It can be hard to access scientific articles, which are often hidden behind expensive paywalls. For 10 years, Sci-Hub, the “Pirate Bay of Science” has hosted scientific papers free for anyone who wanted them. But it hasn’t uploaded anything new since December 2020 and is facing prosecution in America. Now, determined activist archivists are working to make a decentralized backup of the website that can never be erased from the internet.

Sci-Hub hosts 85 million articles and the Reddit community at /r/datahoarder wants to make sure they’re free and available for everyone forever by decentralizing it because of recent legal challenges for the site, which was sued by science publishing giant Elsevier and owes it millions. 

"It's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many,” said a post on the /r/datahoarder subreddit.

The situation is dire but not without hope. The DOJ has been investigating Sci-Hub since 2019 for alleged ties to Russian intelligence services. On Twitter, Elbakyan shared a letter she said she received from Apple that claimed it had turned over information about her Apple account to the FBI. Twitter suspended Sci-Hub’s account in January following lawsuits filed by Indian academics against the site.

The data hoarders have set up torrents from the 85 million articles and they’re looking for seeders. There are 850 torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles totaling 77TB of data. “Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future,” the post said.

It seems like a big task, but this group has been successful before. In 2019, Library Genesis—another source of free academic papers—faced a similar problem. But the community banded together, torrented 33TB of data, and created a space on a distributed web platform that it said is all but impossible to take down. During the pandemic, the group archived 5,000 COVID-19 studies so anyone could read them without going through a paywall.