mksa.top/ (global)
• https://sci-hub.it.nf/
• https://sci-hub.st/ ( São Tomé and Príncipe )
• https://sci-hub.do (Dominican Republic)
• https://sci-hub.se/ (Sweden)
• https://sci-hub.shop (global) [redirects]
• https://scihub.bban.top (global) [redirects]
• https://scihub.wikicn.top/ (global) [redirects]
• https://sci-hub.pl/ (Poland)
• https://sci-hub.tw (Taiwan)
• https://sci-hub.si (Slovenia)
• https://mg.scihub.ltd/ (global)

If your country blocks the website, use one of the many free general purpose proxies. I tested hide.me for the purpose of writing this article and it works fine for Sci-hub using the Netherlands exit.

2. Go to the journal publisher’s website

Go to the website of whatever article it is you are trying to get. Here we pretend you want the article in my tweet above:

• Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Meoli, M., & Malighetti, P. (2017). Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions . Research Policy.

The website for this is sciencedirect.com which is Elsevier’s cover name. Then, you locate either the URL for this (i.e. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873331730210X) or the article’s DOI. The DOI is that unique document identifier that begins with “10.”. It is almost always shown somewhere on the site, so you can use search “10.” to find it. In rare cases, it is in the page’s source code or may not exist. If it doesn’t exist, it means you usually can’t get the article thru Sci-hub. When you have the article’s URL/DOI, you simply paste this into the Sci-hub search box. Like this:

Then you click “open” and you should get something like this:

In some cases, this may not work. The APA journals seem to cause issues using the URL approach, so use the DOI approach. Sometimes Sci-hub returns the wrong article (<1% I should guess).

Finding articles from APA journals

These journals refuse to give a DOI and they don’t work with URL either usually. Example this paper . A workaround is to search Crossref for the title which gives the DOI, then use the DOI to fetch the paper as usual:

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How To Download Research Papers For Free: Sci-hub, LibGen, etc.

One of the biggest problems about accessing research papers is the cost. At times, you may have encountered the right papers for your research, only to be frustrated that it needs to be paid for. 

There are many ways to download research papers for free, using websites like Oa.mg, LibGen, and more. This post will talk about these platforms, so you can go try it out yourself.

Open Access vs Paywalled Research Papers

There may be many research papers around, but there are some that remain behind paywalls. While the demand for open access to research is undeniable, certain factors contribute to the persistence of paywalled content.

Publishing Companies Need The Funds

Publishers like Elsevier and Wiley operate on a model where subscription fees and paywalls helps to pay for costs such as:

• peer review,
• typesetting, and
• maintaining digital platforms.

This economic structure ensures the sustainability of publishing houses but limits access to those without the means to pay. 

Protect Copyright Laws

Copyright laws further entrench the paywall system. Publishers hold the rights to the vast majority of journal articles, making it illegal to distribute copyrighted material without consent.

This legal framework underpins the operation of paywalls, despite the ethical debate surrounding access to publicly funded research.

In response, platforms like PaperPanda and Unpaywall have emerged, utilizing clever logic and browser extensions to find open access versions of papers, leveraging repositories like the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Paid Papers Seem To Have Higher Value

The perceived value of peer-reviewed journal articles also plays a role. Academic institutions and researchers place high regard on published work, often equating it with career advancement and credibility.

This prestige associated with peer-reviewed publications incentivizes researchers to publish in traditional journals, despite their papers going to be behind a paywall.

Open access platforms and repositories strive to balance this by offering peer-reviewed articles for free, challenging the traditional valuation of scholarly work.

Despite these challenges, the landscape is shifting. Open access initiatives are gaining traction, challenging the traditional publishing model and advocating for free access to research.

As the academic community and the public demand more equitable access to knowledge, the future might see a paradigm shift towards a more open and accessible repository of human understanding.

Best Websites To Download Research Papers For Free

If you are looking to dive into the vast ocean of academic knowledge without hitting a paywall, certain websites are akin to hidden treasures.

These platforms offer free access to millions of research papers and journal articles, covering various areas of science and beyond.

Often dubbed as the “Pirate Bay” of scientific articles, Sci-Hub breaks down the barriers to knowledge by providing free access to research papers that are otherwise locked behind paywalls.

Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, this website uses donated institutional logins to bypass publisher restrictions, offering a direct download button for the paper you’re after.

It’s a controversial but popular choice to download papers, with a repository that includes articles from nearly every field of research. Users simply need to find the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the paper they want, and Sci-Hub does the rest.

Library Genesis (LibGen)

This is more than just a repository for scientific papers; it’s a comprehensive database of:

• academic books,
• comics, and

Library Genesis offers a wide range of academic and non-academic content, making it a versatile resource for researchers, students, and the general public alike. 

The platform operates on the principle of sharing knowledge freely, and you can easily find and download PDFs of the research papers you need.

This is a free browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that provides legal access to millions of open access research papers.

When you stumble upon a paper online, Unpaywall’s clever logic checks various open access repositories and finds you a legal, freely available copy. 

It’s like having a digital detective at your disposal, dedicated to finding open-access versions of paywalled articles.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

The DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high-quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

It covers all subjects and languages, making it an invaluable tool for researchers worldwide.

The directory is meticulously curated, ensuring that all listed journals adhere to a stringent open access policy. For those seeking reputable sources, this is a go-to place to find open access research papers across disciplines.

OA.mg is a tool designed to facilitate free access to scientific papers that are otherwise behind paywalls.

It operates by leveraging the open access movement’s resources, indexing millions of freely available research papers.

To obtain a paper, you typically need the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the desired article. By entering this DOI into OA.mg, the platform searches through various open access repositories and databases to find a legally accessible version of the paper.

This service simplifies the process of finding open access versions of research papers, making academic literature more accessible to everyone.

Utilizing some of the most advanced search algorithms, PaperPanda operates by querying various open access repositories to find you the research paper pdfs you need.

It’s especially useful for those who don’t have the DOI of a paper, as PaperPanda’s search capabilities can locate papers based on:

• author names, or

The platform aims to democratize access to scientific literature by making it as straightforward as possible to find and download research papers for free.

Download Research Papers For Free

Each of these websites plays a crucial role in the ongoing push towards open access, ensuring that scientific knowledge is available to anyone curious enough to seek it out.

Whether you’re conducting a literature review, working on a thesis, or simply indulging in a personal quest for knowledge, these platforms can provide you with the resources you need, free of charge.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

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Science’s pirate queen

Alexandra elbakyan is plundering the academic publishing establishment.

By Ian Graber-Stiehl

Illustrations by Alex Castro

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In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

It wasn’t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. “I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like ‘Well, that’s... that’s a real problem.’ There’s no literal translation,” Elbakyan tells me in Russian. “It’s basically ‘That’s an ass.’ But it doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It’s more like ‘That’s fucked up. We’re fucked.’”

Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to the academic publishers’ business model

The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business.  

That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.

But as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers.

Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. But that conversation — at least in English — took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place. Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. Now, even though Elbakyan stands at the center of an argument about how copyright is enforced on the internet, most people have no idea who she is.

“The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009,” Elbakyan says. As a student doing research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she ran across an obstacle encountered by students the world over: paywalls. Most science journals charge money to access their articles. And the prices have only been rising.

How much? Exact estimates are hard to come by. Research by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) suggests that the cost of libraries’ subscriptions to journals only increased by 9 percent between 1990 and 2013. But as Library Journal ’s annual survey pointed out, there was a change in ARL’s data collection. That estimate, Library Journal said, “flies in the face of reality.” Library Journal ’s records showed that a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal in the US ran, on average, for $4,773; the cheapest subscriptions were to general science journals, which only cost $1,556 per year. Those prices make these journals inaccessible to most people without institutional access — and they’re increasingly difficult for institutions to finance as well. “Those who [have] been involved with purchasing serials in the last 20 years know that serial prices represent the largest inflationary factor for library budgets,” the Library Journal report says.

