Knew from the title it's going to be about SciHub. As someone who is just out of a grad programme and no longer has access to the university network, I'm incre

Knew from the title it's going to be about SciHub. As someone who is just out of a grad programme and no longer has access to the university network, I'm incredibly thankful to her. I wish putting papers on ArXiV were the norm in all disciplines, not just math/physics/cs, but until that happens, this is the answer (and when it does, SciHub will essentially become a mirror). The licensing deals that the publishers have made with countries like Germany are still extortion, and aren't a solution. You can learn more about SciHub, and LibGin (a similar project for science books which mirrors SciHub articles) from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub The Wiki page also lists mirrors, in case any of the domains are blocked. If you have some bitcoin to spare, SciHub is donation-supported, and you can help the fight to make science available to the people that do it - and everyone else. ---------------------------- For those out of the loop: currently, access to papers done by scientists (paid for by government/their home institution), typeset by the same scientists, reviewed by their peers (for free) and distributed electronically costs bug bucks to access. The publishers still cite hosting/maintenance costs as a justification, and yet when someone manages to do the same for free (e.g. SciHub), the publishers go to war. SciHub demonstrates that hosting costs are not a justification for atrocious access fees (to the tune of $30 to see one paper!), and yet the racketeering scheme (a relic from the days of Guttenberg's press) still, somehow, persists. To address this problem, people in certain disciplines (math, physics) currently publish their pre-prints online on sites like ArXiV and their own university pages. However, these self-publication methods are not peer-reviewed, and so are not a direct solution to the problem. Some big-name scientists have started open-access online journals, but it's hard to get everyone on board, as academic performance evaluations are based on publications in well-established journals -- so only established academics can afford to be published in new journals when more established alternatives are present, but have little motivation to do so, since the university pays the access fee anyway. SciHub is the interim solution to this chicken-and-egg problem. The long-term solution is still SciHub, but legal. Alexandra Elbakyan has done the footwork on the implementation side, the rest of the battle is going to be social (getting the academics on board) and legal (preventing the publishers like Elsevier from crushing the initiative, and, in the long run, destroying their monopoly on providing access to government-funded research altogether -- which means, effectively, wiping them out altogether). All of this is talked about in the article in more detail.