Sci-Hub: A Solution to the Problem of Paywalls, or Merely a Diagnosis of a Broken System?

"Is Alexandra ElBakyan the Robin Hood of science? It depends whom you ask. Some hail her as a hero; others call her a glorified thief. A graduate student studying in Kazakhstan, ElBakyan has made international waves as the founder of Sci-Hub, the world’s busiest Web site for pirated peer-review science and medicine research.

"Sci-Hub, whose precise URL has nimbly changed several times in response to legal crackdowns, boasts millions of downloads per month from users in dozens of countries. Many presumed that the majority of downloads were being performed by students and academics in poor countries without legal access to the articles in its massive database. But that changed recently when ElBakyan released data to the journal Science. The data showed that a surprisingly large number of Sci-Hub’s users appear already to have legal access to the articles they are illegally downloading. Among Sci-Hub’s download hotspots are major academic centers in the United States and Europe. This raises an obvious question: If so many users have legal access to these articles, why steal them? Many, including some on Twitter, say that they use the site neither out of desperation nor as an expression of dissent from a fee system designed to bolster the pharmaceutical industry, but for far less heady reasons: simplicity and speed. In short, convenience.

As an experiment, I tried to download a peer-reviewed article I coauthored in 2014 through various means. The “click burden” using Sci-Hub was substantially lower than going through my hospital’s online library, and it saved me many seconds (albeit fewer, once I’ve already logged in to my hospital library’s PubMed portal). But Sci-Hub’s appeal does not rest on speed alone but rather its reliability...."