Stephen Reid McLaughlin

From a June 6, 2015 declaration by Anthony Woltermann, Technology Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Elsevier Inc.

While searching for information on the next Elsevier Inc. et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. court date (just rescheduled from March 17 to April 27), I discovered that I — and apparently everyone else — have so far overlooked a big pile of public documents from the case. I’ve been checking PlainSite periodically, which hosts Elbakyan’s defiantly self-incriminating letter to Judge Robert W. Sweet and Sweet’s subsequent preliminary injunction against Sci-Hub and LibGen, but I should’ve noticed sooner that their collection is out of date and far from complete. So I ran a query on PACER, where the search tool for the Southern District of New York is so poorly designed and/or broken I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Fortunately, a site called PacerMonitor provides an alternate interface. $37.80 and many right-clicks later, I’d assembled all 122 PDFs released so far. You can download the full 42MB set here.

I haven’t read every word yet, but a few documents stood out on the first pass:

• Redacted declaration with exhibits by Anthony Woltermann (Technology Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Elsevier Inc.) outlining Elsevier’s in-house investigation and alleging Sci-Hub bought institutional logins using PayPal (June 11, 2015)
• Declaration with exhibits by David M. Hirschberg (attorney for DeVore & DeMarco LLP) including translations of Sci-Hub-related social media posts by Alexandra Elbakyan (June 11, 2015)
• Additional declarations by plaintiffs and their attorneys (June 11, 2015)
• The plaintiffs’ memorandum of law in support of their proposal for preliminary injunction (June 11, 2015)
• A successful amicus brief in opposition to parts of the proposed injunction, written by the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Internet Commerce Coalition (June 26, 2015)
• Two transcribed phone conferences (here and here) including Alexandra Elbakyan on the line (July 14 and 27, 2015)
• A statement from the plaintiffs’ counsel noting that Elbakyan was continuing to work for Sci-Hub while the case was underway (August 19, 2015)
• Edit 3/21: The plaintiffs’ initial complaint (June 3, 2015)

One curious feature of this cache is that it contains articles downloaded from Sci-Hub and entered into the legal record (some in full) by Elsevier, Wiley, and IEEE. So if you need a copy of “The Varus Ankle and Instability” by Georg Klammer et al., you’re free to buy this one from PACER for $0.10 per page, or $2.60 — a real bargain compared to $31.50 for the official version.

I’m planning to add more detailed comments as I read through the set in the coming weeks. In the meantime, my next post will include a bibliography of around 100 news articles and blog posts related to the case, most published in the flurry of Sci-Hub/LibGen media attention that kicked off last month.