Why A New Website Is Hosting 47 Million Pirated Articles

Just as a troublesome music-sharing service called Napster once threw the music industry into disarray by providing free shared music online, the website Sci-Hub is trying to do the same to the academic publishing industry.

Sci-Hub was started by Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist and researcher from Kazakhstan. As a researcher, she found it difficult to afford access to academic journals.

Academic journals often keep their content behind expensive paywalls. Without a subscription, a single article can cost upward of $30, and even then access may be permitted only under strict time limits.

Sci-Hub is changing all that.

With just a few clicks, 47 million (and counting) scholarly papers, once costly, are now free.

“For me, even the purchase of one such article would be a financial setback,” Elbakyan told Russia Today. “So I had to go about acquiring all the articles by pirate means.”

So how does Sci-Hub work? It’s surprisingly simple. Researchers have “donated” their logins and passwords to the site, which, usually through their university associations, grant them access to a vast selection of scientific and scholarly journals.

Users of Sci-Hub search for papers, and the donated login information grants them access. Once a paper has been uploaded to Sci-Hub, subsequent users can download it directly from the site.

In 2015, the publishing giant Elsevier led a legal suit against Sci-Hub for copyright infringement. A New York court ruled in favor of Elsevier and ordered the site to shutdown. The registry that hosted Sci-Hub’s .org web address suspended the domain.

But the site has reemerged under a domain registered outside the United States, sci-hub.io, which may allow it to avoid the reach of the law.

Elbakyan believes she is morally justified. In a letter to the New York court that shut down her first version of the website, she points out that university researchers, especially those in developing countries, frequently pirate academic articles that are essential to their work. She argues that she’s just trying to make it easier for them.

In Elbakyan’s words, Elsevier, as well as publishers like it, “operates a racket. If you do not send money, you will not read any papers.”

When asked to comment on this story, a representative from Elsevier only passed along a statement from the Association of American Publishers regarding Elsevier’s legal complaint against Sci-Hub. According to the statement, the journal publishers “enable free or very low-cost access for researchers at thousands of institutions in over 100 developing countries.”

Yet the statement also claims that health and public safety might be negatively impacted if academic papers are too widely available. In the eyes of the association, some academic research is best curated and controlled by publishers and other experts and is not fit for public consumption.

Paying For Access

Randy Schekman, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that keeping the public from accessing journals is unfair. While the general public cannot freely access articles published in prestigious journals like Nature, Cell, or Science, “in the biomedical sciences, most of the work is supported publicly, by the NIH [National Institutes of Health].”

So even though the public’s tax dollars fund the research published in these journals, most people would still have to pay to access the research.

The statement from the Association of American Publishers also implies that services like Sci-Hub hurt researchers and academics who make their money from their published work. But this claim elides a crucial fact: Academics who write for major journals do not typically get paid.

It gets worse for the authors. Hugh Gusterson, a professor of International Affairs and Anthropology at George Washington University, pointed this out in a commentary for The Chronicles of Higher Education: Because the journals are so strict with access, researchers often have to pay for the right to use their own work. That happens, for example, when a study is first published in a journal and the author then wants to use it in a book.

Gusterson also points out that academics are expected to referee for these journals, verifying that the content meets the standards of the field. The pay: Zero.

Lucrative Industry

That free labor is one reason academic publishing is surprisingly lucrative.

“Big publishers like Elsevier have profit margins that are quite luxurious by the standards of most corporations,” explains Gusterson. “Only the pharmaceutical companies can really compete with them.”

Academic publishers have rarely come under the kind of scrutiny pharmaceutical companies have faced, but Gusterson is certainly right that academic publishers secure impressive profits. In 2013, Elsevier boasted an operating-profit margin of 38 percent, the equivalent of over $1.1 billion. The CEO was paid nearly $6.5 million.

Gusterson argues that the publishers can use their industry power to convince libraries to subscribe to more journals than they would like by bundling journals together and raising the price of subscriptions. Back in 2012, these practices led Harvard to publicly complain that they were having trouble affording the subscription costs of academic journals.

According to Schekman, publishers are not adding much of value to the scientific process in exchange for all this cost, aside from bestowing esteem on those who are published. He points out that many findings published in prestigious journals turn out to be incorrect or misleading, and there’s no indication that the quest for profits in this arena improves reviewing standards or overall journal quality.

Over the past few decades, the academic publishing industry has undergone massive shifts. In 1973, only about 20 percent of papers in medical and natural science were published by the five major for-profit publishers. That number is now 53 percent, while these publishers lay claim to 70 percent of published social science papers. This huge share of the market gives publishers ample leverage to use against university libraries.

Alternative publishing models

Why can’t universities just publish their own journals? They are, after all, paying for academics salaries to be researchers, and then paying journals to have access to their research in published form.

Gusterson says that he thinks the current model is virtually guaranteed to face significant disruption in the coming years. As publishing moves more and more online, the costs associated with publishing should come down. He suggests professional groups or donation-driven publishers, perhaps functioning similar to National Public Radio, might offer an alternative to the current models of academic publishing.

On an alternative model of publishing advocated by Schekman known as “open access,” researchers generally pay to have their work published by a journal and the papers are free to the public. While this approach does not solve every problem in publishing – it’s still vital that papers are subject to review and meet high standards for quality – many believe it is a promising step forward. Even many traditional publishers have begun experimenting with open access models.

But part of the reason the dominant model has persisted is that the major journals retain extraordinary prestige in the academic world. As Schekman notes, “These journals have a big influence. People notice papers published in these journals, and young scholars get promoted, get jobs, or get fellowships by winning the lottery and getting published in these journals.

“Many want to join this exclusive ‘club,’” he continues. “It’s pervasive, and it’s exhibited a toxic influence on science.”

Defenders of the major publishers often point out that alternative models have not proven sustainable. As the standard bearers for disseminating academic research, these publishers believe they’ve proven their worth.

No one thinks the major academic publishers will fall overnight. Even if Sci-Hub remains active, it’s unlikely to shift the balance of power too much on its own. Colleges and universities don’t appear to have any plans to cancel their subscriptions to Elsevier journals and send their students to Sci-Hub instead.

But Sci-Hub may end up helping to change the shape of the industry.

“It’s the nature of digital technology that things like that will happen,” Gusterson said. “So I think the big commercial companies like Elsevier will find it harder and harder, given some of the balance of forces around this technology, to force people to buy these articles at $30 a pop.”

Schekman shared a similarly optimistic prediction, stating, “The commercial journals will have to adjust. The open access movement is inexorable.”

Photo Credit: Firebottle