I’ve written several times about Sci-Hub and the moral quandary it presents for some of us. On the one hand it’s easy to say that what they’re doing is stealing and that it should be stopped. On the other hand, the scientific publishers are rapacious rent seekers who exploit the researchers, the reviewers, their journal editors, and in most cases the taxpayers who paid for the research in the first place. It’s hard not to cheer anything that disrupts their scam.
The Wire has an interesting interview with Alexandra Elbakyan, who founded Sci-Hub. Her impetus for starting it and for continuing to run it is that a large part of the scientific community lives in poorer regions or are not associated with a university and simply can’t afford access to the articles they need for their research.
Elbakyan talks about how she came to found Sci-Hub and her take on the piracy issue. The TL;DR is that Sci-Hub is not diverting funds from the creators who deserve it but from outside organizations that don’t. The publishers, of course, beg to differ and she and Sci-Hub have been sued many times—currently India is being asked by the Publishers to block Sci-Hub. A U.S. court has ordered her to pay Elsevier 15 million dollars, a ruling that she’s blithely ignores.
It’s an interesting interview and relatively short so it’s well worth taking 5 minutes to read it.