“The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009,” Elbakyan says. 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.

Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. But that conversation - at least in English - took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place. Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. 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.īut as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. 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. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. 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.

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

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