Is This Science Hacker a Heroine or a Villain? | thedailybeast.com

"In 2011, 23-year-old Alexandra Elbakyan did something radical: She created Sci-Hub, a digital repository housing copies of 64.5 million scientific journal articles. That might seem, on its face, ho-hum. But Sci-Hub was radical because it was free to anyone with an internet connection, threatening to disrupt the research publishing industry, which holds its copyrighted material behind a paywall. And it all started as a self-serving project. “When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers,” Elbakyan wrote to the judge in the case brought against her by Elsevier, the largest publisher of medical journals. “I needed [the papers] for my research project. Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research...."