The 'Sci-Hub' community provides a very useful website through different domains, and the website name remains as sci-hub.
Sci-Hub is the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers. A research paper is a special publication written by scientists to be read by other researchers. Papers are primary sources necessary for research – for example, they contain detailed description of new results and experiments. The research papers Sci-Hub have in their library is more than 64,500,000 and growing (Source: Sci-Hub).
These days the URL http://sci-hub.tw/ is functional.
The Sci-Hub bypasses publisher paywalls by allowing access through educational institution proxies. Sci-Hub stores papers in its own repository, and additionally the papers downloaded by Sci-Hub are also stored in Library Genesis (LibGen). Sci-Hub was founded by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, as a reaction to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls, typically US$30 each when bought on a per-paper basis (Source: Wikipedia).
The Sci-Hub has also faced legal issues by publishers because it cause them loss of revenue. Sci-Hub has been controversial, lauded by parts of the scientific and academic communities and condemned by a number of publishers.
According to Wikipedia information 'The Sci-Hub project started running on 5 September 2011, created by Alexandra Elbakyan (photo attached), a software developer and neuro-technology researcher from Kazakhstan. Her stated goal is to help spread knowledge by allowing more people to access otherwise paywalled content. Elbakyan claims she could not have performed research at a Kazakh university had she not similarly "pirated" articles through research sharing forums, given the need to access hundreds of articles at 32 dollars each. After getting highly involved with and sending out hundreds of papers she started developing ways to automate the process'.
The ideas that Sci-Hub follows are "Knowledge to all, No copy right and open access."
Hats off to the great initiative.
The Sci-Hub wants donation and states that-
"The project is supported by user donations. Imagine the world with free access to knowledge for everyone ‐ a world without any paywalls. Donate for this vision to become true. Make your contribution to the battle against copyright laws and information inequality. Even the smallest donation counts.Send you contribution to the Bitcoin address:1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM"
Note: We do not intend to promote the piracy in any form. But the research papers from some journals are really costly, may be priced as 32 dollars each. Therefore, being a researcher, access to any type of research work from a platform is applaudable.
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