Today, the federal government spends about $60 billion a year on research. That research gets published in scientific journals that institutions, researchers and the public have to pay in order to access.

Do you think scientists will ever run out of things to study? No, because there will always be something that scientists can study whether a new organisms or something about an organism.

Why exactly are science and research so very expensive? There are many separate reasons why modern research always is costly. First is the cost of salaries. Research scientists deserve a good salary, due to their very long education and advanced training, specialized job skills, and previous lab experience in science.

Research does not necessarily cost a lot of money. Even today, some areas such as literature, philosophy and theoretical mathematics (non-computational) literally cost only as much as a desk, pen and paper.

First, indexing, web hosting, online reviewer platforms etc cost real money that the journal must pay. Second, most well run journals do have professional staff members even if the the editors/reviewers are academics doing the work for free.

Find Free Versions

1. Check for a free version of your chosen paper through the Open Access Button, available through that website or as a browser extension.
2. Search for your paper through PubMed, which includes health and medicine related papers.
3. Search with Google Scholar.
4. Try a regular web search.

Indian copyright law. Sci-Hub does not charge any student or researcher for downloads—it is a free service. The case filed by the copyright holders in Delhi High Court asking for a blanket ban of the sites is not against Sci-Hub and Libgen; it is against the research scholars in this country.

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan

It is not illegal in India to assess Sci -hub which is an information highway for scientific and technology related subjects. They are publishing many papers with out permission. But if you copy it and use it for any publication action can be taken against copy right violations.

The system works like this: whenever an article request comes in through the simple search box on the Sci-Hub homepage, the sys- tem checks the request against the existing archive of articles. As of 2019, Sci-Hub claims this archive consists of 74 million scholarly articles.