The Sci-Hub story so far: Main event or sideshow? – Confessions of a Science Librarian

"The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What’s the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This has not pleased the academic publishing community, to say the least. Elsevier is leading the charge to shut them down, succeeding with one iteration of the site last year until, mushroom-like, Sci-Hub has popped up again this year. My take? Mostly that it’s a sideshow. Overall, my thoughts are fairly similer to The Library Loon’s in a lot of ways, so heading over there to read that very fine post is well worth your time. One aspect that I have ranted about on Twitter which I think is worth mentioning explicitly is that I think Elsevier and all the other big publishers are actually quite happy to feed the social media rage machine with these whack-a-mole controversies. The controversies act as a sideshow, distracting from the real issues and solutions that they would prefer all of us not to think about ..."