Why Sci-hub Should be Here?

Dear Sir/Madam, Sci-Hub is helping global researchers in an unprecedented way. Without this website we would have not been able to access global scholarly literature. Even today most of the scholarly publications are paywalled content. Alxandra Elkabayn the founder of this revolutionary website has time and again put forth her side of story how she struggled to access scholarly literature for her project work in her country. This story is similar to India and most of the Asian countries as well. How many of us individually or our institution have access to major scholarly literature. Even today many of the top notch universities in India have not been able to provide access to major databases leave aside access to full-text articles. Research communication was limited for learned societies for long after two world wars and emergence of industrial and information society it was exploited commercially. learned societies without any commercial interest have sustained the scholarly publications for so long. Now researchers involving in the production of knowledge have to pay to access their own content or knowledge. And we should also not allow scholarly communications to be in the hands of few commercial publishers. We must also remember Aran Swartz who gave away his life for making knowledge free for all. With same ethos Alexandra Elbakyan has also created Sci-Hub. The Sci-hub statistics has shown that India is one of the top countries in terms of number of downloads through Sci-Hub. Why we were using this site extensively, because of lack of access to scholarly literature. The efforts of Aran Swartz led to the invention of creative commons which is helping authors to make their research open and already Alxandra Elkabayn's Sci-Hub has also pushed the major publishers to adopt open access initiatives or making certain contents open for users. At least for this we must thankful for Alxandra Elkabayn and Sci-Hub. Sci-hub instead of stifling the scientific publishing has expanding its horizon more towards open science. The fruits of open science is very much visible during this pandemic crisis as well. The COVID-19 vaccine research and development is prime example for this. ------------------------- With best wishes Vasantha Raju N.LibrarianMysore
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Vasanth