Elbakyan: A Slippery Online Service
March 2, 2022
Paywalls stink. The justification for paywalls is that they keep organizations and publications funded and this makes sense. However, most independent researchers cannot afford the often high fees that educational institutes and corporations have no choice but pay. Other than expensive fees, paywalls prevent important research from being shared.
Alexandra Elbakyan decided to circumvent paywalls as she pursued knowledge and became an expert programmer at a young age. The reason she became an expert programmer was her desire to create her own Tamagotchi program. She failed creating a digital pet, but she did succeed in gathering lots of information and the desire to share it.
Elbakyan designed Sci-Hub, a scientific database that:
“Sci-Hub collected a database of 88,343,822 research documents, freely available for download. Around 80% of the collection are research articles published in journals, 6% are papers from conference proceedings, 5% are book chapters, the rest are other types of documents. 77% of the documents available through Sci-Hub were published between 1980 and 2020, and 36% between 2010 and 2020. The coverage is > 95% for all major scientific publishers. The total size of Sci-Hub database is about 100 TB.”
Elbakyan’s Sci-Hub is an excellent tool for researchers who do not have the privilege of a bypassing paywalls through an educational institute or corporations. Knowledge does need to be shared, especially if it can assist in benefiting humanity.
The only problem is Elbakyan’s questionable celebration of communism and Josef Stalin. She also believes in astrology. It is a stereotype that programmers are oddballs, but applauding the dictator who is second only to Mao in murdering the most people in history and a market system theory that has been proven not to work is not good. Also astrology is junk science.
Whitney Grace, March 2, 2022
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