Over half of all research is now published by the big five of academic publishing

Taken together, universities’ subscriptions to academic journals often cost $500,000 to $2 million. Even Harvard said in 2012 that it couldn’t afford journals’ rising fees, citing, in particular, two publishers that had inflated their rates by 145 percent within six years. Germany’s University of Konstanz dropped its subscription to Elsevier’s journals in 2014, saying its prices had increased by 30 percent in five years.

The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Over half of all research, according to one study , is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. That’s a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. And that’s just for natural and medical science papers; the social sciences have it worse. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five’s pages; now it’s more than half. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players.

Profits and market caps for the publishers have also swelled. Elsevier’s parent comapny RELX Group, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. It has reported a nearly 39 percent profit margin for its scientific publishing arm — which dwarfs, by comparison, the margins of tech titans such as Apple , Google , and Ama zon .

If you’re looking to access an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to pay, says Peter Suber , director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. But there is a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access repositories like Cornell’s Arxiv.org .

Suber is one of the loudest voices for Open Access movement. He was one of the original architects of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that established the most widely used definition of Open Access: “free availability on the public internet,” with the only constraint on sharing of research being authors’ “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” It also established the movement’s mandate to make Open Access the default method of publishing within a decade.

When Elbakyan found herself facing paywall after paywall, she began to wonder why she shouldn’t just jump them

That hasn’t happened yet, but the movement has inspired people to create thousands of Open Access journals including PLOS (the Public Library of Sciences). The movement has also pushed many publishers to allow scientists to upload their research to Open Access repositories like Arxiv.org — which are currently the largest legal source of Open Access papers. The movement has been so successful that even the government has shown signs of supporting it. For instance, in 2013, the Obama administration mandated that copies of research conducted through federal agencies must be uploaded to free repositories within 12 months of publishing.

Many students like Elbakyan simply email studies’ authors, or tweet the article’s information with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF hoping someone will send them a copy if they’re blocked by a paywall. But these methods, like scouring Arxiv, tend to be hit-or-miss. So when Elbakyan found herself facing paywall after paywall, she began to wonder why she shouldn’t just jump them.

Elbakyan had been following the Open Access movement and was an ardent fan of MIT’s OpenCourseWare — an initiative through which the university makes virtually all of its coursework available — since 2008. She’d also always been fascinated with neuroscience, especially the articles by the neurologist-turned-writer (and longtime head of The Guardian’s Neurophilosophy blog) Mo Costandi. Elbakyan became convinced that untapped potential was hidden in the human brain. She particularly liked the idea of the “global brain,” a neuroscience-inspired idea by futurists that an intelligent network could facilitate information storage and transfer — driving communication between people in real time, the way that neurons that fire together wire together.

“I started thinking about the idea of a brain-machine interface that can connect minds in the same way computer network does,” Elbakyan says. If a human’s mind could be connected to a bird’s, she wondered, could we truly experience what it felt like soar?

At first, these were just philosophical musings. However, Elbakyan was compelled by how neural interfaces could enable people to share information, even across language barriers, with unprecedented speed. “Later, I expanded the idea to include not only hard interfaces that would connect people directly neuron-by-neuron, but also soft interfaces, such as speech, that we use every day to communicate.” She cared less about the form than the function: she wanted a global brain. To her, paywalls began to seem like the plaques in an Alzheimer’s-riddled mind, clogging up the flow of information.

Her inspirations also took a slightly more nationalistic bent. Elbakyan studied the writings of Russian neurofuturist thinkers like Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. In 2011, she attempted to create a Russian-language PLOS-style Open Access journal. (She failed to find enough scientists who were interested.) Later that year, Elbakyan even applied to the Skolkovo Innovation Center, Russia’s self-styled answer to Silicon Valley.

Political theory provided new growth to her evolving Open Access philosophy. Communism, a model of government-less society in which resources and opportunity are metered out with equality and impartiality, has never been successfully implemented. Nevertheless, it was a particularly seductive concept to Elbakyan. The collective ideals of communism entwined for her with the ideals of the scientific method. After all, science depends on shared data. History’s greatest scientific discoveries have all been made and shared, as scientists often say, from atop the shoulders of giants: their scientific predecessors who shared their research. To Elbakyan, science thrives only when scientists shout their discoveries to everyone.

According to Elbakyan, communism and science share a common mission, which she refers to as “scientific communism.” It’s a concept she came to borrow from the 20th century American sociologist Robert Merton, who founded the sociology of science, a study of science as a social practice. (Merton coined influential terms such as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model,” and “unintended consequences.”) Most influential to Elbakyan were Merton’s “ norms ,” which were what he considered to be the defining characteristics of science: universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and, of course, communism. (Throughout our interview, she’s still quick to rattle off quotes from Merton, declaring, “The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as ‘private property’ in a capitalistic economy.”)

According to Elbakyan, communism and science share a common mission

Elbakyan’s scientific communism mirrors the Western association between democracy and information openness. (Take the commonly used American expression “the democratization of… ”) Her intellectual convictions informed the growing vehemence with which Elbakyan insisted that absolutely unfettered access was the only acceptable level of access the public should have to discoveries. Ultimately, she concluded that in an age where scientists can publish their research “directly on the internet,” or through paywall-free Open Access journals, traditional publishers will inevitably fade into obsolescence.

To Open Access activists like Elbakyan and Suber, since most research is publicly funded, paywall journals have essentially made most science a twice-paid product, bought first by taxpayers and secondly by scientists.

On the whole, scientific publishing has become a market increasingly characterized by consolidation, soaring subscription fees, and rising profit margins. As a result, plenty of scientists, students, and journalists alike have come to see an empire of academic piracy as a necessity, raising the question: what value do publishers add to any given paper?

Richard Van Noorden probed this very question in a 2013 article in Nature that looked at the meteoric rise of Open Access journals. These journals had an unassuming start in the late 1980s and ‘90s with a handful of obscure digital publications. Many of these were the result of scientists, entrepreneurs, and editors from paywall publications who were inspired by the Open Access movement and struck out to start their own publications. Within just a few decades, these journals have come to account for 28 percent of all published research that’s ever been issued a Digital Object Identifier — essentially a type of URL for research. As the article pointed out, many Open Access publishers charge scientists fees — often anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to around two thousand — for processing their articles, whether they’re accepted or not.

Standard publishers, by contrast, generally charge much less if they require processing fees at all. In return, they find peer reviewers, check for plagiarism, edit, typeset, commonly add graphics, convert files into standard formats such as XML, and add metadata. They distribute print and digital copies of research. Their press departments, especially for more prestigious journals, are well-oiled machines. They churn out perspicuous press releases and help journalists get in touch with experts, enforcing embargo periods where media outlets can review research and formulate their coverage before it goes live — which creates incentives for publications like The Verge to cover more of their studies.

Many publishers also do original journalism and commentary, thanks to the work of large, costly full-time staffs of editors, graphic designers, and technical experts. “But not every publisher ticks all the boxes on this list, puts in the same effort or hires costly professional staff,” wrote Van Noorden in the Nature article. “For example, most of PLoS ONE’s editors are working scientists, and the journal does not perform functions such as copy-editing.” Publishing powerhouses like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have estimated its internal cost per-article to be around $3,700. Nature , meanwhile, says that each article sets it back around $30,000 to $40,000 — an unreasonable amount to expect scientists to pay if they were to go Open Access.

Charging a fee isn’t the only business model for Open Access journals, Suber says: 70 percent of peer-review Open Access models don’t do it. Moreover, thanks in large part to pressure by Open Access activists like Suber, many journals allow scientists to deposit a copy of their work in repositories like Arxiv. Elbakyan, on the other hand, wants Open Access fees covered up front in research grants.

