Yes a lot more heroes like Alexandra Elbakyan, but also people willing to send a bit of monetary support.

I'll be sending $200 worth of bitcoin as a donation. Please consider donating $10 or $20 to Scihub to help them expand.

http://sci-hub.cc/

I think sci-hub is wonderful. However even widespread adoption by students and academics won't necessarily cut into publishers profits.

"Gold Open Access" and so-called hybrid journals will still make money off academics who have to publish in them for status / tenure / just to get a job.

Elsevier etc could transition to make all their money off author / grant agency / institution pays type charges.

The solution[s] to this are things like Green OA journals, library led publishing projects like 'Open Library of Humanities' [1] and piracy / liberation at the point of consumption.

https://www.openlibhums.org/

If Elsevier can find a way to provide open access and still make money, more power to them.

I think, basically, "free the science from the publishers" and "free the scientists from the publishers" are two different goals and it's totally fine if sci-hub only fixes the first one.

And Aaron Swartz.

Hopefully like him, but not with that ending.

"They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.".

That was not even close to the ending of Aaron Swartz.

Spreading the gospel of Open Access sounds strange today, but someday, in the future, it just will be.

I like to think about what how people in some hypothetical future might view us, in broad strokes at least. What will they look at us, aghast, the way we look at rampant lice, or heating a curling iron (that was actually IRON!) over a fire? Along with the fact that most of us take our lives and health into our hands daily in cards, I suspect that the lack of Open Access, the role of money in our science and medicine, will be up there too.

A good point, I chose my words poorly.

You did fine. I hugely appreciate what Aaron did. I wouldn't want to see what happened to him occur again in the name of Open Access, and I'm hoping it doesn't.

But yes, keeping his name and cause alive would be a Very Good Thing.

It will happened again, nothing has changed; if anything, things are getting worse, not better.

Government regulation in the form of trust busting is another legal solution.

I can't imagine our government doing that, or any incarnation of our government we're likely to see in our lives.

To give a recent example, in 2013, federal courts ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws by fixing ebook prices, forcing them to pay nearly half a billion dollars.

I mean... that's never something a business wants to have do, but half a billion is something they could pay out of cash, with many MANY billions (just in cash) left over. I'm not seeing a solution there, just a symbolic victory.