Stuart Lawson

“ But since the notion that scholarly knowledge is something that can be owned is an invented idea, rather than a necessary or inevitable part of the way we collectively generate scholarship, it is important to question the validity and utility of the idea. ”

“ Piracy, authorial property, copyright and the academic journal itself are all ideas with roots in early Modern Europe following the introduction of the printing press. And while these concepts may have developed somewhat over time to adapt to contemporary conditions, there is no reason to assume that their current forms need to be maintained. In the digital era, the ability to create infinite perfect copies of works at near-zero marginal cost has led to an explosion in media piracy. ”

“ Despite what the anti-piracy adverts before films may claim, there is a distinct difference between piracy, which is the infringement of copyright law, and theft, which is the taking of property with the intent to permanently deprive the rightful owner of it. ”

“ Media companies themselves have on occasion benefited greatly from violating intellectual property law, whether through the early film industry moving to Hollywood in order to evade patent restrictions or by the huge profits that music publishers have generated from genres like hip-hop which were created in part through illegal sampling. Could scholarly publishing similarly benefit from opportunities that arise through the actions of pirates? ”

“ However, whatever your opinion on the ethics of piracy, in a digitally connected world with ready access to pirated scholarship, focusing effort on maintaining exclusionary systems of access based on ability to pay appears increasingly futile. ”

“ If the labour of publishing must continue but the subscription model is not fit for purpose, then alternative funding arrangements are necessary.
Open access as a progressive alternative Piracy is not open access. It fulfils an immediate need and unquestionably increases access to scholarship for some but it does not build the infrastructure required to maintain a sustainable scholarly communication system for the long term. ”

“ There is one clear avenue available for those publishers, librarians and researchers who wish to make the results of scholarship as widely available as possible but without resorting to breaking copyright law, and that is open access. It has taken 20 years of continuous work by innumerable people to get open access to the stage it has now reached; millions of openly licensed articles and a broad consensus at the policy level did not come about by chance but by the labour of people dedicated to furthering scholarship. ”

“ Academic piracy today There are a number of academic piracy websites that provide access to scholarly works by ignoring or circumventing copyright restrictions, such as Aaaaarg and Library Genesis. [10] The most notorious of these sites is now Sci-Hub, founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011. [11] [12] Using a simple Google-style search interface, a user can input a DOI and be taken directly to a copy of the article without needing to provide authentication. The precise methods used by Sci-Hub to do this are somewhat murky but are certainly undertaken without permission from publishers. ”

“ Websites such as Sci-Hub are effective because they solve multiple access problems. Pirate sites are heavily used in some developing nations, [14] [15] [16] particularly among countries which are not part of the global publisher Research4Life access initiatives [17] such as Indonesia, India, China or Iran. Another reason Sci-Hub has become popular is its ease of use – even for those with legal institutional access, it can be a lot quicker and simpler to retrieve an article on Sci-Hub than on the publisher’s website. ”

“ And law is not the same as ethics – throughout history there have been many laws that are distinctly unethical, and on occasion acting against unjust laws can be the most ethical position to take. The legal departments of commercial publishers are not commonly prone to such philosophical speculation, however, and in 2015 Elsevier took out a lawsuit against Sci-Hub. ”

“ And from the reader’s perspective, since digital piracy results in an exact copy, it makes no difference at all to the end use whether the article is pirated or not. So aside from the question of legality, piracy definitely works well for many users’ immediate needs – and the distributed nature of the web means that it is probably impossible to stop. ”