{"id":75957,"date":"2018-02-13T01:42:53","date_gmt":"2018-02-13T09:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/sciences-pirate-queen"},"modified":"2018-02-13T01:42:53","modified_gmt":"2018-02-13T09:42:53","slug":"sciences-pirate-queen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/sciences-pirate-queen","title":{"rendered":"Science\u2019s pirate queen"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists\u2019 awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have \u2014 through the Streisand effect \u2014 made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber.<\/p>\n

The threat posed by ACS\u2019s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site \u201ca symptom of a serious problem: people who can\u2019t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don\u2019t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

In cramped quarters at Russia\u2019s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world\u2019s largest publisher: \u201cYOU HAVE BEEN SUED.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. \u201cI remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like \u2018Well, that\u2019s\u2026 that\u2019s a real problem.\u2019 There\u2019s no literal translation,\u201d Elbakyan tells me in Russian. \u201cIt\u2019s basically \u2018That\u2019s an ass.\u2019 But it doesn\u2019t translate perfectly into English. It\u2019s more like \u2018That\u2019s fucked up. We\u2019re fucked.\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists\u2019 awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have \u2014 through the Streisand effect \u2014 made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1496,47,13,224],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-law","category-neuroscience","category-open-access","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}