Meet accused hacker and copyright infringer Alexandra Elbakyan.

Alexandra Elbakyan is challenging the multibillion-dollar academic publishing industry.

"Good thing downloads NOT trackable!" was one twitter response to my post  imagining a skirmish in the imminent scholarly publishing copy...

Study looks at the reasons why people pirate scholarly articles from peer-to-peer research sharing communities -- it's more convenience than ideology.

Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall  about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms in...

Whatever else Sci-Hub may or may not be, it’s becoming apparent that it functions as a litmus test. It focuses people’s thoughts on the problems of scholarly communication, and draws ou…

I’ve been a bit nonplussed recently to see some strange claims about Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub. For example, this from Angela Cochrane in an article at the Scholarly Kitchen:…

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s piece on Sci-Hub contains a disturbing claim that I’ve not seen elsewhere. I’ll quote: Edward Sanchez, head of library information technology a…

The recent news that a researcher in Russia running a site called Sci-Hub has downloaded 48 million scholarly articles and is making them available free as a form of protest over the fact that some publishers charge US$32 to buy a single article  is a good opportunity to pause and consider exactly w

Sci-Hub is a "Pirate Bay" for paywalled science.

Sci-Hub has been around since late 2011, but it has been getting publicity recently for it's refusal to shut down. The website is an unabashed pirate website that provides access to over 48 million scientific articles and publications. The website's mission is to, "remove any barrier ... impeding the widest possible distribution of knowledge in human society," and they "advocate for cancellation of intellectual property, or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources." Certainly strong language, but not an unsympathetic cause--helping researchers and the public bypass academic paywalls.

Inspired by communism, she wants to abolish copyright so that everyone can access science.

RuNet, the Russian segment of the internet is now the home of the most comprehensive scientific pirate libraries on the net. These sites offer free access to hu

Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secr…

How one researcher created a pirate bay for science more powerful than even libraries at top universities.

After getting shut down late last year, a website that allows free access to paywalled academic papers has sprung back up in a shadowy corner of the Internet.