Sci-Hub and civil disobedience in an open access tool to scientific knowledge
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/rhh.v13i30.60224Keywords:
Sci-Hub, Civil Disobedience, Open Access, Open Science, Digital HistoryAbstract
In this article, we examine Sci-Hub as an act of civil disobedience in the context of access to scientific knowledge in the Digital Age. Sci-Hub is a tool hosted on a website that freely provides scientific articles restricted by paywalls or subscriptions, opposing the academic publishing model and the access barriers imposed by publishers and aggregating databases. The aim of this article is to analyze the disruptive implications of Sci-Hub for the dissemination of scientific knowledge and to explore the debates surrounding its nature as an act of civil disobedience—based on the concept developed by Hannah Arendt and Norberto Bobbio—against the market structures of the capitalist system, which rely on the monetization of scientific knowledge.
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