Access to research outputs continues to dominate research policy making, with the overwhelming majority of research funders now requiring that articles linked to funded projects are openly available, and open access publication a de facto requirement for the REF. Though many publishers are now supporting this mode of publication and shifting their income expectations from subscriptions to article processing charges accordingly, universitiy libraries and private researchers still face significant costs in accessing earlier research.
In this context the work of Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, while – to be clear – is illegal, is a significant intervention. Recent research has shown that more than 97% of requests for articles from this service are successful – and with the continually expanding corpus mirrored in numerous locations around the world the genie is firmly outwith the bottle. Scholarly publishers, and research policy more generally, now operate in a post-Sci-Hub world.