Elbakyan argues Sci-Hub is a tool of necessity, and its massive usership in poor countries seems to strengthen her case

This question of what value publishers add was front and center in coverage on Elsevier and Elbakyan’s case. The New York Times asked , “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” When Science Magazine worked with Elbakyan to map Sci-Hub’s user statistics, it discovered that a quarter of Sci-Hub downloads were from the 34 richest countries on Earth. Elbakyan argues Sci-Hub is a tool of necessity, and its massive usership in poor countries seems to strengthen her case. But the 25 percent of users from wealthy countries suggests Sci-Hub is a tool of convenience, says James Milne, a spokesman for the Coalition for Responsible Sharing , a consortium that represents the interests of big publishers. (When I contacted Elsevier for comment on this story, I was referred to Milne.) The CRS was originally formed by a coterie of five publishing giants — Elsevier, ACS, Brill, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer —  to pressure scientist social networking site Researchgate into taking down 7 million unauthorized copies of their papers.

Before Elbakyan was a pirate, she was an aspiring scientist with a knack for philosophizing and computer programming. “I started programming before even being in school,” Elbakyan says. Once enrolled, she developed a program that would ultimately serve as a precursor for Sci-Hub: a script that circumvented paywalls, using MIT’s subscription programs to download neuroscience books. “It wasn’t working exactly the same as Sci-Hub, but it was delivering the same result: going around paywalls and downloading those books.” She often shared these books with other users on a Russian biology forum she frequented, molbiol.ru, which would prove to lay the groundwork for Sci-Hub’s debut.

“Sci-Hub started as an automation for what I was already doing manually,” Elbakyan says. It grew organically from her desire to let people download papers “at the click of a button.” Users loved it. Sci-Hub’s use proliferated across the forum immediately — though it took longer for it to outgrow the forum.

Russia’s weak intellectual property protection had long made it one of the largest piracy hubs among major economies. This was an advantage for Elbakyan in creating Sci-Hub, but she soon found herself watching Russia and Kazakhstan’s dialogue on piracy shift. For years, the focus had been entertainment, but now it was rapidly pivoting toward academic piracy. New anti-piracy laws, which targeted what Elbakyan saw as essential information sharing, hit home for her: in Kazakhstan, illicit file-sharing had just become punishable by up to five years in prison. She felt that the only responsible choice was to join the fray herself.

When Elbakyan started Sci-Hub in 2011, “it was a side project,” she says. She operated it without a repository for downloaded articles. With every request for a paper, a new copy was downloaded through a university’s subscription. It would automatically be deleted six hours later. If, for some reason, a person couldn’t access a paper through one university’s servers, they could switch and download them through another’s.

In 2012, she struck a partnership with LibGen, which had only archived books until then. LibGen asked Elbakyan to upload the articles Sci-Hub was downloading. Then, in 2013, when Sci-Hub’s popularity began to explode in China, she started using LibGen as an offsite repository. Instead of downloading and deleting new copies of papers or buying expensive hard drives, she retooled Sci-Hub to check if LibGen had a copy of a user’s requested paper first. If so, she pulled it from its archive.

That worked well until the domain LibGen.org, went down, deleting 40,000 papers Elbakyan had collected, probably because one of its administrators died of cancer. “One of my friends suggested to start actively collecting donations on Sci-Hub,” she says. “I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers. Around 1 million of these papers [were] uploaded from Sci-Hub. The other[s], as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the darknet.” From then on, LibGen’s database would simply be her backup.

Elbakyan is reluctant to disclose much about how she secured access to so many papers, but she tells me that most of it came from exploiting libraries and universities’ subscriptions, saying that she “gained access” to “around 400 universities.”

It’s likely that many of the credentials Elbakyan secured came from leaked login information and lapses in universities’ security. One official at Marquette University, alleges to have seen evidence of Sci-Hub phishing for credentials. Elbakyan vociferously denies this and has previously said that many academics have even offered their login information. That could explain how Sci-Hub downloads some papers “directly from publishers,” as she has previously claimed .

It wasn’t until 2013 that Elbakyan faced her first major obstacle. That was when Elsevier sent a notice to PayPal, where she’d collected donations. At the time, according to testimony the publisher later gave in its lawsuit, Elsevier was aware that Sci-Hub had paid some students for access to their university credentials. And several PayPal payments had been sent to Elbakyan for buying a proxy server that would allow Sci-Hub to authenticate itself as a student. After the publisher’s notice, PayPal deactivated her account.

When Elsevier’s first shot across Elbakyan’s bow splashed down, the publisher already had gotten serious about pressuring internet service providers and payment services to enforce privacy. But it wasn’t the first time the publisher had pulled these strong-arm tactics. In fact, Elsevier was leading the way among academic publishers.

In 2008, Elsevier shut down an international piracy operation wherein a Vietnamese entrepreneur was selling digital copies of journals to academics. The publisher, both on its own, and through at least one industry group, the American Association of Publishers, pushed Congress for laws that that would have made it easier for publishers to more easily coerce ISPs, search engines, and DNS services to block access to a site — or force advertisers and payment services to drop their support for copyright violators.

Elsevier was leading the way among publishers with its strong-arm tactics

From publishers’ perspective, it only made sense. Increasing their own power to enforce copyright claims was protecting their intellectual property. And though the bills sparked intense backlash for many companies that supported them, individual academic publishers like Elsevier were overlooked.

That same year, the AAP and Elsevier also supported and lobbied in favor of a bill that would have prevented the government from requiring agencies to make research published through a journal Open Access at any point. That would have effectively killed the NIH ’s 2005 mandate that all research funded by the agency have a copy submitted to an Open Access repository within 12 months.

Later that year, the publisher’s rising prices and support for restrictive legislation galvanized nearly 17,000 scientists to pledge against publishing in its journals. Facing backlash, Elsevier reversed its position. Despite its meteoric rise, the boycott ultimately faded with little concrete effect on the publishing giant.

Elsevier’s efforts weren’t limited to lobbying for more-restrictive laws, either. Months before targeting Elbakyan, Elsevier helped 17 other publishers shut down the pirate academic repository Library.nu. Between 2012 and 2013, Elsevier and the AAP also opposed and lobbied against three bills — the Federal Research Public Access Act , Public Access to Public Science Act , and Fair Access to Science and Technology Research — all of which proposed making it mandatory that copies of papers from federally funded research be deposited in an Open Access repository after some period.

In 2015, Elsevier sued the piracy site AvaxHome for $37.5 million. Then, the UK-based Publishing Association , of which Elsevier was a member, and the AAP, where Elsevier was joined by closely associated publisher, the American Chemical Society ( ACS ), also successfully filed an injunction against a slew of ebook pirates — including AvaxHome, LibGen, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap, Bookfi, and Bookre — mandating that ISPs block customers’ access to them. Later, it also attempted to force Cloudflare, an internet security service, to turn over logs that would identify the operators of LibGen and Bookfi.

Elsevier hadn’t gotten the laws it wanted, ones that would have allowed it to pressure ISPs, payment services, and other internet intermediaries to block sites accused of piracy. So instead, it steadily set court precedents that did the same thing.

Elsevier doesn’t oppose Open Access, says the Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s Milne. “I can say with confidence that all the members of the Coalition (Elsevier included) embrace open access,” Milne says. (He refused to answer any line of questioning that focused too heavily on any one publisher’s actions.) Every one of the members of the coalition has their own Open Access journals. And they all also allow scientists to upload a copy of preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers to Open Access archives.

