The Most Revolutionary Website You've Never Heard Of
How One Smart Kid from Kazakhstan Is Saving Science
Sci-Hub is a website founded by a student in Kazahkstan named Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011. For many years—including this year—Sci-Hub is at the forefront of scientific and medical research. If you’re not a scientist or a medical researcher, you’ve probably never heard of it. If you are a scientist or medical researcher, you use the site almost daily, although you don’t often admit it. Sci-Hub is morally courageous, scientifically ethical, and yet on shaky legal ground. It gets closed down frequently and Elbakyan is regularly sued (and loses). Fortunately for her, she lives out of bounds (she’s now in Russia) so the rich overlords in the United States and Western Europe who want to destroy her have little sway over her enterprise.
And it’s a busy enterprise with about 28M regular users and some say a repository of over 1 billion scientific articles. Its young founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, is heralded in some circles as a Robin Hood of research and a humanitarian who is going to save science. Others say she’s running a criminal enterprise. It’s kind of a silly criminal enterprise because Elbakyan makes no money from her efforts and relies on donations (crypto only, please) to fund what is arguably a shoe-string operation. It’s like imaging a Don Corleone type kingpin working for minimum wage.
What’s the Problem with Sci-Hub?
Most peer-reviewed medical and scientific articles are published by a handful of publishers. These publishers are very, very wealthy. They run their business in what might be perceived as unjust ways.
These journals do not compensate their authors in any way. If you want to write an article for a medical journal, you get not even a penny in compensation
On the contrary, you are expected to not just donate the article to the journal, but you may be asked to pay an “article processing fee” that can top $5,000 for one single article
Once your article is accepted after peer review and your check for the article processing fee has cleared, the journal will demand that you sign off on a “copyright agreement” which gives them the rights to the article. That’s right. You write an article, pay five grand to get it published, and the journal will shake you down to sign over all ownership rights to it. What do you get for the copryight of your article? Nothing. Nada. But if you ever want to reuse some of your own content, say a diagram or a medical illustration, the journal will charge you a fee.
Now all of this helps to explain why Big Pharma gets more of its stuff published than individual physicians, startups, or scientists who can’t afford the hefty article processing fees. A small medical company with a breakthrough new drug or medical procedure often cannot afford the multiple thousands of dollars it takes to get a few articles on the topic published. On the other hand, Big Pharma can afford to get dozens of articles published.
But it gets worse. Once the journal owns the article, it may (under certain conditions) put it behind a paywall. That paywall can ask $40, $50, even $100 for rights to get the article. It used to be that journals with a paywall would allow you to download the article as a PDF, but more recently they have introduced some trickery where you might pay $40 but only get 24-hours access to the article as an online document—no PDF option.
If you want to research a medical topic, you can go to the PubMed database (just Google “pubmed”) and use its terrible search engine to find articles on a subject of interest. With one click, the free PubMed search engine will show you the abstract of the article and the citation, meaning you can find out who wrote it, where it was published and when, and get a short synopsis of the content. However, if you want to read the entire article, you either have to hope it’s “open access” (some articles are—it means there is no paywall) or that you have a credit card handy, because you won’t get a peek at some articles until you plunk down the cash.
In 2011, one frustrated girl scientist in Kazakhstan had had enough. She couldn’t afford all of the paywalls. Researchers need to read everything relevant in their field. Studying a topic can mean at least skimming a thousand articles relevant to the topic. A decent medical journal article might cite 40 or 50 different articles, which requires in-depth study of those articles. It was just too expensive for an ambitious young scientist like Elbakyan.
Big universities sometimes pay million-dollar annual fees to journal networks which allows their students and professors to access the journals as subscribers. If you were enrolled or working for a big university, you could pole vault over those paywalls with ease. But it also meant that the only ones who had ready access to the body of scientific and medical literature were affiliated with institutions. Just as the only ones who could pay to publish were Big Pharma supported scientists, the only ones who could research that literature were aligned with the big universities, like here in America, with the Poison Ivy League.
