Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate

Working in research, I do see a clear business value that Elsevier&co are providing and why they continue to get their money.

It's acting as an impartial rating/filtering service for the non-scientist administrators.

In essence, the funding agencies want a way to evaluate scientists and institutions without asking their scientists and institutions to do so, probably because they don't trust them, and also because they have very strong incentives to avoid making any subjective judgment themselves but instead defer to some "objective" outside source - so they use paper counts published in "proper places" or the existence of papers published in "very good places" as the evaluation metric to circumvent the (genuinely very hard!) problem of evaluating the quality/quantity of the actual research done.

And so this incentive, attached to much of the money flowing within academia, trickles down to evaluation of people when hiring and promoting (the committees also often look at paper counts and publication venue rankings instead of trying to evaluate the actual papers - which is time-consuming, and if the papers are not in "your field", then very hard to make an informed judgement) and so to the individual motivations of almost all the people in the system, who have to take into account the "proper publishing rituals" or severely limit their career.

So having worked a bit with administration and evaluation of funding proposals I kind of see why something like that is valuable in general, the main problem being is that the costs are enormous and not really commensurate with the provided value - however, all the costs and barriers are suffered by "someone else" (i.e. the scientific community), while all this value is provided exactly to the funding decision makers who have the power to prevent replacing the current system of Elsevier&co, but don't really suffer from its problems. And when I say "funding decision makers" I don't mean people who have the money and personally care about if it's spent efficiently, I mean all the administrators and bureaucrats running the process of allocating someone else's money or hiring scientists in e.g. some public institution, and whatever "sticks and carrots" these administrators have in their career. This means that to outcompete the current process, any solution would have to benefit them (not the scientists) or it won't be accepted and used, and it's hard to imagine what that would be since there's a huge barrier of entry (e.g. it must work for evaluating/ranking all scientists/institutions, across all disciplines and across all the decades of previous work, or it's not useful) and a huge inertia, as the criteria are also included in very many hard to change legal documents e.g. contracts for long-term funding projects, bylaws and processes of many organizations and committees, actual laws regulating funding institutions, etc; if we had a clear winning replacement launched today, it would still take at least 5-10 years to switch to it.

IMHO the way to change is not a competing solution - it requires institutional change, with the major decision makers simply choosing to make decisions on different factors that do not include the metrics of Elsevier et al. Here's a talk by Stonebraker which gives a strong related argument - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA&t=1220s . However, this institutional change is not that likely because, as I said, for the people who can change this there's little incentive to change, and the people who would benefit from this change are not in a position to make it.

If authors kept their copyrights and submitted the articles to the likes of sci-hub themselves, they would enjoy higher citations and virtually everyone would do this and all this would be legal. But now journals are keeping uncountable number of articles as hostage in order to parasitize on publicly funded institutions and universities. Higher education places in Africa and other poor parts of the world that don't have resources are unable to lawfully access the papers, it's not just morally wrong, the current system is throttling the progress of science and harms the research in important subjects.

For a woman in the similar age, I would say she is more deserving of Nobel Peace Prize than Malala Yousafzai.

The risk that Malala takes in advocating for women right in Islamic countries is admirable, there is no denying in that. However, her impact are minuscule compared to Alexandra's in the big picture of progression as a human race. Malala's activism has not changed much on the course of women right in the countries where religion governs the lives from family to governance.

I think open and transparent science is really important if we want to adopt evidence based policies in a democratic society.

However, when it comes to law I don’t think there really is a “what science says it should be”. We can use the scientific method and evidence based reasoning to assess the likely outcome of any law or policy change, but figuring out what outcomes were as society are willing to accept given all the reasons trade offs is not a scientific question.

Unfortunately I’m not sure just having open and transparent science will be enough when so many seem uninterested in having a good faith conversation about the evidence and its implications

I don’t think there is either. It ignores the fundamentally solipsistic nature of “the truth”, and perhaps more importantly the fact that science can’t tell you what values to have, or what concerns to prioritize. It’s a methodology for refining knowledge, not designing a society.

But in the realm of governance, science is frequently used (or perhaps abused) as an unassailable authority to justify a wide variety of policy positions. I generally consider this to be a governance anti-pattern, but so long as science is being used to justify technocratic policy, it should be available for all of us to make our own judgements about.