© Alex Castro
It wasn't long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. "I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like 'Well, that's... that's a real problem.' There's no literal translation," Elbakyan tells me in Russian. "It's basically 'That's an ass.' But it doesn't translate perfectly into English. It's more like 'That's f*cked up. We're f*cked.'"
Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to the academic publishers' business model
The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn't happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. But even after receiving the "YOU HAVE BEEN SUED" email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business.
That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.
But as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers.
Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. But that conversation - at least in English - took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place. Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. Now, even though Elbakyan stands at the center of an argument about how copyright is enforced on the internet, most people have no idea who she is.
The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009," Elbakyan says. As a student doing research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she ran across an obstacle encountered by students the world over: paywalls. Most science journals charge money to access their articles. And the prices have only been rising.
How much? Exact estimates are hard to come by. Research by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) suggests that the cost of libraries' subscriptions to journals only increased by 9 percent between 1990 and 2013. But as Library Journal's annual survey pointed out, there was a change in ARL's data collection. That estimate, Library Journal said, "flies in the face of reality." Library Journal's records showed that a year's subscription to a chemistry journal in the US ran, on average, for $4,773; the cheapest subscriptions were to general science journals, which only cost $1,556 per year. Those prices make these journals inaccessible to most people without institutional access - and they're increasingly difficult for institutions to finance as well. "Those who [have] been involved with purchasing serials in the last 20 years know that serial prices represent the largest inflationary factor for library budgets," the Library Journal report says.
Taken together, universities' subscriptions to academic journals often cost $500,000 to $2 million. Even Harvard said in 2012 that it couldn't afford journals' rising fees, citing, in particular, two publishers that had inflated their rates by 145 percent within six years. Germany's University of Konstanz dropped its subscription to Elsevier's journals in 2014, saying its prices had increased by 30 percent in five years.
The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Over half of all research, according to one study, is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. That's a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. And that's just for natural and medical science papers; the social sciences have it worse. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five's pages; now it's more than half. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players.
Profits and market caps for the publishers have also swelled. Elsevier, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. It has reported a nearly 39 percent profit margin for its scientific publishing arm - which dwarfs, by comparison, the margins of tech titans such as Apple, Google, and Amazon.
If you're looking to access an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to pay, says Peter Suber, director of Harvard's Open Access Project. But there is a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access repositories like Cornell's Arxiv.org.
Suber is one of the loudest voices for Open Access movement. He was one of the original architects of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that established the most widely used definition of Open Access: "free availability on the public internet," with the only constraint on sharing of research being authors' "control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." It also established the movement's mandate to make Open Access the default method of publishing within a decade.
That hasn't happened yet, but the movement has inspired people to create thousands of Open Access journals including PLOS (the Public Library of Sciences). The movement has also pushed many publishers to allow scientists to upload their research to Open Access repositories like Arxiv.org - which are currently the largest legal source of Open Access papers. The movement has been so successful that even the government has shown signs of supporting it. For instance, in 2013, the Obama administration mandated that copies of research conducted through federal agencies must be uploaded to free repositories within 12 months of publishing.
Many students like Elbakyan simply email studies' authors, or tweet the article's information with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF hoping someone will send them a copy if they're blocked by a paywall. But these methods, like scouring Arxiv, tend to be hit-or-miss. So when Elbakyan found herself facing paywall after paywall, she began to wonder why she shouldn't just jump them.
Elbakyan had been following the Open Access movement and was an ardent fan of MIT's OpenCourseWare - an initiative through which the university makes virtually all of its coursework available - since 2008. She'd also always been fascinated with neuroscience, especially the articles by the neurologist-turned-writer (and longtime head of The Guardian's Neurophilosophy blog) Mo Costandi. Elbakyan became convinced that untapped potential was hidden in the human brain. She particularly liked the idea of the "global brain," a neuroscience-inspired idea by futurists that an intelligent network could facilitate information storage and transfer - driving communication between people in real time, the way that neurons that fire together wire together.
"I started thinking about the idea of a brain-machine interface that can connect minds in the same way computer network does," Elbakyan says. If a human's mind could be connected to a bird's, she wondered, could we truly experience what it felt like soar?
