Description
As the most mentioned movement in online articles, along with The Cost of Knowledge, Sci-Hub is worth focusing on. We want to analyse Sci-Hub's impact on the controversy. Sci-Hub is a online search engine developed by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011. It’s slogan is—quite simply—“To remove all barriers in the way of science”, in fact it aims to provide academic papers and articles in a completely free way, eliminating any paywall between students/researchers and publishers. The founder is moved by the belief that anyone should rightfully access any type of knowledge—according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 27. Still most of the resources that Sci-Hub provides are normally released by publishers under payment. The circulation of such resources in a free way without the explicit permission of the publishers is illegal, which is why Sci-Hub is considered highly controversial. For this reason in 2015 academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint against Sci-Hub alleging copyright infringement by its website.
The map shows a 24-hour snapshot of users activity on Sci-Hub: about 200.000 articles and texts were downloaded for free from the website. This number alone makes Sci-Hub very relevant in the controversy. As seen in the map the use of Sci-Hub is widespread across the globe and download requests barely follow the time zones: almost every country is downloading pirated papers non stop every hour of the day. This behavior shows that more and more people are turning to Sci-Hub for accessing scientific research, bypassing publishers and proving, as claimed by Elbakyan, that their business model has failed. Sci-Hub is also a way to overcome the FUTON bias which is the tendency of students to cite open academic resources ("FUTON" is an acronym for ‘full text on the Net’). Via Sci-Hub scholars get effortless full access to resources that are normally made available at a high price.