It made sure the elites had a stranglehold on scientific information.
Elbakyan saw a way around this problem. She built what is sometimes called a “shadow website” that deftly and rather creatively circumvented paywalls. Sci-Hub became a major hit among all of the people shut out of science because they weren’t professors or working for Big Pharma or other major industries. In particular, Sci-Hub opened up the corpus of scientific literature to researchers working in small medium- or low-income countries.
The Fight Begins
Of course, the big journals sued Elbakyan and tried to shut down Sci-Hub. She was hit with copyright infringement suits in 2015 and 2017. She lost the suits, and, in the process, she lost some of her domain names, which is why you’ll find the site under multiple different names and URLs. Like a true folk hero, Alexandra Elbakyan lost some battles, but she never lost the war. Here’s an image of what you get when you put Sci-Hub.pub into a search engine. Note that the list of sites changes a lot. Like a good undercover operation, Sci-Hub moves around a lot.
The arguments in support of Sci-Hub are strong.
Much of the research published in medical journals (and other scientific journals) is funded by taxpayers
The authors who write the articles or the artists who draw medical illustrations are not paid by the journals
The authors often have to pay thousands to get their article published
The journals then slap the article behind a paywall
So the journal makes money by charging an article processing fee ($5000, let’s say), demanding the copyright, and then putting up a paywall ($50 a pop, let’s say). All this for posting an article online. The authors get 0.
It’s no wonder that the big medical publishing companies are so rich. One of the biggest medical and scientific publishers on earth is the Dutch company Elsevier. Owned by parent company RELX (which owns other journals as well), Elsevier’s profits increased 10% from 2022 to 2023 and, in 2023, RELX took in approximately $2B profit on revenues of over $10B. Another big dog on the porch is British-German publisher Springer Nature (sometimes just called Springer) which made $529M in profit in 2022 and whose revenue is expected to top $2B for 2024.
All of this has led to a proliferation of much-maligned “predatory journals” which are small, opportunistic journals that publish online, trying to horn in on this money machine. Many predatory journals are based in low- or middle-income countries where the barriers to entry for a conventional journal are just too overwhelming. (It’s why Western Europe and North America dominate science and medicine.) A predatory journal will publish something online, hoping to get some article processing fees and maybe paywall money off content they did not have to even produce. It’s funny but the same big-name publishers who criticize predatory journals are actually only criticizing their own business model. They got so defensive that anyone other than the first world might publish medical literature they started Beall’s List of Predatory Journals and Publishers. It’s sort of like the elitist version of wanted posters. These are the journals wanted for trying to publish scientific information without being one of the elites.
Now in Russia
Alexandra Elbakyan is a scientist specializing in the computer-brain interface, that is, how our brains work with machines. She got her degree in Kazakhstan but went on to study in Germany and the United States. Although information published on her is a bit guarded, it seems she currently resides in Russia. Kazakhstan, her birthplace, was part of the old Soviet Union but has been independent since 1991.
Elbakyan’s mission started when she found herself unable to access the many scientific papers she needed for her work. By 2011, she had set up a makeshift and private system to get around paywalls. Her method worked so well, she started to share her homemade system with friends and colleagues. Always cognizant they could be shut down at any moment, those early Sci-Hub misfit-users collaborated, stuck together, and shared information. They got better at what they did, and they also got bigger. Today, Sci-Hub is a repository for what some claim is 1B articles. In fact, the site celebrated its 10-year anniversary back in 2021 by uploading 2.3 million articles in one single day.
Sci-Hub was never meant to be what it turned out to be. It started out when a frustrated scientist figured out how to breach a paywall and told her friends. Today, a U.S. District Court has stated Elbakyan has to pay Elsevier $15M in damages. Various legal maneuvers sometimes get search engines to block her site. Yet to my knowledge, Sci-Hub never went dark. It moved a lot, but it never shut down completely.