At first, these were just philosophical musings. However, Elbakyan was compelled by how neural interfaces could enable people to share information, even across language barriers, with unprecedented speed. "Later, I expanded the idea to include not only hard interfaces that would connect people directly neuron-by-neuron, but also soft interfaces, such as speech, that we use every day to communicate." She cared less about the form than the function: she wanted a global brain. To her, paywalls began to seem like the plaques in an Alzheimer's-riddled mind, clogging up the flow of information.
Her inspirations also took a slightly more nationalistic bent. Elbakyan studied the writings of Russian neurofuturist thinkers like Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. In 2011, she attempted to create a Russian-language PLOS-style Open Access journal. (She failed to find enough scientists who were interested.) Later that year, Elbakyan even applied to the Skolkovo Innovation Center, Russia's self-styled answer to Silicon Valley.
Political theory provided new growth to her evolving Open Access philosophy. Communism, a model of government-less society in which resources and opportunity are metered out with equality and impartiality, has never been successfully implemented. Nevertheless, it was a particularly seductive concept to Elbakyan. The collective ideals of communism entwined for her with the ideals of the scientific method. After all, science depends on shared data. History's greatest scientific discoveries have all been made and shared, as scientists often say, from atop the shoulders of giants: their scientific predecessors who shared their research. To Elbakyan, science thrives only when scientists shout their discoveries to everyone.
According to Elbakyan, communism and science share a common mission, which she refers to as "scientific communism." It's a concept she came to borrow from the 20th century American sociologist Robert Merton, who founded the sociology of science, a study of science as a social practice. (Merton coined influential terms such as "self-fulfilling prophecy," "role model," and "unintended consequences.") Most influential to Elbakyan were Merton's "norms," which were what he considered to be the defining characteristics of science: universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and, of course, communism. (Throughout our interview, she's still quick to rattle off quotes from Merton, declaring, "The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as 'private property' in a capitalistic economy.")
Elbakyan's scientific communism mirrors the Western association between democracy and information openness. (Take the commonly used American expression "the democratization of... ") Her intellectual convictions informed the growing vehemence with which Elbakyan insisted that absolutely unfettered access was the only acceptable level of access the public should have to discoveries. Ultimately, she concluded that in an age where scientists can publish their research "directly on the internet," or through paywall-free Open Access journals, traditional publishers will inevitably fade into obsolescence.
To Open Access activists like Elbakyan and Suber, since most research is publicly funded, paywall journals have essentially made most science a twice-paid product, bought first by taxpayers and secondly by scientists.
On the whole, scientific publishing has become a market increasingly characterized by consolidation, soaring subscription fees, and rising profit margins. As a result, plenty of scientists, students, and journalists alike have come to see an empire of academic piracy as a necessity, raising the question: what value do publishers add to any given paper?
Richard Van Noorden probed this very question in a 2013 article in Nature that looked at the meteoric rise of Open Access journals. These journals had an unassuming start in the late 1980s and '90s with a handful of obscure digital publications. Many of these were the result of scientists, entrepreneurs, and editors from paywall publications who were inspired by the Open Access movement and struck out to start their own publications. Within just a few decades, these journals have come to account for 28 percent of all published research that's ever been issued a Digital Object Identifier - essentially a type of URL for research. As the article pointed out, many Open Access publishers charge scientists fees - often anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to around two thousand - for processing their articles, whether they're accepted or not.
Standard publishers, by contrast, generally charge much less if they require processing fees at all. In return, they find peer reviewers, check for plagiarism, edit, typeset, commonly add graphics, convert files into standard formats such as XML, and add metadata. They distribute print and digital copies of research. Their press departments, especially for more prestigious journals, are well-oiled machines. They churn out perspicuous press releases and help journalists get in touch with experts, enforcing embargo periods where media outlets can review research and formulate their coverage before it goes live - which creates incentives for publications like The Verge to cover more of their studies.
Many publishers also do original journalism and commentary, thanks to the work of large, costly full-time staffs of editors, graphic designers, and technical experts. "But not every publisher ticks all the boxes on this list, puts in the same effort or hires costly professional staff," wrote Van Noorden in the Nature article. "For example, most of PLoS ONE's editors are working scientists, and the journal does not perform functions such as copy-editing." Publishing powerhouses like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have estimated its internal cost per-article to be around $3,700. Nature, meanwhile, says that each article sets it back around $30,000 to $40,000 - an unreasonable amount to expect scientists to pay if they were to go Open Access.
