On September 5th, 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan, illegally made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper ever published – freely available online. In an interview, she said: “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.” Before Elbakyan created her website, multi-million dollar publishing companies like Elsevier charged researchers to publish their work, but the researchers didn’t receive any money from what Elsevier collects. So why would any self-respecting researcher willingly hand over the copyright to their hard work to a publisher that will profit from their work? Read the rest: http://buff.ly/2gYfPaM