On Twitter on Friday, open-source lawyers and academics shared one after the other suspension of Sci-Hub, a site that allows researchers to avoid costly salary costs for more than 70 million papers from around the globe.
If you haven’t heard of Sci-Hub, here’s what you need to know: Bin 2011, a computer programmer named Alexandra Elbakyan CREATED site as a way to offer researchers – who are often forced to give up bullshit wages“Access to papers you might not otherwise allow.” It is certainly a noble cause, but still one involves a certain degree of piracy. As a result, the operation of Sci-Hub put Elbakyan on the line of fire of important academic publishers who spent more years trying to get the site out.
The latest crackdown came late last year, when three major university publishers submitted a copyright infringement lawsuit in India against Sci-Hub and other open-source Libgen sites. To put this in a little context: OOne of these publishers, Elsevier, had earned a reputation for loading some universes tens of millions dollars per year as part of their subscriptions. And Elbakyan’s business was theirs.
Apparently, Twitter agrees. Elbakyan said Torrentfreak that her account has been permanently suspended for violating the platform’s policies the surrounding forgeries, but Twitter did not go into details – noting that the decision “cannot be challenged,” she said.
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It is worth noting here that academics based in India have spent the last few weeks meeting around the Sci-Hub Twitter account. While the suspension erased much of them, Elbakyan actually archiving has begun most only if something like this should happen. Aside from the sentimental value, she explained that she intends to read the posts aloud in court as part of her case “to prove that Sci-Hub should not be blocked.”
Until the results of this legal battle appear, all academics can do is cross their fingers and hope that the Sci-Hub account on Twitter is the last thing to be lost.