A librarian perspective on Sci-Hub: the true solution to the scholarly communication crisis is in the hands of the academic community, not librarians

Sci-Hub is a pirate website that provides free access to millions of research papers otherwise locked behind paywalls. Widespread dissatisfaction with scholarly communications has led many to overlook or dismiss concerns over the site’s legality, praising its disruptive technology and seeing justification in the free access it affords people all over the world. Ruth Harrison, Yvonne Nobis and Charles Oppenheim discuss the challenges Sci-Hub presents to librarians advocating for open access to scholarly content. Sci-Hub perversely enhances the status of prestige publication and its narrow view of what constitutes value in scholarly communications, its users risk causing their libraries to be in breach of licensing agreements, and the site operates with an utter contempt for copyright law that should not be ignored.