Elsevier acts against research article pirate sites and claims irreparable harm

"The academic publisher Elsevier last week filed a complaint against two web sites who it accuses of pirating its academic articles and other publications and offering them up to the world for free. Elsevier is responsible for 25% of the world’s market for peer-reviewed academic publications published in journals that include The Lancet, New Scientist, LexisNexis, and Cell. It also provides a way for students, academics and other researchers to search for publications through a product called ScienceDirect which offers access to information and content of 2,500 journals and 26,000 book titles. Of course, only organisations that license ScienceDirect can get access to these papers, normally universities and research institutes. Others have to pay on an article-by-article basis with articles costing around US $31.50 for each download. In the normal process of research, academics may read a large number of papers which makes paying on a per-paper basis, prohibitively expensive. It is for this reason that people have turned to accessing pirated copies of these papers through sites such as the ones named in Elsevier’s complaint. Elsevier allege that a website called Sci-Hub is using ScienceDirect credentials obtained through students and academics to access and copy pirated academic papers. It normally doesn’t track logons to the system and being on a network associated with a university is often enough to gain access. People visiting the Sci-Hub site are presented with a search bar that carries out a search through a modified version of Google’s academic search site, Google Scholar. Linked articles are then fetched from the other site named in Elsevier’s complaint, called Libgen, or the Library Genesis Project. Libgen acts as a repository for pdfs of the articles obtained from ScienceDirect and other sources. The majority of Libgen’s and Sci-Hub’s traffic comes from countries like Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, and India. Although the US originates the second highest amount of traffic for Sci-Hub ..."