The website, which makes approximately 47 million academic papers accessible for free, is the brain child of neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. As a student, Ms. Elbakyan found herself short on the funds necessary to receive access to various online research publications, leading her to create the site. Sci-Hub was hosted in the U.S. until a New York district court honored a claim from Elsevier, a major academic journal publisher, that the site’s existence violated copyright laws in December.
However, Sci-Hub has found a second life, hosted overseas where it will be much more difficult to shutter, according to Vox. Sci-Hub’s collection is built on passwords donated by users, which are leveraged to make copies of restricted-access papers then mirrored on the site’s own servers.
Ms. Elbakyan’s goal is to make every research paper ever published free to everyone, she told Torrent Freak. While her actions are in violation of copyright laws and therefore illegal, Ms. Elbakayan’s perspective is that costly paywalls that put important research out of the reach of students and the public are morally wrong. She also makes the point that researchers who publish the content often don’t profit from their work, while journals that own the copyrights do, and that the model thrives because of the prestige associated with academic publication, according to Vox.
Ms. Elbakyan has no plans to stop her work through Sci-Hub, she told Nature following the December ruling.
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