Role of Open Access in Combating Censorship

There is a heist currently going on. It is one of the most lucrative scams in the history of modern capitalism and yet we don’t often hear about it in the media.   Global corporations – like Taylor & Francis Group in the picture below – are progressively enclosing scientific knowledge. By controlling peer-reviewed journals, these for-profit companies are able to exploit the voluntary work of researchers who write, review, and edit articles. Taylor & Francis receive ready-to-be-published papers for free and resell them at a high price, keeping all the profits for themselves. Using their monopoly power, they hold universities hostages, forcing them to pay outrageous fees to access knowledge that is actually produced by university researchers. These corporations bring nothing to science, which they treat as a product just like any other. The only reason why they do it is because it’s lucrative. With journals becoming digital, their costs have gone down but not their prices, which are constantly increasing. Their profit margins are unmatched throughout the economy. This is public money being distributed to a minority of (already wealthy) shareholders, the very opposite of redistribution – money tricking up, not down. These predatory practices are a threat to knowledge, endangering the very fabric of science. In times of rampant climate change, the fight for open access has never been more crucial. Making change happen is already complex enough with antiscience movements, greed-driven entrepreneurs, and environmentally blind politicians. But it will get infinitely worse in a world where all the knowledge we have about the climate (and everything else) becomes the property of a handful of profit-craved corporations. A world where small universities cannot afford neither access to knowledge nor access to the peer-review system (because yes, journals start charging submission fees). This is a Black Mirror future in the making. So, fellow academics. We are an irreplaceable ingredient in science making. We are the ones doing all the researching, the writing, the editing, and the peer-reviewing. We are the ones willingly giving them our time and papers for free. Let us just stop. Let us boycott all corporation-owned, for-profit journals until they pledge to keep all science open-access. Let us favour not-for-profit, free-of-charge open-access journals, and let us invent new ways of sharing knowledge outside of this corporate Ponzi scheme. Science is not for sale. Not now, not ever. 

Is this person a genius, a criminal, or an intellectual pirate? In 2011, young neuroscientist and software developer from Kazakhstan decided that she had had enough. Not enough of science but enough of paying for it. Alexandra Elbakyan looked at a world where publicly funded research was often locked behind paywalls charging €20, €30, or more for a single paper. She saw students in developing countries, independent researchers, physicians, educators, and curious citizens effectively excluded from knowledge that had frequently been funded by taxpayers in the first place. So she built Sci-Hub. Over the next decade, Sci-Hub would become one of the most controversial projects in the history of science. More than 88 million research papers were collected (pirated) and made freely available online, bypassing the subscription systems of major academic publishers. Publishers were furious. Researchers were divided, and students celebrated. She was sued and lost, but never paid the fines. Domains simply disappeared and reappeared. Elbakyan has been called a "science pirate," an "intellectual outlaw," and even the "Robin Hood of science." In 2016, Nature named her one of the ten people who mattered most in science that year. But the story does not end with Sci-Hub. Now Elbakyan has taken the next step. The millions of scientific papers that she collected have become the foundation of Sci-Bot, an AI powered scientific research assistant. You read that right. She uploaded all the papers to a LLM. So now, instead of simply searching for papers, users can ask questions in natural language and receive synthesized answers grounded in published research, complete with citations and direct access to source documents. The technology is fascinating but the legal and ethical questions are profound. Copyright law exists for a reason. Publishers invest in infrastructure, editorial systems, archiving, distribution, and quality control. Intellectual property rights underpin much of the modern publishing ecosystem. On the other hand, there is a growing argument that humanity's accumulated scientific knowledge should not be accessible only to those with institutional subscriptions or the ability to pay. After all, if a cancer researcher in Nairobi, a teacher in rural India, or a physician in Peru cannot access the latest scientific findings, who exactly is the system serving? The arrival of GenAI raises the stakes further. For years, the debate was about access to individual papers. Now the debate is about whether entire bodies of human knowledge may be transformed into machine readable intelligence that anyone can query instantly. That is no longer a copyright question alone. It is a question about the future architecture of knowledge itself. So I am curious. Is Alexandra Elbakyan a criminal who built a global copyright infringement machine? A visionary who democratized access to scientific knowledge? Or, is she something more complicated? What do you think?

