There has been no precedent for this kind of access in the history of scientific enterprise.

The fate of a young researcher reflects poorly on the state of scientific publishing.

Alexandra Elbakyan runs Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world.

Cloudflare has terminated service to several domain names of Sci-Hub, which is often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science." The CDN provider was compelled to take this action in response to a permanent injunction the American Chemical Society obtained late last year. While Cloudflare previously objected to a similar request, there is no sign of protest this time around.

Excellent, historically-aware explainer. DOES NOT explain the Big Deal, however.

American Chemical Society awarded $4.8 million in damages from site with millions of illegally hosted journal papers

A US judge issues a broad injunction that allows the society to demand that technology companies actively associated with the site block access to it.

Latest ruling might require Google to remove Sci-Hub from search.

The website Sci-Hub provides access to scholarly literature via full text PDF downloads. The site enables users to access articles that would otherwise be paywalled. Since its creation in 2011, Sci-Hub has grown rapidly in popularity. However, until now, the extent of Sci-Hub’s coverage was unclear. As of March 2017, we find that Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of all 81.6 million scholarly articles, which rises to 85.2% for those published in toll access journals. Coverage varies by discipline, with 92.8% coverage of articles in chemistry journals compared to 76.3% for computer science. Coverage also varies by publisher, with the coverage of the largest publisher, Elsevier, at 97.3%. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. We find Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content, containing 96.2% of citations to toll access journals since 2015. For recently requested articles by Unpaywall users, oaDOI provided access to 48.8% whereas Sci-Hub contained 81.5%. Together, oaDOI and Sci-Hub covered 94.1%, demonstrating that gaps in Sci-Hub’s coverage, especially for open access articles, can be filled using licit services. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection. Sci-Hub’s scope suggests the subscription publishing model is becoming unsustainable.

Ownership of intellectual property rights for a large proportion of the scholarly record is held by publishers, so a majority of journal articles are behind paywalls and unavailable to most people. As a result some readers are encouraged to use pirate websites such as Sci-Hub to access them, a practice that is alternately regarded as criminal and unethical or as a justified act of civil disobedience. This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge. By doing so, it is shown that piracy is an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape that can render the current intellectual property regime irrelevant. If we wish to actively construct a true scholarly commons, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge towards the creation of an open scholarly communication system that is fit for purpose.

Academic social network accused of infringing copyright on a massive scale

The American Chemical Society seeks a broad order that includes millions of dollars in damages and demands action from Internet service providers and search engines.

The pirate site plans to ignore the lawsuits from Elsevier and the American Chemical Society.

Letter requests that ResearchGate consider removing content in violation of copyright

Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of academic research pirate site Sci-Hub, has pulled access to the site in Russia.

Sci-Hub, which is regularly referred to as the "Pirate Bay of science," faces another setback in a US federal court. After the site's operator failed to respond, the American Chemical Society now requests a default judgment of $4.8 million for alleged copyright infringement. In addition, the publisher wants a broad injunction which would require search engines and ISPs to block the site.

Analysis finds website can fulfill 99% of requests for scholarly papers

(and some history of Sci-Hub too) Like most people, I routinely use Wikipedia to lookup information. Sometimes however, the information in Wikipedia does not represent the true facts about reality.…