Ongoing efforts to make pirate sites harder to access have resulted in two new waves of domain blocking by ISPs in the UK.

A group of Reddit users are protesting against the FBI's attempts to pressure Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of the Sci-Hub website, which publishes scientific studies for free. The community is mobilizing around her vision: to create a digital library of scientific articles accessible for free.

Facing lawsuits and legal trouble, archivists are working to save 77TB of freely available scientific data.

Interview by H C-(M)In March 2021 London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit issued a warning towards students and universities to stop visiting Sci-Hub, the first website in the world

Sci-Hub’s account was gathering statements of support

The case in Delhi High Court against Sci-Hub and LibGen, which give students and researchers access to papers for free, is against public interest.

Library Genesis is one of the oldest and largest illegal scholarly book collections online. Without the authorization of copyright holders, this shadow library hosts and makes more than 2 million scholarly publications, monographs, and textbooks available. This paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the service’s administrators. We reconstruct the social and economic factors that drive the global and European demand for illicit scholarly literature. In particular, we test if lower income regions can compensate for the shortcomings in legal access infrastructures by more intensive use of illicit open resources. We found that while richer regions are the most intensive users of shadow libraries, poorer regions face structural limitations that prevent them from fully capitalizing on freely accessible knowledge. We discuss these findings in the wider context of open access publishing, and point out that open access knowledge, if not met with proper knowledge absorption infrastructures, has limited usefulness in addressing knowledge access and production inequalities.

After many years of fierce resistance to open access, academic publishers have largely embraced -- and extended -- the idea, ensuring...

Elsevier et al. against Sci-Hub: more surveillance, more data sales. Including biometric markers, apparently.

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and...

The potentially illegal archive is a 'moral imperative,' said one organizer.

UPDATED to include Sci-Hub data from six months: September 2015–February 2016, and correcting a coding error that inflated download counts. Well, they might not have lost the downloads, but t…

The investigation into Alexandra Elbakyan has criminal and intelligence-gathering elements, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sci-Hub, a repository for pirated research papers, is widely acknowledged to be illegal. But is sharing a link to the site illegal, too?

The High Court of Paris has ordered several of the largest French ISPs to block access to the pirate libraries LibGen and Sci-Hub. The decision is a setback for the sites that have come under increasing pressure, but Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan believes that determined researchers are smart enough to find an alternative route to her site.

After publishers sued Sci-Hub, Russian ISPs are now preventing users from accessing the valuable scientific data repository and paywall killer.

The availability of almost all articles from toll access journals in the Sci-Hub repository will disrupt scholarly publishing towards more open models.