It being illegal didn’t make it unethical, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Apartheid was legal in South Africa until not that long ago, but that didn’t make it ethical.

It was also illegal for African-Americans to drink at “whites only” drinking fountains or stay at “whites only” hotels throughout much of the American south until just a few decades ago. It’s illegal to share an Elsevier article with someone who didn’t pay their $35. True, it is illegal, but it’s not necessarily unethical. A publisher over at Scholarly Kitchen was very hostile about SciHub and kept repeating that it’s illegal. Secondly, nobody without a financial stake in perpetual copyright is going to be especially concerned about the existence of Sci-Hub as such. It’s a clash of values that can’t be reconciled. Researchers at scientific corporations might be different, but academics just won’t care about this. Most of them probably don’t even realize they’re giving up their right to legally share their research hence all the takedown notices from Elsevier to. That’s why they publish in the first place. Doing research and disseminating the results is what researchers do, and they’ve been doing it for centuries. Researchers don’t take copyright of scholarly work seriously because the very concept of making scholarly research unshareable is unthinkable to most of them. One reason this might be popular, and why people might contribute to it, is the contradiction between the sharing culture of academia and the commercial culture of most scientific publishing, which I’ve discussed before.

While I’d prefer to see a more universal sharing of preprints along the lines of arXiv or PhilPapers, preprints aren’t what scholars have access to, so that’s not what they share with Sci-Hub.Ī couple of things to consider. However, the ethics of the existence of the repository itself is very debatable, and aside from the possible network security problems, most academics, including most academic librarians, probably aren’t going to care that much about Sci-Hub.

From what I’ve read, the methods Sci-Hub uses to acquire material range from the dangerous and stupid (e.g., providing strangers access to your network) to the illegal and unethical (e.g.

Sci hub now