"How to Access Research Articles for Free"
The first issues of the first scientific journals were published back in 1665,
in which it was noted things like, hey, it looks like there's a spot on Jupiter,
thanks to new telescopes invented by a certain Mr. Newton,
whose friend Halley described a comet.
The same journal that reported that oranges and lemons could cure scurvy,
and something in willow tree bark could bring down a fever.
Also published, a letter by some guy over in the colonies
about playing with kites during lightning storms,
and an account of a remarkable 8-year-old musician by the name of Amadeus,
and within this last century some sketchings of the structure
of some molecule called DNA.
A journal still in publication to this day, 350 years later,
available now online and in print
for the low, low subscription price of only $6,666 a year.
As you can imagine, the high price of journals
leaves doctors in developing countries
missing out on relevant information about health.
At that time, back in the '90s, there was optimism that by 2004 at least,
the problem of access to life-saving scientific information would be solved.
But 2004 came and went, setting their sights for 2015.
Surely by then we can achieve health information for all,
as lack of access remained a major barrier.
Realistically, only scientists at really big, well-funded universities
in the developed world may have full access to published research,
and as prices rise even higher, even that may no longer be true.
You know there's a problem when even Harvard,
as in $30-billion-dollar- endowment Harvard,
claims that costs for research journals are now prohibitive.
Meanwhile, the journal publishers are raking in billions
charging institutions up to $35,000 a year per journal,
and charging individuals online per article.
So you have a family member diagnosed with some disease and you go online.
You can read all sorts of internet drek,
but if you want to see the actual science, it can get expensive.
And you likely paid for the research.
Tax dollars pour in to fund the research,
and then you can't get access to the research you paid for.
It's like if a nice little city park was built,
but then some private firm came in and started to charge admission.
That's roughly how it works with scientific research,
and this conversion of public research dollars into private publishing profits
has long been a source of discontent.
The publishers don't end up paying anything for the research.
They get it for free; they don't pay the researchers anything.
So we pay for it, and then we have to pay for it again if we want to read it.
So it can end up with science as a profit system, rather than science as knowledge.
Enter Alexandra ElBakyan, nicknamed by some the Robin Hood of Science.
It's the story of how one researcher made nearly every scientific paper ever published
available for free to everyone, anywhere in the world.
Named by perhaps the most prestigious scientific journal in the world
as one of the top 10 people who mattered the most in science in 2016,
Alexandra started out as just a frustrated grad student in Kazakhstan,
unable to access the scholarly papers she needed for her research.
Once she figured out how to circumvent all the paywalls,
she started a website, now at sci-hub.io [2018 update: try sci-hub.la],
to remove all barriers in the way of science
by giving away the world's scientific, medical, and nutrition literature for free.
"What she did is nothing short of awesome," said one researcher.
"Lack of access to the scientific literature is a massive injustice,
and she fixed it with one fell swoop."