What is Sci-Hub?

Sci-Hub: the Pirate Bay of science. The black sheep of academia. By this point, we’ve all heard of it- but how, exactly, did Sci-Hub get started, and why is it so controversial?

Torrent Freak: "Sci Hub loses domain names but remains resilient" (22 nov, 2017)

Sci-Hub is an open access website with “...over 64.5 million academic papers and articles available for direct download.” This number is continually rising.



Sci-Hub ‘pirates’ scientific papers by bypassing the paywalls established by publishers through educational institution proxies. Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions.

When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version. In other words, Sci-Hub pretends to direct user’s traffic from an educational institution that has paid access to the publishing platform, allowing the user to circumvent the high fees generally associated with purchasing rights to a research paper (generally USD$30 or higher per paper).

Pro Sci-Hub

The prices of journals, as some have claimed, may be slowing down the progress of science and scientific research with their barriers. In 2015, academic publishers made over 10 billion USD - the majority of which comes from universities, scholars and academics that are purchasing back the rights to their own research at greatly inflated prices.

To put it bluntly , the journals are too expensive- and as a result impede access to the scientific knowledge contained in their databases. This is no issue for students, researchers and professors at big universities in the Western world- affiliates with Harvard or Cambridge will have little difficulty obtaining the information they need. However, when it comes to smaller universities, more remotely based researchers or researchers based outside of Europe and North America, there may not be a budget available to pay the big publishing houses the fees they charge, either per paper or for a yearly, university-wide subscription.

This is where Sci-Hub comes in. Sci-Hub makes all of these papers freely accessible to anyone interested- without barriers, without paywalls, without the condition that they come from an elite academic background.

Con Sci-Hub

Though it appears to be something of a romantic story- the rogue hacker going up against a bigger, stronger, wealthier corporation- not everything is so clear cut.

One of the arguments against SciHub, and sites like it, is that it removes the agency from the researchers- they are unable to have any control over their work when it is distributed without their knowledge or permission. Another potential negative is that no one is entirely sure how Sci-Hub obtains the permissions to universities’ libraries. It has been speculated by several publishers that this could be the result of phishing attacks- emails sent to professors to obtain their logins without their knowledge. Elbakayan has stated that she has not personally sent any phishing emails.

Further, sites like Elsevier are aware of the problem, and are putting efforts to change both their image and their approach, by offering more and more free programs, and by enabling some research to become public after a set embargo period (for instance, 12 months).

Sci-Hub’s users

Sci-Hub’s users are very diverse - located across the world, they are interested in every scientific discipline imaginable - all 28 million of them (see also this scientific study on Sci-Hub's users). Interestingly, many researchers affiliated to universities, who thus should have proper access, also use Sci-Hubs services.


Sci-Hub was created in 2011, in response to the increasingly high cost of accessing scientific research online. The founder, Alexandra Elbakayan, stated that her goal was to “help spread knowledge by allowing more people to access otherwise paywalled content”.

Big Publishers Revolt

In 2017, Sci-Hub lost two court cases in the United States. The first was against Elsevier, who claimed copyright infringement, and subsequently took control of the SciHub.org domain name. The other was against the American Chemical Society, which arguably had a bigger impact- third party search engines were ordered to stop linking to the new Sci-Hub domains. Interestingly, both court cases cast Sci-Hub in a negative way- citing the operators as ‘hackers’ promoting illegal data sharing, rather than as academics attempting to break down the barriers that publishers impose on the spread of knowledge.

Where is Sci-Hub now?

Sci-Hub, despite losing the court case last year, remains active, albeit under a different domain name. The servers that power the site are based in Russia, and are therefore unaffected by laws, court cases or lawsuits that may occur in the United States. The ever-changing domain is usually listed on Sci-Hub’s Facebook page or on their Twitter.

Domains of Sci-Hub

  • https://sci-hub.la
  • https://tree.sci-hub.la
  • https://sci-hub.mn
  • https://sci-hub.name
  • https://sci-hub.tw
  • https://sci-hub.tv
  • https://sci-hub.hk
  • https://sci-hub.hk
  • https://sci-hub.is
  • https://sci-hub.ws
  • https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link
  • https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion

    • TorrentFreak, Sci-Hub Loses Domain Names, But Remains Resilient
    • ScienceMag, Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
    • TheAtlantic, The Research Pirates of the Dark Web
    • Arstechnica, A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again
    • Reddit, Working Sci-Hub Domains 10-12-2017