The publishers’ sales teams have heard “individual institutions and consortiums” name-drop Researchgate and pirate sites like Sci-Hub to get leverage in price negotiations

The actions of the publishers in the coalition have simply shown an opposition to illegal and unauthorized sharing, Milne says. Before Elsevier and ACS sued Researchgate, they tried for two years to convince the site to adopt their “ Voluntary Principles on Article Sharing, ” which would allow scientists to share articles — though only between others in their research groups, and provided that articles’ metadata wasn’t changed, preventing publishers from collecting accurate data on articles’ sharing statistics. Before suing Sci-Hub, Elsevier attempted to stop Elbakyan technically. The publishers feel they’ve been patient in enforcing copyright claims, particularly considering that, as Milne tells me, their sales teams have heard “individual institutions and consortiums,” which he is not at liberty to name, name-drop Researchgate and pirate sites like Sci-Hub to get leverage in price negotiations.

Sci-Hub’s burgeoning reach and reputation painted a target on Elbakyan’s back. Nonetheless, by the time Elsevier took aim, Elbakyan was already a woman on a mission. Sci-Hub was about to become more to Elbakyan than a “side project.”  

“With LibGen, I saw that it is possible to accumulate 10 million scientific articles,” she says. After that, she figured “[why] not download all the scientific articles that are currently listed in cross-reference database?” With PayPal now closed to her, she simply turned to bitcoin donations to keep feeding Sci-Hub’s growth.

Elbakyan had been pursuing a master’s program on public administration (which, she tells me, would’ve allowed her to make the “upgrade” to her living conditions she’d long been jonesing for) at Russia’s National Research University. She’d hoped it would let her influence internet information-sharing legislation. But in 2014, Elbakyan left, disappointed.

She switched to a master’s program in religious studies, where her thesis led her to research how ancient societies treated information distribution. Both the revelations about the ancient societies and their attitudes toward ”information openness,” and the “feeling that [public administration] wasn’t quite the direction that I wanted to go” led her to double down on Sci-Hub.

Elbakyan created several more backup copies of Sci-Hub’s database. She rewrote Sci-Hub’s code, starting from square one, so that the service could download papers automatically. Now, once users pointed Sci-Hub toward an article, the site would check every university proxy server until it found one through which it could download the paper, and would download it automatically. They didn’t have to manually browse the publisher’s website through Sci-Hub to find the articles anymore.

Elbakyan had defied Elsevier. Her former hobby had become her primary focus. Nothing would make her waiver from making Sci-Hub a titan of Open Access.

Until, that is, the Kremlin unintentionally accomplished what Elsevier couldn’t: it got Sci-Hub shut down — at least in Russia. After an isolationist policy enacted by the Kremlin sparked intense bickering between scientists and Elbakyan, she pulled the plug herself.

In May 2015, as part of a sweeping effort to insulate Russia from foreign influence, the Kremlin labeled Russia’s only private funder and popularizer of scientific research, the Dynasty Foundation, a “foreign agent.” Unlike much of the scientific community, Elbakyan was happy about change. However, her reaction would spark what she saw as cyberbullying from her opponents, prompting her to shut down Sci-Hub in Russia.

Elbakyan’s reaction to what she saw as cyberbullying would prompt her to shut down Sci-Hub in Russia

About three years before the Dynasty incident, the Kremlin adopted a law that required any organization with foreign funding not strictly involved with “science, culture, art, healthcare, charity,” and a laundry list of other activities, to register as a “foreign agent.” This barred those organizations from any further political activity, and raised a red flag for any associated groups. Charities, NGOs, and many social scientists decried the law, refusing to register. They argued that “political activity” was vaguely described, and that the law would cripple vital international collaboration. So, in 2014, the Kremlin amended the law so organizations could be labeled involuntarily. By July of last year, 88 organizations had become “ foreign agents,” and the law had sparked protests from human rights groups calling it a crackdown on freedom of expression and LGBTQ rights.

Dynasty was founded in 2002 by Dmitry Zimin, a beloved philanthropic oligarch whose work had even won him an award from the government “for the Protection of the Russian Science” just weeks earlier. By American standards, Dynasty wasn’t that deep-pocketed. In 2015, its anticipated budget for research funding amounted to just $7.6 million USD. And yet, in Russia, it had no peer as a private supporter of science.

However, Dynasty had always been heavily involved in education: funding research, supporting high school science programs, and training science teachers, among other things. In order to continue the same line of work, the fund would now somehow have to tiptoe through its involvement in the education system without doing anything that the Kremlin could construe as political activity.  

Through Dynasty, Zimin supported another one of his organizations, the Liberal Mission Foundation (LMF). It was effectively a think tank that assisted education initiatives that taught modern political science from a liberal perspective in Russian schools — including Elbakyan’s. This is ostensibly what qualified as “political activity.” And though Zimin was a Russian national, he kept the money with which he supported Dynasty in foreign banks — making it fair game to be considered foreign funding. (In an interview with The New Yorker, Zimin said, “The Russian government also keeps its money abroad,” likely referencing the fact that the Kremlin holds billions in US bonds.) Together, Zimin’s “foreign” money and Dynasty’s relation to the LMF provided the excuse for the “foreign agent” label.

Zimin was likely interesting for other reasons, though. Not only did he attend 2012 anti-Putin protests in Moscow, he also supported a free press. In 2014, when Zimin’s cable company, Beeline , was forced by the government to drop Dozhd , the country’s only major liberal, independent TV news station, Zimin said, “I think that everyone understands that this is not Beeline’s decision.” Afterward, he went on to bankroll a number of independent news outlets .

The government never cited these incidents as part of its reason for labeling Dynasty and the LMF as “foreign agents,” though Zimin’s past ventures do raise some suspicion about the Kremlin’s motives. Nevertheless, Zimin decided to shutter Dynasty, to get the LMF taken off the “foreign agent” list.

Elbakyan contends that Dynasty is somehow Sci-Hub’s capitalistic foil

Many scientists protested, but Elbakyan didn’t understand the outrage. As far as she was concerned, Dynasty — particularly through its funding of the LMF — had spread “propaganda against Putin and the Russian authorities.” She describes Zimin’s work through Dynasty, and the organization itself, as “anti-communist,” though she’s vague about how. Elbakyan says the foundation and Sci-Hub are “ideologically opposed,” and contends that Dynasty is somehow Sci-Hub’s capitalistic foil.

“I knew about this fund firsthand. It was involved in the Higher School of Economics where I was studying,” Elbakyan says. So, she began writing posts presenting instances of Dynasty supporting liberal-leaning groups. She asserts that she didn’t want to “[argue] any kind of side.” But the posts read with surprising acrimony for someone ostensibly attempting to be objective. She dubbed Dynasty’s supporters “the Brigades of the ‘Dynasty.’” She also re-shared negative articles about Dynasty that were written by state-controlled media outlets, and even shared Photoshopped pictures doctored to cast Zimin in a blatantly suspicious light.

Shortly afterward, something strange happened. Former members of Sci-Hub’s vKontakte group began saying that Elbakyan, a champion of Open Access to information, had blocked them.

“They just started launching just really personal and low bar attacks on me personally, calling me names, spreading false information about me, calling me crazy, etc.” So she threw them out.

Many of the former members of Sci-Hub’s vKontakte group say that they simply got booted for supporting Dynasty. One scientist, Dmitry Perekalin of Nesmeyanov Institute, said that Elbakyan asked her group to vote on which was better for Russian science, Sci-Hub or Dynasty. “I wrote that it was a false dilemma and was immediately banned,” Perekalin said in a vKontakte post . Ultimately, Elbakyan shut down Sci-Hub in Russia for several days (though many people could still access it through Virtual Private Networks ).

Shortly after the Dynasty controversy at home, Elbakyan discovered that Elsevier was suing her and LibGen abroad.

“I did not believe that it’s possible to win against such a well-funded, rich, and influential company,” says Elbakyan. Rather than fight the case, she’d just keep an eye on it from afar. Money aside, “I would have had to provide certain documents that potentially could have exposed me or my physical location.”