Charging a fee isn't the only business model for Open Access journals, Suber says: 70 percent of peer-review Open Access models don't do it. Moreover, thanks in large part to pressure by Open Access activists like Suber, many journals allow scientists to deposit a copy of their work in repositories like Arxiv. Elbakyan, on the other hand, wants Open Access fees covered up front in research grants.
This question of what value publishers add was front and center in coverage on Elsevier and Elbakyan's case. The New York Times asked, "Should All Research Papers Be Free?" When Science Magazine worked with Elbakyan to map Sci-Hub's user statistics, it discovered that a quarter of Sci-Hub downloads were from the 34 richest countries on Earth. Elbakyan argues Sci-Hub is a tool of necessity, and its massive usership in poor countries seems to strengthen her case. But the 25 percent of users from wealthy countries suggests Sci-Hub is a tool of convenience, says James Milne, a spokesman for the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a consortium that represents the interests of big publishers. (When I contacted Elsevier for comment on this story, I was referred to Milne.) The CRS was originally formed by a coterie of five publishing giants - Elsevier, ACS, Brill, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer - to pressure scientist social networking site Researchgate into taking down 7 million unauthorized copies of their papers.
Before Elbakyan was a pirate, she was an aspiring scientist with a knack for philosophizing and computer programming. "I started programming before even being in school," Elbakyan says. Once enrolled, she developed a program that would ultimately serve as a precursor for Sci-Hub: a script that circumvented paywalls, using MIT's subscription programs to download neuroscience books. "It wasn't working exactly the same as Sci-Hub, but it was delivering the same result: going around paywalls and downloading those books." She often shared these books with other users on a Russian biology forum she frequented, molbiol.ru, which would prove to lay the groundwork for Sci-Hub's debut.
"Sci-Hub started as an automation for what I was already doing manually," Elbakyan says. It grew organically from her desire to let people download papers "at the click of a button." Users loved it. Sci-Hub's use proliferated across the forum immediately - though it took longer for it to outgrow the forum.
Russia's weak intellectual property protection had long made it one of the largest piracy hubs among major economies. This was an advantage for Elbakyan in creating Sci-Hub, but she soon found herself watching Russia and Kazakhstan's dialogue on piracy shift. For years, the focus had been entertainment, but now it was rapidly pivoting toward academic piracy. New anti-piracy laws, which targeted what Elbakyan saw as essential information sharing, hit home for her: in Kazakhstan, illicit file-sharing had just become punishable by up to five years in prison. She felt that the only responsible choice was to join the fray herself.
When Elbakyan started Sci-Hub in 2011, "it was a side project," she says. She operated it without a repository for downloaded articles. With every request for a paper, a new copy was downloaded through a university's subscription. It would automatically be deleted six hours later. If, for some reason, a person couldn't access a paper through one university's servers, they could switch and download them through another's.
In 2012, she struck a partnership with LibGen, which had only archived books until then. LibGen asked Elbakyan to upload the articles Sci-Hub was downloading. Then, in 2013, when Sci-Hub's popularity began to explode in China, she started using LibGen as an offsite repository. Instead of downloading and deleting new copies of papers or buying expensive hard drives, she retooled Sci-Hub to check if LibGen had a copy of a user's requested paper first. If so, she pulled it from its archive.
That worked well until the domain LibGen.org, went down, deleting 40,000 papers Elbakyan had collected, probably because one of its administrators died of cancer. "One of my friends suggested to start actively collecting donations on Sci-Hub," she says. "I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers. Around 1 million of these papers [were] uploaded from Sci-Hub. The other[s], as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the darknet." From then on, LibGen's database would simply be her backup.
Elbakyan is reluctant to disclose much about how she secured access to so many papers, but she tells me that most of it came from exploiting libraries and universities' subscriptions, saying that she "gained access" to "around 400 universities."
It's likely that many of the credentials Elbakyan secured came from leaked login information and lapses in universities' security. One official at Marquette University, alleges to have seen evidence of Sci-Hub phishing for credentials. Elbakyan vociferously denies this and has previously said that many academics have even offered their login information. That could explain how Sci-Hub downloads some papers "directly from publishers," as she has previously claimed.
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