Sci-Hub describes itself as "the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers". At the time of writing, there were 77.5 million academic papers available on the site. Many, perhaps most, of them were funded by taxpayers, through government grants to researchers working at educational institutions. The person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, presumably sees her site as a way of letting people have access to the work they paid for. The publishing giant Elsevier doesn't agree. For some reason, it seems to think it has a right to a profit margin of 35-40% arising from its role as a gatekeeper to the papers that the public has paid for.
The resulting David and Goliath battle between Sci-Hub and Elsevier has been raging for years, and follows a predictable pattern. Elsevier spends lots of money getting a court somewhere to shut down one way of accessing Sci-Hub, and the latter simply finds an alternative -- by moving to a new domain, for example. As TorrentFreak reports, Elsevier has just "won" another pointless legal battle:
Publishing giant Elsevier has emerged as a major player with arch-rivals Sci-Hub ('The Pirate Bay of Science') and Libgen (Library Genesis) as its key targets. Late last week, Austrian ISP T-Mobile revealed that it had begun blocking several Sci-Hub and Libgen related domains following a supervisory procedure carried out by local telecoms regulator TKK.
Most of the 24 domains blocked in Austria concern the less well-known LibGen, which describes itself as: "a community aiming at collecting and cataloging items descriptions for the most part of scientific, scientific and technical directions, as well as file metadata."
It's not clear from the article whether the block will automatically be implemented by all Austrian ISPs, or just some of them. It doesn't really matter. In either case, the blocks are easily circumvented. That's the irony here: the more companies like Elsevier try to stop people accessing Sci-Hub and LibGen, the more people get to hear about them (hello, Streisand Effect). Moreover, the more people discover they are blocked from accessing these sites directly, the more they will seek out technical workarounds: installing a VPN, or accessing material via Tor. These approaches have the collateral benefit of giving users access to other blocked sites, and improving their overall security. Thanks, Elsevier.
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