Alexandra Elbakyan: Hero or criminal? Open access, Copyright & acedemia

"Former neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan (retired blog: https://engineuring.wordpress.com/) founded the Sci-Hub site back in 2012 to bypass academic article paywalls and to provide open access to academic articles to those who otherwise would not be able to afford it otherwise - for example, students, engineers and even medical professionals in poorer countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub There is much debate within academia about whether traditional publishing is not only obsolete, but actively holding back the field. Research is primarily conducted within public institutions such as universities, often with public funding and to a lesser degree R&D departments of private organisations - yet publishers do not pay anyone to purchase the material that they publish, nor do they pay the volunteers who review and edit the material. Who really owns the material? The publishers are never the creators, nor do they facilitate the research. Simultaneously, many scientific fields have done some soul searching and realised that traditional peer review is not the gold-standard of quality some make it out to me. Post-publication peer review is more important in determining quality. Scholarly articles are predominantly accessed online and the primary costs are running the servers to provide that access. Yet the cost that publishers charge is many times more than would be expected based on those costs. There are proposals that academia should move away from the old publishing models (alternatives exist, arxiv.org biorxiv.org, researchgate.net etc) ..."