The Delhi High Court ordered the blocking of Sci-Hub, Sci-Net, and LibGen in India on August 19, 2025, following a copyright infringement case brought by academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society[1][2].
The court found that Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub’s founder, violated her December 2020 undertaking not to upload new copyrighted content by making post-2022 articles available through both Sci-Hub and a new platform called Sci-Net[2:1]. While Elbakyan claimed this was due to technical errors and argued Sci-Net was a separate project, the court rejected these arguments[2:2].
The ruling requires India’s Department of Telecommunications and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to issue blocking orders within 72 hours, with Internet Service Providers required to implement the blocks within 24 hours[2:3].
This case marks the first time Sci-Hub and LibGen faced legal action in a developing country[3]. Earlier intervention attempts by Indian scientists and researchers had argued these platforms were “the only access to educational and research materials” for many academics in India[3:1], with social science researchers specifically highlighting the “detrimental effect” blocking would have on research in India[4].
Substack - GPT-4o about Sci-hub: The Delhi High Court’s latest order ↩︎
SpicyIP - Sci-Hub now Completely Blocked in India! ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
InfoJustice - Update on Publisher’s Copyright Infringement Suit Against Sci-Hub ↩︎ ↩︎
Internet Freedom Foundation - Social Science researchers move Delhi High Court ↩︎
We really need to push for fully open access research. I believe the ACM has announced a transition to open access, so there is that. However I think there needs to be legislated open access. Specifically, any federally funded research (or research from publicly funded universities) that is to be published should be forced to be open access. In America I don’t think that’s going to happen for a while lmao, but hopefully other countries can do this.
Any NIH-funded research must be made open access one year after its publication date. NIH publishes the accepted manuscript in PubMed at the one-year mark. Unlike NIH, (last I checked) NSF doesn’t strictly require it, but you won’t be getting NSF funding unless you say you’re going to make the resulting papers freely available somehow (e.g., preprints, paying for open access, etc.). Not sure about DOE/DOD/etc. funded-articles.
The majority of federally funded research in the US is made open access. You might not realize it because news outlets typically report on brand-new articles, which haven’t hit the one-year mark for open access yet.
That’s great to hear. In my experience every second paper I ran into needed a subscription, although I am guessing they weren’t federally funded research or from a country where that isn’t required by law