RECORD companies and film studios have had to learn to live with internet piracy. Despite their best attempts to close sites or co-opt them, pirated copies of their wares are easily available. Increasingly, the same is true of scientific papers. On June 21st a court in New York awarded Elsevier, a big scientific publisher, $15m in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and the Library of Genesis, two websites that offer tens of millions of scientific papers and books for anyone to download.
Both sites are increasingly popular with scientists, who use them to dodge pricey paywalls and subscriptions. Alexandra Elbakyan, who founded Sci-Hub in 2011, did not turn up for the trial (nor did the people behind LibGen). But she did send a letter outlining her reasons for starting the site. While at university in Kazakhstan she needed access to hundreds of papers for her studies. But the only way to get them, she said, was to pay $32 per paper, which she described as “just...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/2tq36nh
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