Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site has been lauded by some in the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community. Others have criticized it for violating copyright, threatening the economic viability of publishers, potentially compromising universities’ network security, and jeopardizing legitimate access to papers by university staff.

About Sci-Hub in brief

Summary Sci-HubSci-Hub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. In September 2019, the site’s owners said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. Sci-Hub has been lauded by some in the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community. Others have criticized it for violating copyright, threatening the economic viability of publishers, potentially compromising universities’ network security, and jeopardizing legitimate access to papers by university staff. In June 2020, a study found that articles downloaded from Sci- Hub were cited 1. 72 times more than papers not downloaded from the site. The site has cycled through domain names, some of which have been blocked by domain registry operators. In December 2019, it was reported that the U.S. Justice Department was investigating whether Sci- hub had links with Russian intelligence, due to the suspicion that tacit approval of the Russians is required for an operation like this to go ahead. The White House Office of the US Trade Representative named Sci-hub as one of the most flagrant \”notorious market sites in the world\” in the December 2019 edition of its trade journal, The American Trade Representative’s Trade Report. It was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the US, or in theworld, at the time. The court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci- hubs and others in a default judgment in June 2017.

The judgment also granted the injunction, which led to the loss of the original sci-hub. org domain. In November 2017, the American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit against Sci- Hubbard in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleging copyright and trademark infringement; it sought judgment US$4. 8 million from Sci.Hub in damages, and Internet service provider blocking of the Sci-Kuber website. The case was settled out of court, and a permanent injunction was granted against all parties in active concert or participation with Sci- Kuber. In July 2018, four domain name registries ceased facilitating access to the service, and its CloudFlare account was terminated by the court and its account terminated by order of the court. It has also been reported that Sci-Huber is being investigated by the US Department of Justice for possible violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other laws. It is believed that the site may be based in either the Netherlands or also in Russia, and that it may be used by students and academics in the UK and Europe. The website was launched on 5 September 2011, and has been accessible via alternative domains such as. io, then. cc, and. bz. The number of articles claimed is frequently updated on the home page, being over 84 million in November 2020, and is extensively used worldwide. In 2015, Elsevier filed a suit against the site, in Elsevier et al. v. Sci-huber, and it was also a defendant in the case which may bebased in the Netherlands and also in Germany.