In her letter she described her reasons for creating Sci-Hub, in which she stated, "Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research." Īt the time the website was hosted in St. In her letter to the court, Elbakyan responded by accusing Elsevier of violating the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Elsevier asked for monetary damages and an injunction to stop the sharing of the papers. Elsevier alleged that Sci-Hub violated copyright law and induced others to do so, and it alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as inducements to violate that law. It was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the US, or in the world, at the time. Library Genesis (LibGen) was also a defendant in the case which may be based in either the Netherlands or also in Russia. Sci-Hub et al., at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, in Elsevier et al. On 8 January 2021, Twitter suspended Sci-Hub's account citing "counterfeit content" as the reason. Sci-Hub has also been accessible at times by directly entering the IP address, or through a. Sci-Hub remained reachable via alternative domains such as. Sci-Hub has cycled through domain names, some of which have been blocked by domain registry operators. See also: Copyright infringement § Legality of downloading In September 2021, the site celebrated the tenth anniversary of its launch date by uploading over 2.3 million articles to its database. In May 2021, Sci-Hub users collaborated to preserve the website's data. The site was launched on September 5, 2011. In 2011, she developed Sci-Hub to automatically share papers. She began contributing to online forums dedicated to sharing research papers. According to Elbakyan, she experienced difficulty accessing scientific papers relevant to her research project. She later returned to Kazakhstan, where she started research in a Kazakh university. After Freiburg, she did a research internship at Georgia Institute of Technology. Elbakyan earned her undergraduate degree at Kazakh National Technical University studying information technology, then worked for a year for a computer security firm in Moscow, then joined a research team at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2010 that was working on a brain–computer interface. Sci-Hub was created by Alexandra Elbakyan, who was born in Kazakhstan in 1988. Number of papers downloaded from Sci-Hub per capita by country (September 2015 to February 2016) "My goal is not only to make the website run indefinitely, but also to make its operation perfectly legal" In a 2020 interview, she stated, that "if Americans obeyed every wrong law, they would have been ruled by a queen today and had slavery". In a 2016 interview with Vox magazine she said: Elbakyan stated that the Sci-Hub operation is a moral imperative, and if it comes into a conflict with the law, the law should be changed. Įlbakyan responded by questioning the morality of the publishers' business and the legality of their methods under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Publishers have criticized it for violating copyright, reducing the revenue of publishers, potentially being linked to activities compromising universities' network security (although the cybersecurity threat posed by Sci-Hub may have been exaggerated by publishers), and instigating publishers to make paywalls stricter. Sci-Hub has been lauded by some in the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community, often from some share of public funding.
The site has cycled through different domain names since then. Sci-Hub and Elbakyan were sued twice for copyright infringement in the United States in 20, and lost both cases by default, leading to loss of some of its Internet domain names. The number of articles on Sci-Hub is over 85 million as of February 2021. In September 2019, the site's owners said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day and in 2021 that had risen to 2 million requests per day. Sci-Hub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls.
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Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.