Elsevier’s lawsuit was a civil case, for which extraditing someone to the US from abroad to be tried is generally against the law. Still, Elbakyan worried about being extradited. “I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.” Although, the main reference she cites is the arrest of Dmitry Zubaka , who had criminal charges against him for a cyberattack against Amazon. Nonetheless, since her last visit in 2010 to speak at Harvard, she’s had no intention of returning to the US.

“I did not believe that it’s possible to win against such a well-funded, rich, and influential company.”

Court transcripts reveal that Elsevier had been playing cat-and-mouse with Elbakyan, working with universities to block her access to the university proxies Sci-Hub used to access their journals. Elsevier’s technicians were able to identify many source IP addresses associated with university computing systems that looked suspicious. They alerted institutions about these breaches, so that the schools could block these proxies’ credentials. However, Elbakyan had penetrated too many universities, and not every school had the technical expertise to keep up.

Elsevier steadily shut down student accounts whose credentials Elbakyan was using to access Elsevier’s database, Science Direct. By doing this, it had “vastly reduced” her access to its articles. On Sci-Hub’s Twitter page, Elbakyan even complained about this, saying that “[due] to the huge amount of accounts that were closed recently we were forced to introduce limits on the maximum number of users, especially foreigners.” She had to prioritize the access of “former USSR countries,” says Elbakyan. “Access from China and Iran was blocked for some time because Sci-Hub couldn’t serve as many requests as were coming from these countries. She also made Sci-Hub inaccessible to Americans (except those using VPNs) — in part because of the number of download requests, but also because she wanted to avoid becoming a target for lawsuits.

Then, Elbakyan switched her strategy. As Elsevier’s technicians testified, instead of using university proxy servers to access Elsevier’s repository directly, Sci-Hub started using them just to obtain an authorization token. Then Sci-Hub could use the token to connect to the repository from a different IP address — no longer leaving an easy breadcrumb trail of the same handful of IP address being consistently used to access and download an outrageous number of papers. By the time the publisher had gone to trial, it still hadn’t figured out any effective workaround to this technique. But, Elsevier had found a different pressure point for enforcing piracy that would establish a precedent for another publisher to get something of a chokehold on Sci-Hub.

Elsevier was awarded $15 million in June. Thanks to an injunction included in the suit, Elbakyan lost the domain Sci-Hub.org as well as Sci-Hub’s Twitter account — but, according to Elbakyan, not before the media coverage boosted Sci-Hub’s usership by a factor of 10.

“I was disappointed in the results of the lawsuit,” she says. “[That] public opinion and the position of modern society did not correspond with the justice’s decision” was a blow. “As far as the amount is concerned,” Elbakyan says that she couldn’t pay $15 million even if she wanted, as she is getting “only few thousand a month” in donations. She may be undercounting. One 2017 PeerJ study estimated that Sci-Hub owned $268,000 in unspent bitcoin as of August 2017. (Though Elbakyan has publicly disagreed with that estimate, she hasn’t said how much she owns in bitcoin. She claims the exact amount is confidential.) Nonetheless, since Elbakyan lives outside the US, she can’t be compelled to pay. “I was actually flattered that my project was evaluated so highly,” she says.

A week later, Elbakyan discovered she was being sued again, this time by the scientific society and publisher ACS. The suit was a long time coming. ACS publications rank among the most-covered by Sci-Hub. To date, Sci-Hub holds copies of 98.8 percent of all of ACS’s research. Until November, when ACS was awarded $4.8 million, she admits that she didn’t follow the case.

But ACS proved more formidable than Elsevier — winning not only the suit, but an injunction demanding that “any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries,” stop doing anything to make Sci-Hub’s operation —  and piracy — possible.

Legal and tech activists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) immediately decried the injunction. It went too far, the EFF said, setting a precedent eerily similar to previously proposed legislation would’ve worked: ACS theoretically could strong-arm any service that could be seen as aiding Sci-Hub. Forcing internet intermediaries to enforce copyright claims by shutting down accused sites wholesale makes it possible for copyright holders to abuse claims of infringement, says Mitch Stoltz , a senior staff attorney at the EFF. If a website can “disappear on command” without any oversight, there is no incentive to encourage copyright holders to be judicious. Even if a website simply advertises or links to another infringing site, or unintentionally has a few unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted works, not only could a copyright holder black out the site entirely, it would be relatively easy.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a tech nonprofit with members such as Google, Intuit, Uber, and Microsoft, even filed an amicus brief against ACS’s injunction — just as it did when Elsevier, in its case, initially attempted to get a similar injunction — urging the court to drop it.

ACS’s injunction wasn’t the first such web-blocking order — and though ACS said that it wouldn’t pursue ISPs or search engines not in “active participation” with Sci-Hub, the case is one of several that are increasingly making ISPs the pressure points of enforcing copyright. The list of governments that have blocked the site PirateBay by pressuring ISPs into denying access to the site has its own Wikipedia page . The aforementioned AAP and UK Publishers Association case against several ebook pirates also pressured ISPs into blocking access to those sites. Earlier this year, a coalition of Hollywood organizations forced Australian ISPs to block dozens of piracy sites.

Last year in a landmark American case, The Washington Post called “The Copyright Case that Should Worry all Internet Providers,” a court determined that the ISP Cox (a former head of its Abuse Group, even went so far as to say in one email “f the dmca!!!”) had flagrantly disregarded its responsibility to make some effort to enforce piracy. Thus, it didn’t qualify for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s so-called “ safe harbor ” protection, which grants a measure of legal immunity to ISPs that make adequate efforts to curb piracy. Without that protection, Cox lost a lawsuit to the music rights group BMG, which had hired a third-party organization to levy fees from Cox customers found to be accessing accused piracy sites.

After the ACS ruling, a few Sci-Hub domains (.ac, .io, and .cc) stopped working, says Elbakyan. In response, she used Twitter to tell users how to change their settings to get around the blocks. “It’s useful to know how to go around domain blocking,” she says. However, since then, she’s lost Sci-Hub’s. bz domain — announcing on vKontakte that “the capitalists have started blocking Sci-Hub domains, so the site may not be accessible at the regular addresses.”

Sci-Hub isn’t going anywhere. Elbakyan has spare domains. She’s backed up her repository of articles.

“I do not endorse illegal means for providing Open Access,” says Harvard’s Peter Suber. “For most of Sci-Hub’s existence, I went out of my way to dissociate myself from it because it gave Open Access a bad name.” However, Suber says, Sci-Hub isn’t going anywhere. Elbakyan agrees. She has spare domains. She’s backed up her repository of articles. According to her, even if ACS pressures search engines to black out search results, it won’t matter: only 25 percent of Sci-Hub referrals come via search engines anyway.

Sci-Hub is often called the Pirate Bay of science; the Pirate Bay itself was raided twice before it finally succumbed. “If nothing happens to me personally, then naturally I will try to continue Sci-Hub project myself,” Elbakyan says. If something were to happen, while her network of journal and institutional subscriptions might be lost, “the main resource of the project, being the scientific articles, they are already published on the internet.”

Elbakyan faces an uphill battle. ACS has yet to show what it defines as “active participation.” If Sci-Hub’s Twitter page were to get taken down again, it would hobble the word-of-mouth network perpetuating Sci-Hub and ACS’s current domain-name whack-a-mole.

As copyright holders continue establishing even more precedents of compelling ISPs to enforce copyright disputes, other publishers may well follow suit. The Trump administration has expanded ISPs’ ability to surveil customers. Net neutrality, which prevented ISPs from biasing speed, connectivity, and access to some sites over others, has been revoked as well, which means ISPs may get much more discretion in how they enforce piracy. These policy changes place Sci-Hub on a more tenuous footing in the US. But if America’s access were further restricted, it would be a blow to the site, and to many of the “capitalists” that use it.

