ISTOCK, SORBETTOOver the past year, major publishers began to crack down on illegal means of accessing paywalled articles for free. In November, the American Chemical Society (ACS) won a default judgement in its case against Sci-Hub, a pirate site for scholarly literature. ResearchGate, an academic social network where many researchers post their published work, also faced legal action—in October, the ACS and Elsevier filed a lawsuit against the site for illegally hosting copyrighted material. ResearchGate then moved to restrict access to 1.7 million articles.
Together, these sites provide scientists access to a vast collection of academic publications: Sci-Hub alone hosts around 65 million research-related documents, such as journal articles and book chapters. “Sci-hub shows people how easy it should be to access scholarly literature,” says Joe McArthur, cofounder of the Open Access Button, a tool that helps researchers legally access articles behind paywalls. “Unfortunately, it is in no way sustainable, and we need to continue to work within the bounds of copyright law to make sure we have community-owned, open infrastructure for accessing research articles.”
Free alternatives to these sites are on the rise. McArthur is among a growing group of individuals who have developed legal means of retrieving paywalled scientific literature for free. These tools—free browser extensions that ...
