Sci-Hub Undermines both Paywall and Open Access Models
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As reported by TorrentFreak, Sci-Hub, the notorious pirate site for scientific and academic journals, has been blocked in India by court order after a 5 year court process. Obstinacy and failure to appear or offer a defence on the part of Sci-Hub’s operator, Kazakhstan-based Alexandra Elbakyan, appear to have been factors in finally deciding the case. Although Sci-Hub has been blocked or banned in a number of countries, India was a holdout. Sci-Hub had been effective in mobilizing the “exploited Global South/knowledge should be free” argument to delay proceedings. Sci-Hub has accused the academic publishers, in this case Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society, of monopolizing knowledge and sealing it off behind paywalls that block access. In India, where the cost of western IP is a political issue (often played out in the patent domain in the area of pharmaceuticals, where India’s widespread production of generic drugs is controversial among western pharmaceutical companies), that argument has political legs. But in the end, it did not stop the court from putting an end to the delays and reaching a clear decision. Perhaps the last major domino has fallen.
Sci-Hub dates back to 2011 when it was founded by Elbakyan explicitly to do an end run on publishers of academic journals. Its motto, highlighted on its site, is “breaking academic paywalls since 2011”. What are Elbakyan’s motivations? They appears to be altruistic, i.e. making knowledge “free” as proclaimed on Sci-Hub’s website, although it is easy to be altruistic with someone else’s property. There doesn’t seem to be much of a business model behind Sci-Hub, with donations being the prime source of funding, a pipeline made more difficult when PayPal and Twitter agreed to block the platform. Justifying Sci-Hub’s piracy by arguing that it frees up academic and scientific knowledge is fed by academics who are unhappy with the academic publishing model. For example, this India-based academic argues that, as a right, researchers should have “complete, paywall-free access to every paper published everywhere.” In other words, all free, all the time. Publishers would argue that widespread access is already provided through university libraries to those who need it, although not every institution has access to all the key journals. However, it is always possible to contact the author directly and ask for a copy. But that is a hassle. It is far easier to go to Sci-Hub and download pirated articles.
The issue of access to academic and scientific journals is complex. Academic and scientific publication is essential for several reasons. A key one is to advance and share knowledge through accurate, peer-reviewed, properly edited, credible publications. Part of that process involves career advancement and development in academe; scholars and academics are often evaluated by their institutions based on the quality and sometimes quantity of adjudicated publications they author or co-author. Research without sharing the knowledge gained is essentially pointless. The issue is how best and most credibly to disseminate that knowledge.
There are lots of dodgy so-called academic journals that will publish anything, accurate or peer reviewed or not, simply on a pay-to-play basis. Frankly, no self-respecting academic would publish in such journals; it would undermine their reputation and credibility. Therefore, publication needs to be in a recognized and respected journal where there is a high academic barrier to entry. Those journals are generally published by a few major publishing houses, such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and Sage. Elsevier publishes almost 3000 journals, concentrating on science and health, Springer about the same but including social sciences and humanities, Wiley 1500 and Sage about 1000, with a focus on social sciences. Other institutions such as the Royal Society, American Chemical Society and various university presses also publish peer reviewed journals.
The normal model of a publisher paying an author a royalty for the right to publish a work is stood on its head in the academic world. In a sense, the publication is doing the author a favour by agreeing to publish, assuming the work meets editorial standards. At least, that is the way the publishers see it. The peer review process is unpaid work undertaken by other academics as part of their research commitments (although many academics are unhappy with this unpaid labour) while the publisher absorbs the costs of editing, publishing, archiving and distributing. (Sometime editors are senior academics who are not separately compensated for these services). In the digital world distribution and archiving is far less costly than in the pre-digital days of printing and distributing physical copies of journals, mostly to university libraries. Today, authors are not expected to pay for publication but also normally receive no compensation for granting the right to publish. The publisher recoups its costs, (and turns a profit) by charging for access to the journals. Most universities purchase bulk access for their students, but of course they cannot subscribe to every single journal. One time access is normally available through payment of anything from $20 or $30 to much more to get the paywall key.