Elbakyan did not pay $15M in damages (she hasn’t pay anything), her site has more followers than ever, and nobody can explain to me why putting paywalls around taxpayer-funded research is ethical. Why should scientists have to enrich Elsevier and other publishers for research their tax dollars paid for?
How To Use Sci-Hub (A Short Guide For Non-Scientists)
If you’re a scientist, medical researcher, or scientific writer you already know how to use Sci-Hub. But if you’re not and just want to take a gander, search for Sci-Hub. The URL right now that works is sci-hub.pub but this can change. Just use a browser to find Sci-Hub. (You may get to see a lot of sites telling you how wrong it is to access taxpayer-funded information for free.)
Sooner rather than later, you will land on a list of domain names. Try them out and keep going till one works. (They don’t all work, in my experience.) The domain extensions like .se indicate countries, but it is unclear where Sci-Hub actually keeps its servers and other hardware.
There is also a Telegram bot to get there, and sometimes if you know the full IP address you can try that. The Onion Router (TOR) will also give you a back door into the site. TOR is the gateway to the so-called “dark web, but Sci-Hub isn’t above ground (that is, findable by search engines).
But be aware: it does get shut down a lot and it moves around.
You will eventually land on a page with a black raven holding a key in its mouth. Enter what you want about the article—you may have a bibliographic citation or you may just know an author or title. If you know the DOI—a unique identifier in the form of numbers for certain scientific documents—that works like a charm. Enter it. If the article is in their database, it will be presented to you intact, in full, as a PDF. Sometimes articles are not there. In my experience, the stuff not on Sci-Hub is either very new, very old, or of extemely narrow interest.
Sci-Hub is not a search engine—you can’t just say “articles on hypertension” and get a list of potential results. You have to know which article you want. You can use PubMed or (even better) Google Scholar to search for the articles you want, get the DOI, and enter the DOI into Sci-Hub. Clumsy, maybe. But affordable and reliable.
Courtroom Goliaths
Monolithic publishing giant Elsevier was the first to file suit against Sci-Hub and young Alexandra Elbakyan made an interesting defense. She said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights assured people the right to science and culture. In other words, it was punitive to ask people like Elbakyan to pay $40 or more per article when she might have to read 500 articles to complete a single research project. She had a right to the body of scientific literature.
She lost her suit, but because the site was located in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the time, no judgment was enforceable.
Meanwhile, the American Chemical Society also sued Sci-Hub for copyright infringement and won. That was in 2017 and Sci-Hub lost four of its domains. What it didn’t give up was its database or its ability to find new domains.
The White House Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has called the Sci-Hub site notorious. In 2021, Twitter (before it was X), banned the Sci-Hub account. The European Commission called Sci-Hub a pirate site. Nobody has ever refuted Elbakyan’s main argument: that people have the right to knowledge.
As far as one can figure out, Alexandra Elbakyan runs the site mostly by herself: she wrote the PHP code, maintains the network of Linux servers, and oversees daily operations. Sci-Hub gets access to articles behind paywalls by “leaked credentials.” This means somewhere a professor or other person with subscription privileges (who can get access to an article) has shared his or her username and password. The exact mechanisms that Elbakyan uses are not disclosed, but it has to be something along these lines. They download the article and migrate it to Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub indexes it, and now it’s free.
Scuttlebutt maintains that Sci-Hub with its “leaked credentials strategy” has infiltrated more than 370 universities in 39 nations, including 150 in the United States alone.
It’s a remarkably cheap operation to run. Sci-Hub does not solicit donations or charge any fees or subscriptions. There are no ads on the site, no commercial interruptions. If you want a scientific article that’s behind a paywall, chances are you can grab it for free at Sci-Hub. What a major publisher will give you for $63 (many of the publishers have odd paywall fees), Sci-Hub will give you for nothing.