The remarkable initiative is called The Uncensored Library, a massive virtual library filled with articles, journals, and press freedom reports from countries where media is censored. The idea was to use the popular game as a loophole to bypass censorship in countries where independent journalism is restricted, since Minecraft is often freely accessible even when social media and news sites are blocked. According to the design collective BlockWorks, the library is a massive virtual structure filled with hundreds of books containing articles, journals, and press freedom reports from journalists whose work is banned in their home countries. Visitors can explore its grand halls and read these texts in the form of Minecraft books, making censored information available in a creative and safe way. The library includes material from countries like Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, with new rooms added over time to highlight different regions. The project has attracted millions of visitors and millions of articles read, making it one of the most impactful digital activism efforts in gaming. This initiative demonstrates how digital platforms can be repurposed to protect freedom of expression.

The Delhi High Court has ordered Sci-Hub and Libgen to be blocked in India. On paper, this may look like just a copyright decision. But in reality, for thousands of students and researchers especially those pursuing a PhD without any stipend, grant, or funding. This is a direct hit on access to knowledge. Not everyone can afford subscriptions worth thousands of dollars for every paper. Universities too often lack access to many high-impact journals. For many of us, shadow libraries were not a luxury but a survival tool to keep our research alive. Research should not be a privilege only for the well-funded, it should be a collective effort towards knowledge creation. If we truly want to strengthen India's research ecosystem, then affordable and equitable access to scientific literature is non-negotiable. This is not just about Sci-Hub or Libgen. This is about the future of students who dare to pursue research despite financial constraints. Blocking access without offering a viable alternative only widens the gap between privileged and struggling scholars. 🔑 The question is how do we ensure that knowledge remains accessible for everyone, not just the few who can afford it? #Research #PhDLife #HigherEducation #OpenAccess #AcademicFreedom #ResearchFunding #IndiaResearch #PhDStudents #EducationForAll #KnowledgeShouldBeFree #IndianEducationSystem #IndianStudents

Years ago, Alexandra Elbakyan created Sci-Hub, the site that tore down the paywalls of major academic publishers. Sci-Hub provides free access to millions of scientific articles on a massive scale every day. Every time I needed to have a glance at a publication while I wrote my own just to make sure that the work I have done has not been reported before, I was faced with the dire prospect of spending huge sums in dollars to download that paper because it was not free. That was long ago when someone told me about Sci-Hub where I could download most of the publications free of cost. Initially I was sceptical, but to my surprise, it was true. All that I needed was the title of the paper or better the doi. The doi worked most of the time and I could download my own papers for which the publisher had not given me free access. Imagine, you spend your grant money, time and effort and write and publish a manuscript and you have to pay for the reprint of that article! The publishers were hard hit by Sci-Hub and that could be one reason for them to move into open access mode by charging the authors for publishing the work. For instance top journals like the Nature family charge thousands of dollars for publishing your paper these days because of the open access model. Those papers could be downloaded by anyone because the publisher has already made the money. Still, if you are searching the archives of the journals when there was no open access, you need to pay for reading or downloading the paper. Here, Sci-Hub comes to your rescue. Just enter the doi of the paper and the Sci-Hub retrieves the same in a matter of seconds. Alexandra Elbakyan believed that scientific knowledge belongs to all and should be freely available to all. The Hub has faced numerous problems because of publishers tracking the location of the server and I have heard that she has to shift the server in different locations in different countries over the years. She was always successful. Now, she has just launched a new tool that strikes back at the publishing corporations once more. It's Sci-Bot, an artificial intelligence trained directly with the full texts from her platform. Unlike other chat systems, this one answers your questions by reading the original academic research. The tool delivers exact data without fabricating information and includes a direct link to the document. The big corporations see their business model threatened, as scientific information continues to be set free.