Are Open Access Journals Immune from Piracy? - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The Internet is pretty evenly split with articles hailing Sci-Hub as the heroine of OA and articles reminding everyone that piracy is not the same as OA. But for the masses of people using Sci-Hub, do they care?

A year ago, I wrote about harm being done to the OA movement when some of the loudest advocates started shilling for Sci-Hub. For researchers still skeptical of OA (and there are still a lot of those), aligning the OA movement with piracy is a big mistake.

There are many reasons Sci-Hub is not OA, not the least of which includes:

• Reuse licenses are maintained from the original publication (most of it under copyright and not Creative Commons)
• Sci-Hub leaches off library subscriptions so it’s all paid for anyway
• Sci-Hub is not sustainable. Stealing stuff and giving it away to others is not a sustainable business plan.
• Due to various legal actions, Sci-Hub jumps from domain to domain and search functionality is often blocked."