How Piracy Became a Cause Celebre in the World of Academics
Source: Liam
The Sci-Hub logo in 2015. Image: Wikimedia Commons
In October 2008, two of the big names in academic publishing, Elsevier and Thieme, celebrated victory against an "international piracy scheme involving the unlawful copying, sale, and distribution of scientific journals.”
In the defeated scheme, a Vietnamese entrepreneur had used throwaway email accounts to pose as a salesman. He contacted academics, offering discounted access to subscription journals. The unsuspecting marks made payment through fake websites that mimicked the publishers’, and received paper printouts of the journals in the mail.
Now, another international piracy scheme commands the attention of Elsevier—but this one looks more like a Silicon Valley startup than a black market.
The new offender, Sci-Hub, describes itself as “the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers.” It has more than 47 million papers available for free, according to its own estimate, hosted on servers outside the US.
In June 2015 following a complaint against the site’s founders, Elsevier succeeded in scaring Sci-Hub off the open web as a New York district court ruled that the site violates copyright law. But the site is still available, if you know where to look.
The front page of academic piracy
Sci-Hub was founded by a university student in Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan. While doing her research on machine-brain interfaces, Elbakyan discovered how hard it is to get access to scientific literature. The best research is locked up in paywalled journals with expensive subscriptions. Academics and students in richer countries get access to these journals through their universities, but independent researchers and academics in poorer countries often have to resort to piracy.
Like many students, Elbakyan turned to informal online communities to access the articles she needed. But unlike any student before her, she set about automating the process, and permanently altered the research landscape for students everywhere.
The basic concept of Sci-Hub—enabling people without access to scientific journals to request articles from those who have access through universities or institutions—is nothing new. This type of informal information trade has been going on on Reddit for years.
Reddit user Laverabe, an archetypal redditor of his day—interested in Linux, marijuana, atheism, and his pet cat—started the /r/Scholar subreddit in June of 2009.
The first few months were slow. Early contributors seemed to have little idea what the sub’s purpose might be. It wasn’t until April 8, 2010 when Laverabe posted in /r/NewReddits encouraging people to use his sub to request full-text journal articles, that the fledgling community was given its reason to be. Over the next twelve months, requests for hundreds of articles were fulfilled by the growing pool of users, and today the community boasts over 26,000 subscribers.
The advent of Sci-Hub has been labeled the Napster moment for academic publishing
“If you want access to knowledge and I can help you obtain it, I will,” said Paper_Fairy, an /r/Scholar moderator, prolific request fulfiller, and graduate research assistant at an undisclosed “large university” in North America.
This type of sharing can happen almost anywhere there is an online community with enough users. Since 2011 students, academics, bloggers and journalists have been using a hashtag riffing on the lolcats meme, #ICanHazPDF, to request paywalled articles from sympathetic Twitter users.
Sci-Hub took this concept a step further. When a user types their request into Sci-Hub’s search bar, their query is checked against the holdings of another pirate archive, the Library Genesis (LibGen) database. If the article is not already in the database, Sci-Hub will route the request through one of several proxies and retrieve the article using unversity logins that have been donated, or stolen, depending on who you ask.
At this point the user will be served a .pdf, and the article added to the LibGen holdings. A 2016 study found that the LibGen database is growing in this fashion by about 2,700 papers per day. This means researchers in developing countries have enduring access to articles that may have once cost upwards of $30 each.
What’s in a name?
At a time when more information is available for free online than ever before, why does access to scientific knowledge cost so much?
As the value of an academic’s output is routinely calculated with blunt measures like citation counts, academics who want to secure further funding need to publish frequently. Traditionally, their work will be more visible and frequently cited if published in a prestigious journal with a high impact factor. With the best and brightest academics scrambling to be published in those journals, publishers are able to charge more for access to their research.
Alexander Elbakyan. Photo: Apneet Jolly/Wikimedia Commons
The spiraling cost of academic journals is often referred to as “the serials crisis.” It's prompted even some of the wealthiest university libraries to criticise publishers and speak publicly about the difficulty affording resources students need.
But while publishers dismiss criticism by pointing out the complexity of their role, and the implied costs, Gemma Hersh, Policy Director at Elsevier explained that “pricing correlates to impact factor." When asked why costs were so high, Hersh stressed that “publishers do not operate a cost based system, [...] we operate a value-based system which reflects the value that we provide."
Tear down this wall
Between established publishers carefully controlling their collections and academic pirates busily dynamiting holes in the paywalls, lies a vast swath of fertile ground where new approaches to publishing are attempting to meet the possibilities offered by the internet.
Open access publishing removes restrictions on readership, and takes many forms, from “gold open access” in which authors cover publishing costs with an article processing fees, to “green open access," including self-archiving in institutional repositories and other non-commercial outlets.
Open access adoption has been recorded since the beginning of 2005 by an organisation called ROARMAP (The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies) who have charted the policies of research institutions and funding bodies. From a collection of 132 policies in 2005 the registry now lists 762. In a similar time period, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has grown from an index of 300 journals in 2003 to a current listing of 11,590.
The value of all that open access data is apparent to large publishers too, demonstrated by Elsevier’s recent acquisition of the open access database Social Science Research Network.
Proponents approach open access as both a moral issue, and an historical turning point for academia promising huge economic and social justice outcomes by providing access to information on a scale unimaginable until recently.
"If you want access to knowledge and I can help you obtain it, I will."
One such academic is Jo Guldi, an historian at Brown University, and advocate for “a form of scholarship that thinks critically about the organs of publishing and dissemination at a moment of technological change.” Guldi co-authored The History Manifesto, published open access by Cambridge University Press in 2014.
Guldi explains in a blog post, that she and co-author David Armitage pressed “for open access because we wanted there to be a path for engaged scholars to reach a broader audience and to learn from them, still paired with the credentials offered by a university press.” Publishing ventures like this may provide a key legitimising force for open access, lending institutional authority to published works, while operating with less of a profit motive than commercial presses.
Where to from here?
In 2008, the Vietnamese pirate was identified by authorities. With his bank account frozen he confessed to his crimes, agreed to stop the piracy and pay a fine. In contrast, ventures like Sci-Hub are proving tricky to defeat.
The advent of Sci-Hub has been labeled the Napster moment for academic publishing. Despite publishers best efforts, the ways researchers access academic literature, and the qualities they look for in a publisher are slowly changing.
In summing up his frustrations, Matteo De Felice, an Italian researcher I spoke with said “I hope for a more diverse publishing ecosystem than now, that's it.” It may seem like a simple request, but with cases still before the courts in New York, unrepentant adversaries, and profits worth billions of dollars to protect, the coming years promise to be anything but simple for the centuries old industry.
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