A world without Sci-Hub

Aaron Swartz was 26 when he committed suicide. He committed suicide in the shadow of legal prosecution, and the government's lawyers intend to punish him as much as possible. If convicted, he could face up to 50 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Swartz's crimes were not only legal, but political. He had access to a private computer network and gained valuable information with the purpose of sharing it. His actions threaten some of the most powerful, connected and politically protected groups in the country. Their friends in government wanted to get the message across.

This is a story about some distant dissident. But Swartz took his own life in Brooklyn one winter in 2013, and his prosecutor was the federal government. At the time of his death, Swartz was charged with 13 felonies of using MIT computers to download excessive scientific articles from the academic database JSTOR, ostensibly to make them freely available to the public. Ultimately, Swartz could face more prison terms for downloading academic papers than for helping al Qaeda build nuclear weapons. Even the Soviet penal code stipulated that those who stored and disseminated anti-Soviet literature had only five to seven years in prison. While prosecutors later pointed out that a shortened deal could be reached, Aaron would still be labeled a felon for his actions — and, JSTOR itself had reached a civil settlement without even filing a lawsuit.

But Aaron's career continued. This September marks the tenth anniversary of Sci-Hub, an online "shadow library" that provides access to millions of research papers that would otherwise be hidden behind prohibitive paywalls. Founded by Kazakh computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan (popularly known as the "pirate queen" of science) , Sci-Hub has grown into a repository of more than 85 million academic papers.

The site is globally popular and used by millions - many of whom would otherwise be unable to complete degrees, advise patients or make new scientific discoveries using text-mining algorithms. Sci-Hub has become an unrecognized foundation that helps the entire academic community function.

Even if they don't need to use Sci-Hub, the excellent user experience it offers means that many people prefer to use this illegal site rather than access papers through their own institutional library. It's hard to say how many ideas, grants, publications, and companies Sci-Hub has facilitated, but there's no denying that Alexandra Elbakyan's decade-long website has become an essential part of contemporary scholarship.

Sci-Hub's success has made it the target of injunctions and investigations. Sci-Hub has been repeatedly sued by academic publishers, with opponents accusing the site's creators of collaborating with Russian intelligence and private-sector critics saying it poses a threat to "national security." Alexandra Elbakyan recently tweeted that she had received a notice that the FBI had requested her personal data from Apple.

Whatever happened to Sci-Hub or Alexandra Elbakyan, the existence of such a site is a tragic fact. Sci-Hub currently fills a void that shouldn't exist. Like a black market drug purchased by someone who cannot afford a prescription drug, its existence is an accusation against the official system that created the conditions for its emergence.

Buying individually all the articles needed to complete a typical literature review can easily run into the thousands of dollars. In addition to paying for the articles themselves, academics often have to pay exorbitant fees to publish their research. At the same time, most peer reviewers and editors responsible for evaluating, correcting and editing papers are not paid for their work.

It is especially ironic that this situation coexists with the so-called digital “infodemic” of disinformation . But few, if any, public figures draw a direct link between the costly barriers surrounding scientific research and the apparent epistemological breakdown in a significant part of American political discourse.

Even advocates of the scholarly publishing industry seem unable to develop a coherent defense. In 2019, rumors began to circulate that the Trump administration was considering an executive order requiring published articles funded by government grants to be immediately available to the public. In response, the Academic Publishers Association issued the following warning:

In addition to funding and managing the world's leading peer review process, publishers invest heavily in education, research, and innovative digital platforms to improve U.S. competitiveness and help ensure the quality and integrity of American science. Disrupting the market is unnecessary, counterproductive, and seriously damages the peer-reviewed scholarly communication system that fuels U.S. leadership in research and innovation.

In this context, "funding" the peer review process means not paying anyone who does the actual work of peer review. Likewise, "extensive investments" in "innovative digital platforms" have failed to produce the kind of user experience that Alexandra Elbakyan created in her early 20s better experience. As for ensuring the "quality and integrity" of science, that seems to mean operating journals with surprisingly high retraction rates and inconsistent reliability. A 2018 study found that high investment by academic publishers had "no significant impact" on the quality of scientific papers. Given that these arguments are flimsy, it's not surprising that so many Nobel laureates wrote a separate letter encouraging the Trump administration to pursue its plan -- which never materialized anyway.

Intentionally or not, academic publishers' ridiculously high paywalls only keep scientific information away from the general public. More incongruously, the people blocked from accessing the information are often also taxpayers who fund research.

By positioning the debate over Sci-Hub as a debate about property rights, supporters and critics of Alexandra Elbakyan's website alike share in what John Gall said " operational fallacy . In his book The Systems Bible , Gall defines "operational fallacy" as "the system itself does not do what it says" it is doing). In other words, the system's calls to itself are not always a reliable indicator of its true function. In this case, the name "academic publishing industry" implies that it should be involved in the dissemination of scholarship. But the effective function of scholarly publishing is actually to prevent the dissemination of scholarly writings.

