Sci-Hub Founder Fighting to Keep Pirated Repository of Academic Papers Alive | Labcritics

"The founder of Sci-Hub is fighting an uphill battle against publishing giants like Elsevier to keep the pirate website running over a recent temporary injunction granted in favour of the publisher. Sci-Hub, a completely open access repository of academic papers, has become a lifeline of hundreds of students across the world. However, its future is a bit uncertain at this point with its founder Alexandra Elbakyan, involved in a bitter dispute with Elsevier over the academic papers available on its site. Founded in 2009, by Elbakyan after facing what most graduate students experience: a severe cash crunch. At a time when $30 is either a full week’s supper or an academic paper crucial for their research, Elbakyan was introduced to Fulltext – a social hub where researchers plead for academic papers crucial to their research to help with their ongoing research. Being an expert coder herself, she worked on a script that collected every paper ever shared and the accounts shared by empathetic researchers to their universities’ paid account, Elbakyan was able to rapidly encompass a huge repository of research papers very quickly. Currently it stands at a cool 47 million papers, which is about 8 million or so short of all the papers ever published ..."