The ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Adds 2 Million New Journal Articles

On September 5, 2011, the Sci-Hub was born. It's a place where people can find scientific studies that are typically hidden behind expensive paywalls for free. The site is constantly under legal threat and only periodically uploads. On its tenth birthday, it did what it does best. Uploaded paywalled articles to a database where anyone can read them. In honor of such a round date, two million have been added to the server today, namely 2,337,229 new articles," neuroscientist turned scientific paper pirate Alexandra Elbakyan said in a blog post announcing the upload.

According to Elbakyan, most of the more than 2 million articles come from Netherlands based publisher Elsevier-which often leads the legal charge against Sci Hub-and international publisher Springer. There's 398,548 articles about medicine, 184,598 about engineering, 171,929 about chemistry, and 7 dentistry articles. Nothing surprising, these are the largest publishers today," Elbakyan said.

It's a huge upload and a sign of strength and defiance from a long embattled website. In 2015, a judge ruled that the site violated U.S. copyright and ordered an injunction against its operators. In 2017, another U.S. court awarded publisher Elsevier $15 million in damages related to copyright violations. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice opened an investigation into the site for alleged ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

But Elbakyan lives in Russia and it's been hard for U.S. officials to collect that cash or shut down the site. When it is threatened, its users come together to back up the data. In May of this year, when it looked as if the site may go down, its users rallied to back up its 77 terabytes of data.

All that collected human knowledge was spread across 85 million articles. On the site's birthday, it's grown just a little more.