In the case of Sci-Hub, the convenient logistics of Internet publishing, and the funding structure of academic research, it seems clear that in the event of the disappearance of the academic publishing industry, academic results will be more widely available, not less. If scholarly publishing didn't exist, scientists could still do their research -- in fact, it would be easier to do so because more people had access to scholarly literature. The peer-review process still works—although there are good reasons to change that. The resulting paper can be posted where anyone can read it.

When we explored the actual function of the scholarly publishing industry—restricting access to scholarly research, we found that these publishers had little in common with companies that opposed other file-sharing sites. When several record labels sued Napster in 2001, they could make legal arguments that the financial interests of musicians, producers, and everyone who needed to distribute records were threatened. This parallel does not exist in Sci-Hub's case. Scientists are not paid by publishers. Publishers do not pay peer reviewers. As evidenced by Sci-Hub and its more law-abiding sibling site arXiv, the distribution itself is cheap enough to be freely available to the public. So it's no surprise that opinion polls show that scientists overwhelmingly support Sci-Hub.

All of this makes it clear that the strength of the scholarly publishing industry does not come from customer satisfaction. The Aaron Swartz case was made possible by both the scholarly publishing industry persuading its political friends to set up massive safeguards and the government's willingness to go through legal procedures to combat personal threats to the system. It's unclear exactly what the prosecutors' political motives were, but one theory is that Aaron's political activism to advocate for an open internet made him useful during a time when the U.S. government was trying to crack down on rogue digital activism and hacker culture in the 2010s Target.

Like the early secret networks that helped promote and popularize forbidden ideas and research, Sci-Hub acts as an infrastructure for circumventing artificially imposed restrictions on human thought. Few people these days give up streaming movies or buying MP3s because of the exorbitant prices, but access to scientific information has become a real luxury.

The reasons for restricting information may be different than before. For academic publishers, it's about extracting rent, not enforcing ideological or theological orthodoxy. But unfortunately, making scientific journals too expensive has the same effect as reviewing them. In fact, it's a smarter strategy because it allows publishers to use the moral language of property rights to protect themselves. If the KGB had charged astronomical sums for Solzhenitsyn's work, perhaps they would have enjoyed a better reputation.

There are also some prominent examples of academia and other organizations fighting artificial barriers to information. The "Cost of Knowledge" movement, led by a British mathematician, has asked its signatories to boycott a partnership with Dutch publisher Elsevier. In Germany, some scientists have resigned from editorial boards of Elsevier journals after Elsevier disagreed with increasing open access. In 2018, when a Swedish court forced internet provider Bahnhof to stop all traffic to Sci-Hub, the company also blocked access to Elsevier's website in protest of the decision.

While these actions help draw attention and support, they remain largely within the realm of activism. The open-access movement often uses such protests to advance its goals. But publishers have taken a different tack. About no one held up signs denouncing Sci-Hub and demanding more acceptance of paywalls. Instead, the academic publishing lobby has established direct relationships with politicians, using its influence to advise policy and maintaining well-funded legal teams that can use the law against opponents.

In the vast majority of cases, lobbying strategies outperformed aggressive strategies. Elsevier's parent company spent nearly $2 million on lobbying in 2021, according to Open Secrets. With this money, no matter what arguments they present to politicians in favor of their position, they will be able to garner enough political support to stick with their campaign. Targeted political action and the right strategy will succeed. On the other hand, those who grew up in the heyday of activism strategies have yet to make similar strategic updates. While scattered individuals like Tim Berners-Lee work directly with governments to influence their decisions, restricting access to scientific research is unthinkable in a world like in Asia According to Len Swartz's opponents, providing JSTOR documentation is unthinkable.

Sci-Hub makes information accessible because it frees itself from the economic and political constraints faced by simply trying to reform existing institutions. But for these projects to succeed, their backers need a machine that can defend and solidify their existence politically and legally.

Components of such a machine already exist. In addition to individuals working in universities and hospitals, the cause of open information is widely supported both in the crypto community and in the field of machine learning. Sci-Hub's role as an important platform for contemporary research means that it is supported by a broad (if unlikely) industry coalition that collectively has the resources and capacity to nurture and sustain a new political lobby.

In fact, the academic publishers themselves may have provided such a lobbying group with a political objective to unite them:

Scholarly publishing industry protests rumored executive order in letter to Trump administration, saying moves to increase open access "would effectively nationalize the precious American intellectual property we produce and force us to make it freely available to the world" Other regions." In response, scientists and researchers said in unison: Yes. Nationalization would not only solve the problem of scholarly publishing and make scientific work and innovation based on it easier, but it would also enhance U.S. soft power in an era of diminishing U.S. geopolitical dominance.

David Wiley suggested that the federal government use eminent domain to acquire intellectual property rights of academic publishers. Fees already paid by public universities (the UC system alone pays Elsevier $13 million in 2021) could go a long way towards achieving "just compensation" for property seizures under the Fifth Amendment .

More recently, Sci-Hub supporters have started creating a massive archive of the site in case it gets taken down. They want to make Sci-Hub "un-censorable". But it's still worth thinking about a world without Sci-Hub -- that is, a world that doesn't need Sci-Hub. "Effective nationalization", as proposed by Wiley and the academic publishers themselves, may pave the way for this to happen. Picture this: a 21st century library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam.

Compiled from: A World Without Sci-Hub