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The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Over half of all research, according to one study, is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. That’s a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. And that’s just for natural and medical science papers; the social sciences have it worse. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five’s pages; now it’s more than half. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players. That worked well until the domain LibGen.org, went down, deleting 40,000 papers Elbakyan had collected, probably because one of its administrators died of cancer. “One of my friends suggested to start actively collecting donations on Sci-Hub,” she says. “I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers. Around 1 million of these papers [were] uploaded from Sci-Hub. The other[s], as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the darknet.” From then on, LibGen’s database would simply be her backup. Elbakyan created several more backup copies of Sci-Hub’s database. She rewrote Sci-Hub’s code, starting from square one, so that the service could download papers automatically. Now, once users pointed Sci-Hub toward an article, the site would check every university proxy server until it found one through which it could download the paper, and would download it automatically. They didn’t have to manually browse the publisher’s website through Sci-Hub to find the articles anymore.
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