When the Delhi High Court ordered internet service providers to block access to Sci-Hub and its mirrors, it closed a chapter in one of the more fraught debates in contemporary research: who gets to read research papers, and who must pay. The verdict followed years of litigation by Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan. The court held that Ms. Elbakyan had violated an undertaking not to upload publishers’ articles, and that Sci-Net, a mirror service, was being used to circumvent judicial orders, leaving her prima facie in contempt.
This seemingly straightforward case of copyright violation — private corporations defending intellectual property against piracy — is transformed by its context. The publishers’ legal win must be weighed against the case for public access to knowledge, the economics of scholarly publishing, and the arrival of ‘One Nation, One Subscription’ (ONOS), which together suggest that depending on courtroom battles might be misplaced.
An endeavour apart
Scientific publishing is unlike other enterprises where piracy drains income from creators. Scientists who produce and review research are not paid by journals: their work is largely funded by public money in India. Yet publishers charge institutions exorbitant subscription fees, sometimes lakhs of rupees per journal. Publishers have defended these figures on grounds of quality control and peer review. But with profit margins of 30% or more and a voluntary review system, the system has often resembled rent-seeking.
On the other hand, Sci-Hub was always vulnerable to the charge of copyright infringement. Courts in the U.S. and Europe have consistently ruled against it, and now the Delhi High Court has joined that chorus. While this is uncontroversial from a strictly legal standpoint, the larger implication is troubling. The judgment risks reinforcing the idea that legal strategies to restrict access are valid even in settings where no affordable or equitable alternative exists.
Internationally, publishers have used the courtroom to buttress the legitimacy of their business model and portray shadow libraries like Sci-Hub as rogue actors rather than as symptoms of dysfunction. In fact, the outcome in the High Court fits a pattern: publishers protect a lucrative business model, courts apply the letter of the law, and the underlying lack of access stays unresolved. Experts have been steadfast that the dysfunction is the real disease that needs to be cured.
Unified subscription
The Indian government recently put forward the ONOS initiative as an alternative. Whether it succeeds will determine if future generations of researchers must still look for back doors. The Union Cabinet approved ONOS in 2024 with an outlay of ₹6,000 crore for its first phase (2023-2026). Under the scheme, the state has negotiated a bulk subscription with 30 major publishers so that research institutions — all public and, in phase II, many private ones — have equal access to some 13,000 journals.
Thanks to the rise of preprints and institutional repositories, more than half of the scientific papers worldwide are now open access. From 2026, all federally funded research in the U.S. must be openly accessible; the EU’s Horizon Europe programme has similar requirements. Paying crores for subscriptions at a time when openness is expanding could render ONOS an expensive detour. Until phase II, independent researchers and those at private institutes and centres — who may outnumber their counterparts at public centres — will still have to pay considerable non-ONOS fees to access journals and still depend on platforms like Sci-Hub.
ONOS also doesn’t address structural flaws in scholarly publishing, reinforces dependence on foreign publishers, and continues to force Indian researchers to transfer copyrights of their own work to journals. At the same time, the subscription model that ONOS pays for still encompasses several thousand journals, including those that many researchers wish to be published in. Blaming ONOS on this count rather than a long-awaited culture change, especially not one the state could have forced, wouldn’t make sense.
Ms. Elbakyan’s attempts to (further) incentivise scholars to contribute to Sci-Hub’s collection of papers using the Sci-Net portal and its cryptocurrency-based rewards system also don’t seem to be succeeding. Whatever moral force Ms. Elbakyan’s project once had has since been squandered by technical unreliability and increasing redundancy. The High Court’s injunction may thus be decisive less because of its punitive sting than because of the fact that the Indian community is already moving on.
Pathology of publishing
At the time the publishers sued Ms. Elbakyan in 2020, there was no realistic prospect of universal access. For countless researchers outside elite institutions, Sci-Hub was (and remains) often the only path to knowledge. Both legal experts and researchers have thus contended that on principle alone, courts could have acknowledged the unique nature of scientific publishing — that the absence of author royalties, prevalence of public funding, and exorbitant pricing by publishers set it apart from creative industries like music or film — and refused to privilege corporate margins over public good.
Today, ONOS provides a legal path to broader access and its success could render shadow libraries unnecessary. It needs to prove it can seamlessly deliver equitable access at a fair cost while India must foster greater indigenous publishing capacity. On both counts, however, it’s not clear if ONOS can do so in its present form. For example, on the first count, the concerned authorities will have to improve the efficiency of use by regularly consulting researchers on which journals are useful and keep other options, like a per-article fee for esoteric journals, open.
On the second, ONOS frees funds at many individual institutes and the scheme currently intends to redirect them towards pay-to-publish (rather than pay-to-read) open-access journals. Instead, governments may consider using them to install and manage institutional repositories. Experts have said this service could in turn be complemented by a national rights retention policy, like those at Harvard University and MIT, that require researchers to deposit their work in the repositories regardless of publishers’ restrictions.
This could keep researchers in control of their work, force pay-to-publish journals to modify their terms, and allow people who aren’t linked to university and/or public libraries to access papers, including journalists, activists, and independent researchers.
Sci-Hub in many respects remains a symbol of resistance against publishers’ profiteering. Following the Delhi High Court order, the question is whether ONOS will step up to eradicate the disease rather than simply manage the symptoms.
Published – August 27, 2025 09:23 am IST