This business model has been modified over time with the growth of the Open Access model and other means to provide content without going through a paywall. Under Open Access (OA) the article is published in the journal but not put behind the publisher’s paywall, i.e. it is disseminated without charge. Another is the pre-print process whereby authors can post a pre-proof copy of their paper on a preprint server. Preprints are copies of papers that can be posted prior to peer review and are freely available, typically with Creative Commons or similar licenses. Pre-prints were originally opposed by the publishers, but the arrival of open access mandates led to a sudden shift where publishers now risk having their journals abandoned by authors if they refuse to accept articles with posted preprints. Many new preprint servers, some “altruistically” funded by publishers, others funded by Foundations, have sprung up in response.
As for post-proof Open Access copies published in the journals, there are still costs to be covered so if the user is not going to pay for access, who covers the costs? Why, the author of course! (The cost would possibly be covered from whatever grant the author was using to research the topic, but often there is insufficient funding to cover these costs. Sometimes there is assistance provided by the author’s institution). Cost can vary significantly but are typically in the low thousands of dollars although it can cost over $12,000 to publish an Open Access article in Nature. The point is there are legitimate costs to be covered and somebody needs to pay, unless the author has uploaded a pre-print version. But that is not how Sci-Hub works. Peer-reviewed, published works are hijacked and placed in Sci-Hub’s repository through various means such as illicit sharing of passwords, leaked credentials from students or faculty who have legitimate access through their institutional libraries, or apparently through more nefarious means such as phishing. Police in the UK reported that 42 UK universities had been “hacked” by Sci-Hub by tricking students into revealing their log in credentials.
For the academic and scientific publishers, Sci-Hub is a growing problem and so they have taken action, as in the recent case of India. In 2015 Sci-Hub was sued in the US by both Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS). Elsevier won a $15 million judgement; ACS was awarded $4.8 million. Sci-Hub was not represented in court and despite the judgements, continues to operate despite losing its domain. Not surprisingly, the damages were not paid. In the UK, the publishers took a different approach, successfully obtaining site blocking orders, an approach also taken in a number of EU member states, including France, Germany and Sweden. But India was the big test, given significant support in India for Sci-Hub and the sensitive “decolonialization of knowledge” argument. An “inconvenient truth” regarding this argument, however, is that, according to a 2022 study published in Nature (sorry, paywalled) the country with the second largest number of users of Sci-Hub, after China, is the United States, followed by France, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Germany. The widespread use of VPNs also hides where many users reside.
Why do students in developed countries use Sci-Hub? It is sometimes–perhaps often–quicker and easier than going through an institutional library, where they may have to be physically present or have updated and valid credentials. Piracy is often the course of least resistance for the user, although it comes with costs and risks, such as malware, whether it is pirating academic journals or streaming content. It is for this reason, among others, that many academic institutions warn their students against using Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub has been accused of obtaining and potentially misusing all sorts of other personal information, such as email addresses and social insurance numbers, obtained through using “borrowed” library access credentials.
It has also been accused of undermining the legal Open Access movement. Counter-intuitively, I think Sci-Hub’s role initially likely provided impetus to expand Open Access. As an academic friend put it, while policy makers were trying to figure out how to share the keys to the library, Sci-Hub had broken in through the window and was giving away the books in the back alley. Finding legal ways to minimize the negative impacts of paywalls helped energize Open Access, but now that it is well established, resorting to Sci-Hub for documents weakens the case for Open Access options. As this university library notes;
“The OA movement is a way to transform the research dissemination in a healthy and safe way for the long term without putting users and institutions at risk. If as researchers we are unsatisfied with the current limitations of academic publishing, then the solution is to push for change in how we disseminate our work that don’t necessitate responses like Sci-Hub.”
Now the “Indian domino” has fallen, with a blocking order issued by the Delhi High Court, will this stop Sci-Hub? Not likely, which means there will continue to be a need for regular pushback by the publishers, along with continued work on improving legal open access. Otherwise, the established and essential system of academic and scientific publishing will be undermined by Sci-Hub’s piracy. No-one benefits from that outcome.
While the motivation for academics to get paid for the content they produce is generally not as intense as with other authors (by “authors”, I include artists, photographers, musicians, etc)–because most academics and scientists already get compensated by their employing institutions for the research and writing that goes into an academic publication–they still need compensation. That compensation comes in the form of being able to publish in recognized, academically respected journals. As with any discussion of piracy, the reality is that when free-riding begins to overtake the legitimate dissemination of content, the content creation and distribution model is undermined. By taking various legal means to disable Sci-Hub, the publishers are of course protecting their business model–but they are also protecting the future production and distribution of quality, credible and verifiable knowledge, including content distributed through Open Access models.
© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.