Despite this, Elbakyan (and Suber) plan to continue with business as usual. Suber will keep pushing for the expansion of Open Access journals and repositories despite publishers’ lobbying. Elbakyan plans to handwave away any more lawsuits and play whatever game of cat-and-mouse she must.

As for the publishers, it seems their attention may be shifting to scientists themselves.

Since 2015, many publishers, including ACS and Elsevier, have pushed their STM voluntary principles for article sharing: a series of rules for researchers and networking sites for scientists on how they can share their research. More recently, at least nine of the largest publishers are actively promoting howcanishareit.com as the go-to reference for scientists looking to learn about publishers’ rules on how they can share their research.

At first glance, these initiatives seem like pushes for increasing the accessibility of research. Upon closer examination, a number of holes in publishers’ advocacy for access become evident: the voluntary principles focus chiefly on giving researchers guidelines on sharing papers only within small collaborative research groups, not the larger public.

Howcanishareit.com offers advice on how scientists can share their research, but buries mention of Open Access journals in links to academic editorials. Similarly, any mention that scientists are allowed to upload preprints to repositories are sequestered in links to individual publishers’ contracts. Several for-profit repositories and Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) are advertised, but major nonprofit Open Access repositories like PeerJ , Arxiv, and bioRxiv are conspicuously absent. Overall, the site reads like an attempt to “educate” scientists away from more traditional Open Access infrastructure, and, if not to constrain their sharing, then to redirect it toward for-profit platforms.

The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have made the site more well-known than most repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions

Legal Open Access activists like Suber have disagreed with this limited interpretation of Open Access. “The benefits of OA come from sharing with the public, or with everyone who might want to read your research, cite it, apply it, or build on it,” not just SCNs, he says.

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists’ awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber. The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

The effort may backfire. It does nothing to address disappointment scientists feel about how paywalls hide their work. Meanwhile, Sci-Hub has been making waves that might carry it further to a wider swath of both the public and the scientific community. And though Elbakyan might be sailing in dangerous waters, what’s to stop idealistic scientists who are frustrated with the big publishers from handing over their login credentials to Sci-Hub’s pirate queen?

Correction February 9, 12:45AM ET: This article has been corrected to give James Milne’s actual first name. It has also been updated to note that the Sci-Hub shutdown in Russia was temporary, and to note some traditional publishers have processing fees as well.

Correction February 23 6:40PM ET: This article has been corrected to note that the market cap for RELX Group, not Elsevier, is $35 billion.

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Websites for pirated research papers, during my research, i found various reddit discussions that addressed the issue of accessing pirated research papers and alternative methods to find them. there was a general consensus among reddit users that websites like sci-hub, researchgate, and arxiv.org provide access to research papers for free, although some users cautioned against using sci-hub due to ethical and legal concerns . users also suggested alternative methods like using open access button, reaching out to authors directly, and searching for papers on authors' research group websites . overall, the sources were quite related to the original query, and my uncertainty is relatively low given the information provided in these discussions..

Contributors

Jump to research

Composed by

Anonymous Puppy

Version history

Anonymous Puppy, 432d ago

Have an opinion? Send us proposed edits/additions and we may incorporate them into this article with credit.

Preferred Methods to Access Research Papers

"Don’t neglect ResearchGate either. That’s a free and 100% legal avenue where researchers post their own work."

"Try arXiv.org as well, they host papers for free."

"I use Researchgate and CiteSeer as well as scihub, libgen and arxiv.org"

Alternative Methods to Access Research Papers

"I only use sci-hub if all else fails, but it usually is able to find anything not accessible through usual means. Especially handy for more obscure articles from pre 90’s, since most library licenses don’t go back so far. Just to add, I use a chrome extension called “Open access button” which will check if any (legal) OA version of the paper exists when you are on the web version."

"Regardless, sci-hub is the resource I use, and it’s done well by me for over half a decade now."

Pirated Research Paper Websites

"I only know of Sci-Hub and then /r/Scholar. I have only used the Scholar subreddit once after I couldn't find my article on Sci-Hub, but I got the paper I needed rather quickly."

"Nexus is the best way right now. Their [telegram bots](https://twitter.com/the_superpirate/status/1621818918292561920) have almost all articles up to date., especially Elsevier. paste DOI and Single click, done."

Ethical and Legal Concerns

Conclusions, jump to top, "public access: the pros and cons of open-access publishing".

Not used in article

"[D] Thoughts on IEEE Access as a journal?"

"what is your opinion about open access journals", "(pdf) piracy: a threat to academicians and publishers - researchgate", "is downloading really stealing the ethics of digital piracy", "(pdf) legality and ethics of web scraping - researchgate", "lpt: when looking for more reliable, professional sources for academic writing. try adding pdf on the end of your search", "how can i gain access to scholarly articles for free to use as sources for a paper".

Here are my notes:

• Reddit thread from 3 years ago with 11 points discussing the issue of gaining access to scholarly articles for free, particularly for academic research papers.
• Users suggest various tools to access scholarly articles for free, including Google Scholar, DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), and gen.lib.rus.ec (Scientific Articles). These tools can help search for Open Access publications and find PDFs of articles that are not paywalled.
• Another user suggests talking to librarians about remote access options, particularly if one is part of a university.
• Other suggestions include looking for specific OA journals and even reaching out to authors directly for access. Various academic databases, like the ones available through university libraries, may also be helpful for those affiliated with an institution.
• The legality of some of these methods are questioned by some users, including Sci-hub and other tools that may involve non-legal means.
• Many users express gratitude for the suggestions provided, indicating that the issue of accessing scholarly articles for free is more widespread than one may think.

"Access to published articles for free from journals such as Nature?"

Unfortunately, since this is a Reddit post with over 30 comments and replies, summarizing this page in 400 words without losing important information would be difficult. Nonetheless, the main points that I see as relevant to the query are:

• Various websites allow users to access research papers for free, including Sci-Hub, ResearchGate, arXiv.org, MedRXiv, and bioRxiv.
• Different Reddit users suggest different methods to access the papers, including pasting the URL or DOI of the article on sci-hub or searching for the article directly on the site; using an Open Access button extension for Chrome to check if an open-access version of the article exists or a PaperPanda Chrome extension to automatically find a full-text copy of the article; visiting the author’s research group website to access their posted research for free or reaching out to the author directly to request a copy.
• Users mention that they prefer accessible sources over Sci-Hub, but resort to it when no other option is available. Some caution users to prioritize checking whether an open-access version of the paper is available and to reach out to authors first before using Sci-Hub.
• Elsevier, a publishing company, receives extensive criticism in the discussion for their predatory fees and poorly-designed manuscript submission pages.
• Users suggest that library subscriptions may provide free access to certain articles, but access is typically limited to certain journals and depending on the affiliation of the individual.
• Some users caution that preprints - versions of papers that have not yet been peer-reviewed - may have errors that are not caught yet, so users should take the extra step to fact-check those papers.
• Extension authors commend the Unpaywall extension that displays a link to an unpaywalled version of the paper when the user is on a journal page.
• Users discuss the struggles of submitting papers, including experiencing errors and difficult interactions with publishers, and the frustration of high fees.
• Some users provide helpful tips like checking Google Scholar for free versions of papers or using archive.is to access the internet archive version of blocked URLs.

"Home - Free Legal Research Resources - Harvard Library Guides"

"7 ways to access journal articles without breaking the bank - bitesize bio", "📌 here are some sites where you can find sources and references for your review of related literature (rrl) in research and the most powerful academic search engines for references".

