It looks like the scholarly publishing community has been hit by its own version of Napster.
Over the past year, some 47 million research articles have been made freely available through a site called Sci-Hub. The publishing giant Elsevier, aghast at finding many of its articles being given away, wasted little time in suing the site in federal court for irreparable damages and copyright infringement “of up to $150,000 (£105,000) per infringed work.” Last autumn, the court granted a preliminary injunction against the site that succeeded in shutting it down. Since then multiple versions of Sci-Hub have sprung up on the darknet, largely beyond the reach of the law.
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for 17 March.
What is thoroughly Napster about this case is how it concerns an ageing industry trying to maintain a terribly profitable – but outdated – business model. Such was the music industry when Napster sounded the wake-up call.
What is decidedly not Napster about this case is that the circulation of research is at issue, and not the music of Metallica. Alexandra Elbakyan, the researcher from Kazakhstan who started Sci-Hub, makes this very point about Napster and the need for change. Musicians receive royalties for music sold; researchers need access to each others’ work, for which they largely do not receive royalties.
The old economy is the impetus behind the workaround of Sci-Hub. It reflects an impatience with the speed of change, even as a good number of us are working on instituting a new academic publishing economy based on academic institutions funding “open access” to research. It reflects an impatience with the lingering monopoly pricing of journal subscriptions that causes even Harvard to baulk, while excluding many researchers elsewhere, which runs counter to the very intent of copyright law, namely, “to promote the progress of science”, as the US Constitution puts it.
In a two-page letter sent from perhaps Moscow to the court, Elbakyan explains that as a student in Kazakhstan, she found the “payment of $32 [Elsevier points out that it’s as high as $41.95] is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research”. She adds: “I could obtain any paper by pirating it so I solved many requests and people always were very grateful for my help.”
But make no mistake, her efforts represent a 10-fold escalation of the tragic protest of Aaron Swartz, a gifted US computer scientist and entrepreneur who committed suicide two years ago after being charged with theft for downloading 4 million journal articles to his laptop.
Elbakyan’s case seems bound to result in billion-dollar liability charges. But it will not result in Elsevier’s recovery of “damages”, nor bring down Sci-Hub. It may just ensure that she is Snowden-ed in Moscow, the city state of hacker exile, as others deal with what lies behind the crime, much as is happening with the National Security Agency revelations.
As she set out her arguments in the letter to the judge, I should not have been surprised to find her citing my book on what I call the “access principle”, which grows out of a human right to this particular form of knowledge. The right to this knowledge figures, as Elbakyan notes in a subsequent interview, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it runs through the history of scholarship in the modern era.
This right to know is also behind this new, emerging academic publishing economy. It is aligned with the broader social and intellectual movement of open science. It is behind the White House’s insistence on open access for all government-funded research, with similar policies at Unesco, the Gates Foundation, the European Commission, and the list goes on.
It has given rise to more than 11,000 open access journals, including hundreds from Elsevier. These journals, although still in the minority, make their content freely available through the support of authors, libraries and granting agencies. In another approach, particle physicists have brought 3,000 libraries together to fund open access to the best journals in their field. For my part, I work with colleagues at the Public Knowledge Project on open source (free) publishing software that is now used by thousands of open access journals, with half in the global South.
As a result of all these efforts, you can now freely – and legally – access roughly a third of the research papers published in the past few years. We clearly have a long way still to go with this new economy. And ultimately, Elbakyan’s point that pirating research is different from pirating music is only part of the story.
More fundamentally, research represents a different order of intellectual property. This is not only because of the public and tax-exempt funding involved in its production and publication. It is because of how this work’s value and benefit is realised through others’ access to and use of this work.
John Willinsky is Khosla family professor of education at Stanford University and founder and director of the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
