Kazakh Student Operates Largest Website to Download Scientific Papers

Alexandra Elbakyan a student aged 27 and from Kazakhstan created a website in 2011 that she named Sci-Hub to let anybody freely access it and download any scientific paper released at any time. The articles from Sci-Hub are available to all researchers and students for a standard price of approximately $30 each whilst purchased at per-paper basis.

Importantly, there's an assortment of nearly 50m reproduced journal articles, properly destroying journal paywalls, which for years have been yielding yearly earnings of $10bn. Today Sci-Hub proudly serves a gigantic number of requests daily.

During a description with Washington Post a high-profile newspaper, Elbakyan asserted she wanted the service continuing always, whatever effort she might've had to put, despite Elsevier, a globally biggest publisher of academic journals, suing her in New York.

Elbakyan, who no longer performs legal representation, merely communicated with the judge through a letter, elaborating the way scientific journals run like some form of scam.

The problem, according to her as well as what other academic publishing paradigm critics expressed long back, is that within the academic sphere, there's generally a glorification of researchers once they publish their works merely inside a chosen few scientific journals. Softpedia.com posted this, April 4, 2016.

Executive Director Lui Simpson for Association of American Publishers described the problem as outright piracy. The issue took up such a controversial turn that Office of Science and Technology Policy of White House too acted towards fixing the problem via issuing a mandate that all researches that were publicly-funded should be accessible without any charge in twelve months from their publication.

Elbakyan says, if anyone hunts for certain research paper that isn't available within her database, there's a method by which different university databases' earlier-set login credentials would be used for searching-and-downloading that paper onto the Sci-Hub database.

Elaborating further, Elbakyan says inside sources provided a few of these pre-set login details under the consideration that information shouldn't carry a price tag; however, she also thinks a few passwords maybe due to spear-phishing scams targeted on those accounts' administrators.

She concludes that people accessing the same research articles and books shouldn't be considered unlawful.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/12/2016