Illegal or Admirable?
Sci-Hub is an online service that allows people to download articles from academic journals. Normally, these articles would only be accessed through universities with a subscription or an expensive fee for each scholarly work. The tool downloads it from a university database and delivers it to the user via pdf. Alexandra Elbayakan, the creator, developed Sci-Hub because of the absurd prices to access these journals. People who attended schools that do not have subscriptions to such academic journals especially benefit from such a tool because they do not have to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on specific articles.
On the other hand, there are some negative aspects to Sci-Hub. Publishers of these academic journals like Elsevier are hurt greatly because of the business that they are losing to people that are utilizing this information without paying for it. In addition, the elite reputation of the peer review process regarding these journals is tainted. If they can be released and accessed by anyone, then the credibility of the information could potentially diminish. The actions of Elbayakan create an interesting predicament. On one hand, she is allowing people that cannot afford academic journals access to invaluable information. Yet, her actions are quite unfair because she is simply decreasing the value of the hard work by the academics whose articles are made available through her service. Also, she could be breaking the law through copyright infringement. I respect her motives because she is doing it for the spreading of high education that some could not obtain otherwise.
