Content area
Full Text
The founder of an illegal hub for paywalled papers has attracted litigation and acclaim.
It took Alexandra Elbakyan just a few years to go from information-technology student to famous fugitive.
In 2009, when she was a graduate student working on her final-year research project in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Elbakyan became frustrated at being unable to read many scholarly papers because she couldn't afford them. So she learnt how to circumvent publishers' paywalls.
Her skills were soon in demand. Elbakyan saw scientists on web forums asking for papers they couldn't access - and she was happy to oblige. "I got thanked many times for sending paywalled papers," she says. In 2011, she decided to automate the process and founded Sci-Hub, a pirate website that grabs copies of research papers from behind paywalls and serves them up to anyone who asks. This year, interest in Sci-Hub exploded as mainstream media cottoned on to it and usage...