Researchers in India worry about access amid Sci-Hub ban

Researchers in India fear they may have limited access to academic papers after an Indian court’s decision to block the pirate website Sci-Hub, which provides illegal access to millions of scholarly papers. On Aug. 19, a Delhi High Court judge ordered India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and its Department of Telecommunications to block Sci-Hub and its sister site Library Genesis (LibGen) within 72 h. The decision was in response to a petition filed in 2020 by the scientific publishing giants Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society. It alleged mass copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and LibGen and asked for the sites to be blocked permanently in India. (C&EN is published by ACS but is editorially independent.)At the time, the Indian court asked Sci-Hub not to upload any more papers, and the latter agreed. But after finding studies from 2022 on the site, the court ordered a blanket ban on Sci-Hub and its sister sites until further notice, Indian media reported. Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan called the uploading a “technical error.”Elbakyan didn’t reply to a request for comment. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for Dec. 1. A joint statement issued by the plaintiffs on Aug. 26 says: “Pirate websites such as Sci-Hub and Sci-Net threaten the safety of university and personal student and proprietary data.” Sci-Net is Sci-Hub’s social network site.“They compromise the security of libraries and higher education institutions by gaining unauthorized access to scientific databases and other intellectual property and illegally extract journal articles and e-books. The