• The webpage provides a list of websites where resources and references for research can be found, including various academic search engines.
• The list includes links to websites like PDFDrive, Global ETD Search, Theses.fr, Springer Link, OhioLINK, Lib Guides Community, DOAJ, BASE, Eric, Infotopia, Google Scholar, Refseek, The Virtual LRC, SweetSearch, and DeepDyve.
• PDFDrive is described as a source for over 205 million books for direct download in all disciplines.
• Global ETD Search Engine provides access to over 4 million PDF studies.
• Theses.fr is a scientific database of theses and diaries for students and researchers.
• Springer Link is a website that provides access to paid researches and books for free.
• OhioLINK provides access to more than 65,000 master’s and Ph.D. theses that can be read and downloaded.
• Lib Guides Community is a website that offers research and exploration service over 318,968 research guides supervised by over 53,731 librarians in 3,856 libraries worldwide.
• DOAJ allows you to download more than 9,000 respectable court scientific journals for free.
• BASE is one of the world’s most massive search engines especially for open electronic scientific sources.
• Eric is an online digital library of education research and information, providing easy access to educational resources to support their use in improving learning and teaching practices, educational decision-making, and research.
• Infotopia is a research engine for students that provides information and an archive of art sites and topics, history, social sciences, issues, and community problems.
• Google Scholar is a scientific researcher from Google that offers an easy way to research on a large scale in scientific material. It allows users to search through many disciplines and sources like articles, university letters, books, summaries, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional associations, and other sites.
• Refseek is a search engine dedicated to students and researchers that categorizes more than a billion subjects, including web pages, books, encyclopedia, magazines, and newspapers.
• The Virtual LRC is an indexing system of thousands of the best academic information sites, selected by teachers and libraries around the world, to provide students and teachers with the proper information for academic projects for schools and universities.

SweetSearch is a website that helps students quickly collect information, identifying the most relevant findings from a credible resource list and facilitates them to find initial sources away from unwanted sites and marginal sites that lack academic rigor.

"internet archive scholar", "14 websites to download research paper for free – 2023", "a researcher’s complete guide to open access papers", "eight ways (and more) to find and access research papers", "what is the best way to find research papers".

• Title of Reddit thread: “What is the best way to find research papers?”
• Posted 7 years ago under subreddit “scientificresearch”
• User asks for help in finding free or cheaper scientific research papers
• Reddit user suggests using Google Scholar as a way of finding free, full-text research articles
• They provide instructions on how to find full-text articles on Google Scholar using the “All 5 versions” link and how to use regular Google search to find non-academic sites that carry an article
• Other Reddit users provide additional free databases such as PubMed Central, BioMed Central, Science Direct, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Repositories (Open DOAR), HighWire, OCLC World Catalog, Social Science Research Network, Microsoft Academic Search, Mendeley, and Science.gov
• Under each database listed, the user provides a brief description of what each one offers and what fields of study they cover
• Some Reddit users suggest finding an email address for the author and asking for the article directly or using a friend’s login to access restricted content
• One user suggests enrolling in a local community college to get access to some databases or connecting to their Wi-Fi for access
• Another user suggests using “Mendeley” to manage research and find free full-text articles

"The 8 <b>Best Open Access Journal Sites</b> for Students "

"21 legit research databases for free journal articles in 2022", "i made a list of academic research websites, i hope you find some helpful.", "ethical challenges in accessing participants at a research site", "federal privacy protections: ethical ... - ama journal of ethics", "is downloading pirated games illegal", "what is a pirated game what are the differences between it and the actual game", "accessing elsevier papers".

• Paywalls and accessing research papers can be a frustrating experience for students and researchers.
• Elsevier is a journal publisher that makes contributions and access to science expensive, especially for those who are financially-pressed, leading to difficulty accessing many relevant papers in the field.
• Various methods are discussed for overcoming this hurdle, ranging from emailing researchers directly to requesting inter-library loans.
• One Redditor comments that researchers are generally eager to share their papers for free.
• Other suggestions include reaching out to a researcher via social media, or asking for help on Twitter or Reddit via the “icanhazpdf” hashtag or /r/scholar subreddit.
• Some users recommend using platforms like Sci-Hub or Library Genesis, which offer access to a vast repository of research papers.
• However, these platforms often face legal issues.
• Other comments suggest checking authors’ personal websites for archived versions of papers or even emailing the authors to ask for a copy of the paper.
• Some users also recommend finding connections at other universities who may have access to the desired journal.
• Another option is to search for pre-prints or draft copies of the papers on platforms such as Arxiv or BioArxiv.
• One Redditor commented that librarians are often very helpful in finding hard-to-acquire papers via inter-library loans.
• It is noted that there are some ethical considerations when deciding to use pirated versions of research papers.
• A discussion is also present regarding the legal issues surrounding paywalls, with some noting that accessing publicly funded research being published behind paywalls should not be considered piracy.
• Some individuals have organized to establish their own alternative publishing methods, as highlighted in the resignation and formation of a new journal by the editorial board of Journal of Combinatorial Theory Ser. A.
• Some specific websites recommended for accessing research papers include Sci-Hub (now blocked in many countries), Library Genesis, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, Arxiv and BioArxiv, among others.
• Others cautioned that some of these sites are not reliable and may carry risks such as malware.
• Overall, there are a variety of options available for accessing research papers that require subscriptions.

"Publication ethics: Role and responsibility of authors"

"pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers", "ethical challenges in online research: public/private perceptions", "is it unethical or illegal to cite papers obtained through sci-hub or libgen".

• The webpage is a thread on Reddit titled “Is it unethical or illegal to cite papers obtained through Sci-hub or Libgen?” and was posted 4 years ago on the subreddit r/AskAcademia.
• The thread has 7 points and contains 12 comments as of the time it was posted.
• Some commenters in the thread argued that it is unethical and potentially illegal to use research papers obtained through websites like Sci-hub and Libgen because it violates copyright law.
• Others argued that the high cost of accessing research and the fact that many authors are happy to share copies of their work justifies the use of these websites.
• One user who identified themselves as a librarian stated that while the high cost of academic publishing is unethical, users should do their best to obtain free versions of research papers before obtaining them through sites like Sci-hub and Libgen.
• This user also suggested using tools like Open Access Button to find freely available copies of research before resorting to these websites.
• Another commenter stated that they would be flattered if someone obtained their work illegally because it meant that their research was valuable.
• Several commenters suggested that pirating research through websites like Sci-hub and Libgen was necessary for individuals living in countries without access to academic resources.
• Some users argued that the academic publishing industry itself is unethical and unfair to the public because it puts taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls and sells it back to the public.
• One user joked that it was unethical to cite books they returned to the library on time.
• Overall, the thread highlights the controversial nature of using sites like Sci-hub and Libgen to obtain research papers and the varied opinions on the ethical implications of doing so in the academic community.

"ELI5: How a company can 'catch' you for pirating"

"besides sci-hub, does anyone know where else i can get a pirated article".

• One Reddit user suggests /r/Scholar and has used it successfully once after Sci-Hub did not have the paper. (Karma: 24)
• Another user suggests using Nexus and their Telegram bots for articles, especially those from Elsevier. (Karma: 1)
• A third user recommends checking with the librarian at one’s college, contacting authors, posting on Twitter with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF, and using LibGen. (Karma: 18)
• One user has never gotten a response from an author before. (Karma: 2)
• Another suggests checking out Filepursuit and posting the DOI or link on Reddit. (Karma: 3)
• A user recommends using the Unpaywall browser extension to see if the paper is available for free on other sites. (Karma: 2)
• Arxiv.org is recommended as a source of free pre-reviewed articles by another user. (Karma: 2)
• Wosonhj.com is suggested for those who cannot find articles on Sci-Hub. (Karma: 1)
• LibGen is mentioned multiple times as a resource for books and papers. (Karma: 1, 1)
• ResearchGate and CiteSeer are also suggested for requesting papers from authors. (Karma: 1, 1)
• Someone asks for help accessing a specific research paper. (Karma: 1)
• One user reiterates that paying for a scientific article is unnecessary. (Karma: 2)
• Another user confirms that the response rate on ResearchGate is good. (Karma: 1)

"Open Access Versus Traditional Publishing - Amnet EnableOA"

"pros and cons of traditional and open access publishing", "sci-hub&#39;s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription ... - aaas".

