Sci-Hub is oftenly presented as an illegal way to get access to paywalled research papers, and hence, in some way inferior to the other options, like:
– send an email to the authors of the manuscript and ask them to send you a copy;
– search Google Scholar, perhaps the paper is available somewhere;
etc.
Indeed, Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to surpass these ‘legal’ methods. Researchers were doing these for years and decades, even before email was invented: asking authors and other researchers to send them a copy of the paper.
But that is very time-consuming and slow method to read research articles. And it does not always work, especially for old papers, when authors can be retired already.
And Google Scholar can search only those papers that are available online, which was, especially in 2011, a very small percentage of the papers published behind paywall.
Sci-Hub emerged as a solution for immediate access to any paper behind paywall and simply because it was better than other methods listed here, it became very popular.
Why Sci-Hub is considered to be illegal?
Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles.
Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place. Pirate Parties emerged as a response against it:
The first Pirate Party to be established was the Pirate Party of Sweden, whose website was launched on 1 January 2006 by Rick Falkvinge. Falkvinge was inspired to found the party after he found that Swedish politicians were generally unresponsive to Sweden’s debate over changes to copyright law in 2005.
When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed.
Nothing of that happened. Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’ solution and projects like Unpaywall emerged and started promoting themselves as a ‘legal’ alternatives to Sci-Hub.
These projects are not in fact an alternative: Sci-Hub started providing access to paywalled papers that could not be found anywhere on the Internet, because distributing them is illegal, while solutions like Unpaywall provide access to papers that are already available on the Internet, which is a huge difference.
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
To help Sci-Hub get legal, you can support these fight, for example by joining the local Pirate Party.
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