You Pay to Read Research You Fund. That’s Ludicrous | WIRED

"IN 2011, DEVELOPER and researcher Alexandra Elbakyan launched Sci-Hub, an online archive that shares research articles freely and openly without paywalls or restrictions. Four years later, as the archive passed 48 million articles, academic publishing giant Elsevier filed a copyright infringement claim against the site. Sci-Hub has ignored an injunction to stop distributing copyrighted articles because it is hosted in Russia, beyond the influence of the US courts. A March 17 hearing offered little change to stem the flow of research articles flowing from Sci-Hub to eager researchers.  Sci-Hub is obviously committing copyright infringement, and publishers are calling on open access advocates to denounce the site. But saying that Sci-Hub is about copyright infringement is like saying the Boston Tea Party was about late-night vandalism. In fact, it’s a rebuke of the thoughtless, conciliatory acts of governments, institutions, and the public that are preventing the most valuable product of our society—human knowledge—from being freely available to drive discovery and innovation. And not just by the academic elite, but by all of us. Elbakyan’s civil disobedience has forced the issue on behalf of a society that continues to allow the knowledge it creates to be locked away from the public that pays for it. And it has the potential to disrupt academic publishing forever ..."