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Comparison between Open Access and traditional subscription-based publishing models

Advantages and disadvantages of accessing pirated research papers online

Top 5 most reliable websites to download pirated research papers

the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers

If it were not for Sci-Hub – I wouldn't be able to do my thesis in Materials Science (research related to the structure formation in aluminum alloys)

Alexander T.

We fight inequality in knowledge access across the world. The scientific knowledge should be available for every person regardless of their income, social status, geographical location and etc.

Our mission is to remove any barrier which impeding the widest possible distribution of knowledge in human society!

We advocate for cancellation of intellectual property , or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources.

Copyright laws render the operation of most online libraries illegal. Hence many people are deprived from knowledge, while at the same time allowing rightholders to have a huge benefits from this. The copyright fosters increase of both informational and economical inequality.

The Sci-Hub project supports Open Access movement in science. Research should be published in open access, i.e. be free to read.

The Open Access is a new and advanced form of scientific communication, which is going to replace outdated subscription models. We stand against unfair gain that publishers collect by creating limits to knowledge distribution.

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• 25 February 2022

Sci-Hub downloads show countries where pirate paper site is most used

• Brian Owens 0

Brian Owens is a freelance writer in New Brunswick, Canada.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Download figures for Sci-Hub, the popular but controversial website that hosts pirated copies of scientific papers, reveal where people are using the site most. The statistics show that users accessing Sci-Hub from China are by far the most active — and that with more than 25 million downloads, usage in China outstrips the rest of the top ten countries combined (see ‘Global resource’).

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Unlocking knowledge: your gateway to open access scientific papers and research data, introduction.

In the digital era, the quest for knowledge and scientific discovery is no longer confined to the walls of academia and research institutions. Welcome to [Your Website Name] , a dedicated platform for finding and downloading open access scientific papers and other research data. Our mission is to democratize access to scientific information, making it freely available to researchers, students, and curious minds across the globe.

What is Open Access?

Open Access (OA) refers to the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research. OA content is available to all, without the usual financial or legal barriers. We believe that open access is crucial in fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, thereby accelerating innovation and discovery.

Types of Open Access:

• Gold Open Access: Papers are published in open access journals that provide immediate open access to all of their articles.
• Green Open Access (Self-Archiving): Authors publish in any journal and then self-archive a version of the article for free public use in their institutional repository or on a website.
• Hybrid Open Access: Some articles in a subscription journal are made open access upon the payment of an additional charge.

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• Direct Downloads: Once you find a paper or dataset, download it directly.
• Citation Tools: Easily export citations in various formats to incorporate them into your research.

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Open access in scientific publishing represents a transformative approach that breaks down traditional barriers to knowledge dissemination. It is a movement dedicated to making scientific research freely available to all, fostering a more inclusive and collaborative scientific community. At its core, open access allows for the unrestricted sharing of research findings, enabling scientists, academicians, and the general public to access and utilize scientific papers without the constraints of subscription fees or licensing restrictions. This paradigm shift in scholarly communication is driven by the belief that knowledge, particularly that which is publicly funded, should be a communal resource, accessible to everyone for the greater good of society.

In the realm of scientific research, open access has numerous advantages. It accelerates the pace of discovery by allowing researchers to build upon existing work without delay, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas across various fields. This is particularly crucial in addressing global challenges, where rapid and unencumbered access to research can lead to faster solutions. Furthermore, open access democratizes knowledge by making it available to researchers in developing countries who may not have the resources for expensive journal subscriptions, thereby narrowing the research gap between high and low-income countries.

The open access model also aligns with the digital age's ethos of openness and transparency. It enables a more efficient validation and critique process, as a larger audience can scrutinize and contribute to the research. This can lead to higher quality and more reliable scientific work. Moreover, it provides an equal platform for emerging researchers and institutions to share their findings, ensuring that the visibility and impact of research are not confined to those within well-funded, prestigious entities.

However, the transition to open access is not without challenges. The sustainability of publishing models, quality assurance, and equitable distribution of costs are ongoing concerns. Despite these hurdles, the open access movement is gaining momentum, driven by the global scientific community's commitment to an open, accessible, and collaborative future in research. As we move forward, open access stands as a beacon of progress, symbolizing a world where knowledge is a shared and freely accessible asset, driving innovation and societal advancement.

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Are Pirate Sites Open Access?

Pirate sites or shadow library websites such as Sci-Hub or Libgen circumvent institutional authentication barriers to provide access to journals and books.   Pirate sites can violate copyright to provide access to material - conversely, Open Access conforms with copyright legislation and ethical use.

Also,  the articles on pirate sites are sometimes obtained by authors unwittingly sharing their credentials through phishing campaigns .   Never share your Georgetown NetID credentials as it places your data and the University networks at risk.   The following legal options for full text articles are listed below.

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• use the Citation Matcher tool and/or
• install the Lean Library Browser extension to integrate streamlined access to both subscription and open access full text content.

For articles not provided by the DML subscriptions,   DML's Document Delivery Services team can request the article from another library on your behalf. 

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• Use Google Scholar to find Library subscribed content and legal open access material. Instructions for setting up fulltext@UC Library links to access UC Library subscribed content.   

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More information

Gonzalez-Solar, L, & Fernandez-Marcial, V. (2019). Sci-Hub, a challenge for academic and research libraries . El Profesional de la Informacion , 28(1). 

Pitts, A. (2018, Sept 18). Think Sci-Hub is just downloading PDFs? Think again . Scholarly Kitchen. 

Smith, D. (2016, Feb 25). Sci-Hub: How does it work?   Scholarly Kitchen.

What are pirated journal sites?

Sci-Hub and Lib-Gen (Library Genesis) are examples of piracy or shadow library websites that illegally circumvent institutional authentication barriers to provide access to journals and books. 

Sci-Hub is the most well known of these sites. Log-in credentials (usernames and passwords) of University staff and students are used to illegally bypass institutional authentication to provide access to journal content for which the University has licensed access. The exact methods Sci-Hub uses to obtain these log-in credentials is somewhat vague.  Individuals either voluntarily provide them to Sci-Hub or they are obtained through other means such as phishing.  

As these websites obtain material illegally, using them infringes copyright and license agreements between libraries and publishers. University IT Policy requires you to not violate copyright and not share your credentials with others.  Breaching this can have serious repercussions for your study. It also puts University I.T. systems at risk. 

We do not endorse illegally downloading material.  If you need an article, follow the advice in the left hand box (Need an article?) to find it legally.

Difference between Sci-Hub and Open Access

Open Access (OA) is free and legal online access to research and scholarly material. Content on Sci-Hub has been illegally obtained.  Pirate sites often call themselves "open access" but they are not "open access" according to the meaning as understood by academic publishers, researchers and librarians. SPARC  (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines open access as "the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment". Scholarly open access conforms with copyright legislation and ethical use while enabling the information to be freely accessed. Websites like Sci-Hub violate copyright to provide access to material. 

  More information about Scholarly Open Access.

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Access to research papers?

I haven't been a student in a long time, and one of the things I miss the most is having access to academic databases such as JSTOR etc.

Is there a more convenient way to get access to the papers without contacting the authors by email? I usually find the paper just by googling it or on libgen, but often I do not and even though the authors are always so kind to send me a pdf, it sometimes takes a while and it looks like I will be researching a bit in the near future. Thank you!

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