Science, open access… and Sci-Hub
The Sci-Hub academic papers repository continues to pile up lawsuits, multi-million dollar fines and blocking petitions from countries around the world, which its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, continues to ignore.
Despite recent claims by Elsevier, which is demanding $15 million, as well as the American Chemical Society (ACS), which wants $4.8 million, the founder of the page has still not appeared in court, refusing to answer demands to do so, and the page remains open, although some ISPs may not be able to access it if you do not use a VPN.
The site continues to host more than 65.4 million pieces of work (and is growing steadily), allowing academics around the world to download more than 100,000 papers each day. The claimants have no hope of ever being able to recover the damages they are demanding, and the founder has made clear her willingness to continue offering the service no matter the consequences, with versions of the page in multiple domains and even on the deep web. The case is heading down the same path as another page in a different field, The Pirate Bay, created in 2003 and still available through dozens of proxies around the world.
But surely there is no comparison? In the case of The Pirate Bay, the complainants were the distributors of audiovisual content, acting in their own interests and those of the owners, who were generally unhappy with the fact that their works were freely available on the site. Few content owners wanted their work available in this way, in many cases because they did not understand the business model associated with their work, and in others for fear of possible reprisals from distributors. In the case of Sci-Hub, no teachers or scientists have protested the presence of their work there, while many actively use the site for their own research; likewise many upload their work themselves, and in general, the scientific community is very much in favor of such open access, calling for immediate access, without registration, subscription or payment — that is, without any kind of restrictions — to digital educational, academic, scientific articles published in specialized magazines and peer reviewed. Not only is the open access movement widely supported, it has even made prestigious universities such as MIT and many others change their policies in this regard, requiring their academics to publish their research articles openly.
Contrary to the world of content, where there is widespread opposition among artists and the industries they work in to unrestricted access to their work, in the academic world, many authors and academic institutions oppose the private business model of the journals publishers, questioning their contribution. Numerous journals in open access format reach prestigious positions, such as PLOS ONE, using open access and maintaining rigorous and demanding peer review policies, while many authors, despite publishing in private access journals, allow access to their work on their own pages by publishing supposedly alternative or previous versions. Contrary to the content industry, in the academic world positions are not so maximalistic, much less homogeneous, and some publishers have very few allies. They have created a business model around the academic publication that provides poor service (papers take months, or even years to be published), they do not pay for the material (neither to those who write, nor to those who review it, even though all of them invest huge amounts of time and effort in the task) and charge astronomical subscriptions. It is a wonder that they have gotten away with it for so long.
What will happen to Sci-Hub? For the foreseeable future, the plaintiffs will continue to use the legal system to exert pressure, while the creator of the site will continue to ignore them, and while accessing the site will be more difficult, it will still be available. It is difficult to convince a doctoral student or a teacher in a country or institution with few resources that they cannot access resources or publications in their area of interest, when what is at stake is the progress of science and knowledge.
As with the content industry, the important thing is not whether a site is open access or not: what matters is to challenge outdated business models. Content publishers began to have problems when technology developed better and more efficient ways of accessing material and they began to stop having them when a wide range of simple and relatively inexpensive ways to access content appeared: Spotify, Netflix or whatever.
There is no reason why the same dynamics should not apply to academia, and that the hundreds of journals that feed off scholars and institutions with high-priced subscriptions will find ways to disseminate scientific material that match their need for a reasonable level of profitability, while making science readily available to all. As in the case of The Pirate Bay, Sci-Hub will not close due to prosecution, lawsuits and fines: it will close when it is no longer necessary. Meanwhile, the raven will retain the key.
(En español, aquí)
