Sci-Hub is an online search engine with over 58,000,000 academic papers and articles available for direct download, bypassing publisher paywalls. New papers are uploaded daily when accessed through educational institution proxies, and papers that have been accessed through Sci-Hub are stored in the LibGen repository.
Sci-hub was founded by Kazakh 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.
In 2015 academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint in New York City against...