Sci-Hub has revealed some disturbing statistics that speak to the state of scientific literature.
It found that 80% of all articles accessed through the site come from just 9 publishers
Elsevier, the biggest fattest dog on the porch, is the source of 24% of all articles sought on Sci-Hub
About 45% of scientific publishers are rarely accessed
About 69% of content sought on Sci-Hub come from reserachers in middle- to low-income nations where high paywall fees are prohibitive
India, China, Brazil, Iran, and the United States are the biggest users of Sci-Hub
And contrary to the notion that it’s the authors and scientists who are hurt by Sci-Hub, the only victims for Sci-Hub are the big publishers. Remember, the doctors and researchers who wrote these articles received no pay or compensation from the journal publisher and had to give (for no compensation at all) the copyright to the publisher… plus they were socked with an article processing fee that typically is about $3-5K. And after all that, no one can read their work unless they’re willing to pay the fee.
One could argue that developing nations need and depend on services like Sci-Hub to provide better science and medicine for their countries. Western Europe and North America dominate medicine and science and we haven’t always done such a great job. Our greatest dominance now comes from the legal stranglehood we rich nations have over the publishing world, thanks to copyrights.
Sci-Hub might be in possession of about 85% of all the paywalled scientific and medical content published. It’s hard to know the data since the publishers and Sci-Hub keep this secret and it’s in constant flux. Despite its legal battles, a study in 2023 found that at least half of academic researchers use Sci-Hub to avoid paywalls. I would argue that it’s closer to 100% but about half do not like to talk about it.
About 28M people use Sci-Hub. That’s more than 3 times as many as read The New York Times.
The World’s Largest Scientific Library
Over the years, something weird happened. Sci-Hub became the biggest scientific and medical library in the world.
University libraries right now are getting crushed by the scientific publishers, who are so greedy they are now raising the fees for subscriptions. A university might pay more than a million dollars a year to get access to a suite of journals that it, in turn, makes available free but only to its students and professors. As prices have doubled or more in the past few years, universities are having to make hard decisions and cut back. Libraries that once subscribed to pretty much all of the scientific literature can now only afford to subscribe to some of it. Even university professors are finding they cannot get around all of the scientific paywalls.
How can the big publishers get away with this? They hold the copyrights. They’re the only game in town.
So who hates Sci-Hub? Not scientists, medical researchers, authors, students, and poor and medium-income nations. They love Sci-Hub. The people who hate it are the publishers and Big Pharma and other Big outfits that do not want upstarts snooping around at the research their tax dollars pay for.
Conspiracy Theories
The main conspiracy theory about Sci-Hub is that it is a Russian site and it exists to spread Russian propaganda. Now I love a good conspiracy theory but this conspiracy theory only shows that the elitist overlords who run the world not only can’t meme, they can’t come up with a decent conspiracy theory. If Russia wanted to infiltrate the world, why would it choose to offer scientific articles free to scientists?
It’s true that Sci-Hub has some ties to Russia, but Sci-Hub was never a government activity.
Some say Alexandra Elbakyan is a pirate and a thief, others say that she is a scholarly activist. Vox claims that she “stole” 50M academic papers and her activities are “definitely illegal.” Meanwhile, Vox is breathlessly covering the Luigi Mangione trial because he’s so brave shooting a healthcare insurance executive in the back, but they are quick to point out that Alexandra Elbakyan is stealing from Elsevier.
Taxpayers in the United States alone spend about $140B a year in funding research—that they are not allowed to see the fruits of this research without paying some publisher who didn’t write it, didn’t pay the author, and didn’t do the work? And why do journals and publishers get to take the copyrights of articles that others wrote? (They do this because up to recently, you had to go along with these thugs or you couldn’t get published at all.)
It’s a crazy system and somebody better tell the big publishing houses that their days are numbered. They can harrass Sci-Hub for a while longer, but they can’t stop it.