Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fraction of a fraction because there's 1) YouTube and 2) Spotify et al. You can listen to music all day with ads and not pay a cent, or you can pay a reasonable fee and get all the HQ music you can eat without ads. Publishers continue to screw content makers, but that's another conversation.

Just trying to ban pirate sources is a wonderful dream for publishers for sure, but there's no way it can work. Scientific papers are just too easy to share, the need for them high, and the current pricing too insane for it to be otherwise.

The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that moved.

Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and precluded any kind of pirate culture.

But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen, the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of momentum for moment.

Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted) the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.

This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to review papers, but one battle at a time.