Academic publishers have been raking in huge profits, and their reluctance to giving open access to academic journals without collecting fees limits researchers. One Russian scientist has found a solution, a new website dubbed “the pirate bay for scientists.” Sci-Hub bypasses publishers by simply making papers available to download for free. Alexandra Elbakyan currently hosts 48 million academic papers on the site, taking inspiration from her own thesis. (She needed to pirate journal articles in order to finish her research.)
