For people who are doing research or Ph. D. Russian researcher gives free access to 48 million academic papers.

A Russian researcher has made available for free 48 million journal articles on what's seen as a hub for pirated academic content, Sci-Hub - a site the researcher helped set up in 2011.

Meet Alexandra Elbakyan. A Russian neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who's behind as much academic material freely accessible as she can online.

Her motive is easy to understand. Students of all kinds, Masters to PhDs, depend heavily on research others have done. Not only to gain perspective but also as crucial reference points for new research.

However, the price publishers put on such academic content makes it inaccessible to most individuals and even institutions, making it hyper-restrictive for those looking to broaden their horizons without going broke in the process.

In the early 2000s Elbakyan was doing her thesis on biometric scanning for consumer electronics. To access the research material she needed, she would have had to cough up a minimum of $300, a fortune back then for a student.

"For me, even the purchase of one such article would be a financial setback," Elbakyan told RT in an email. "So I had to go about acquiring all the articles by pirate means."

Around 2011, Elbakyan came across Fulltext - a portal where researchers could look for help on important source/reference material.

Soon after, in September 2011, she developed Sci-Hub: a site that effectively broke through practically all journal paywalls and provided access ('non legal') to tomes of scientific papers worldwide.

There are two broad steps to how Sci-Hub functions.

First, it tries to download a copy from LibGen - another similar database for pirated research content. The next step, if it can't retrieve the material from LibGen, is what will earn fan points with hackers: Sci-Hub dodges the paywalls in real-time using access keys that have been "donated" by other pro-piracy academics who have studied at institutions which had the required subscriptions (JSTOR, Springer, Sage, Elsevier and basically any high profile database). Result? You receive a PDF of the paper within a minute.

And for good peer-to-peer karma, a copy of that particular paper is immediately sent to LibGen for posterity.

Alexandra Elbakyan has, and for the sake of free knowledge, we're hoping she won't be the last.

Source- Catch News