Scientific piracy is a violation of copyright ( copyright ) in scientific works to provide universal open and free access to scientific information. The term "piracy" in the meaning of "copyright infringement" has been used since the beginning of the 17th century, made better known by the poet Alfred Tennyson , who used it in the preface to The Lover's Tale [1] in 1879.
Today, scientific piracy is considered a separate area - illegal access to exactly scientific information. The reason for this is the high price that you have to pay for obtaining a scientific article for magazines and corporations that own copyrights (and, in the Russian Federation, limited opportunities for legal access [2] ). Since a scientist may need dozens and hundreds of articles, and even large state projects to collect analytics about publications require access to them [3] , scientific piracy affects almost every researcher and causes a wide public resonance, having his opponents and supporters.
 | The largest universities pay millions for subscribing to scientific journals. For most scientists working in smaller and richer organizations, piracy remains almost the only way to keep abreast of the latest scientific news ” [4]One of the editors of the GeekTimes project |  |
Proponents of scientific piracy see a solution to this problem by providing open access to scientific articles using special services that download publications automatically from publisher sites (as Sci-Hub does). An alternative approach is to create resources that allow scientists to share articles (or preprints) and upload them to open access on their own (like ResearchGate ). In this case, copyright infringement does not occur.
And although Richard Stallman , the author of the concept of “ copyleft ” (by analogy with copyright ), calls for replacing the term “piracy” with more neutral ones, as he believes that this word associates those who unauthorized copies of information with sea pirates who are engaged in robbery , robbery attack ships and kill people [5] , many continue to call this phenomenon piracy.
Content
- 1 Problem Description
- 2 Resources providing illegal free access to scientific information
- 2.1 Sci-Hub
- 2.2 Other resources
- 3 Litigation of scientific pirates
- 4 Criticism of Scientific Piracy
- 5 Scientists protest against access restrictions
- 6 Scientific piracy and open science
- 6.1 In Russia
- 7 Open Access
- 8 See also
- 9 notes
Feature Description
The cost of legal subscription to scientific articles is high. At the same time, the money for the subscription is not received by the scientists who conducted the research and wrote the article, but by the publishers. The result is a situation where financial barriers limit access to scientific information, which, according to supporters of open science, contradicts the very concept of science, which involves the collection, critical evaluation, dissemination, analysis and double-checking of data. The situation comes to precedents when researchers do not even have access to their own works (Cognition magazine requires about $ 2000 for a subscription) [6] .
Science , one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, in its discussion material examines the problem using the example of a scientist from Iran: downloading one article costs about $ 30, and for work he would have to spend more than $ 1000 a week on that, which he doesn’t can afford it. A young scientist faces a choice: either quit graduate school, or upload articles illegally. As a result, he uses a pirated website and admits that he does not feel any guilt, since "high prices hinder the development of science" [7] .
The large medical scientific journal The Lancet also expresses concern about the situation, reporting in editorial material that this problem is especially acute in Peru: physicians cannot afford legal access, and they have to break the law in order to maintain their professional level and keep abreast of current scientific research [8] .
However, in reality, illegal downloading of articles in large volumes occurs not only from the territory of third world countries. According to the analyzes of the same Science journal [7] , which gained access to Sci-Hub data, articles from this pirate site are downloaded 200,000 times a day (as of February 2016) from all continents of the planet except Antarctica [9] . The download took place both from the hot spots of Libya and from the accounts of leading world universities, for which a corporate subscription was issued [7] [9] .
Publishers who have a large amount of scientific information (the largest of them are Elsevier and Springer ) have their own reasons to make access to articles paid: articles should be reviewed, sites should be supported, and numbers should be made up. Paying for the work of reviewers, designers, editors, and technical support, even if you refuse the printed version of the journals, is costly. However, from the point of view of advocates of scientific piracy, download prices are clearly overpriced, and the main purpose of such overpricing is to monopolize information. According to Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan ,
| not only new articles are in paid access, but also articles published before the 1990s and even articles of the 18th century. Is it necessary to justify the costs of publishing? I doubt it. Guardian wrote that the director’s income at Elsevier is $ 150,000 (one hundred and fifty thousand) a month, with most of the income being scientific articles. And so much? All these prices are specifically set with the expectation of restricting access to knowledge and controlling the dissemination of information. In the English-speaking Internet they say that prices are “prohibitively high”, that is, restrictively high ” [4] . |
Alexandra Elbakyan also notes that, in her opinion, this restriction violates article 39 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .
Resources providing illegal free access to scientific information
Sci-Hub
The Sci-Hub service, which uses an automated script to illegally download articles, was created by Alexandra Elbakyan on September 5, 2011. Alexandra Elbakyan supports the idea of free unlimited access to knowledge, believing that the very presence of Sci-Hub should push magazines to switch to an open access model. In an interview, she admits that she wants the law to end up on the side of projects such as Sci-Hub and LibGen, which will help “overturn copyright” [4] . Alexandra Elbakyan became the Person of the Year 2016 according to the version of the most cited scientific journal of our time, Nature , who included her on this list along with scientists who made breakthroughs in various fields - from genetics to registering gravitational waves [10] [11] . The magazine itself, however, continued to distribute through a paid subscription.
Other resources
There are a number of sites of this orientation - LibGen (Library Genesis, the second largest download after Sci-Hub, where at the moment there are more than 62 million articles [12] ), Ebookee , Freshwap , AvaxHome . Some of them also download articles automatically using a program similar to anonymizers [9] , while others provide links on an individual request.
LibGen as of January 2015 contained 25 million documents, 95% of which belonged to the category of educational and scientific texts (articles, textbooks, etc.), and 5% to the category of entertainment literature (books and comics). With LibGen, you can access 36% of all articles with a DOI address, and if you count only the articles of the three largest publishers - Elsevier, Springer and Wiley - then 68% [13] . Research has not yet been conducted on who and in what quantities uses this service, although there is every reason to assume that the results will be similar to those of Sci-Hub.
For example, on the Molbiol.ru website, you can leave requests for articles and an email address in the FULL TEXT section [14] , and users who have the required article can send it to the requestor.
Lawsuits of Scientific Pirates
In 2015, Elsevier and the Association of American Publishers sued services that help to download his articles bypassing subscriptions, as this “poses a serious threat to publishing” [15] . Previously, the Public Interest Registry refused to block the domains of these sites at the request of Elsevier without a court order [16] . In a letter to the American court, Alexandra Elbakyan accused the publisher of fishing money out of scholars, emphasizing that scientific piracy does not lead to less information or someone losing it, so scientific piracy cannot be considered a theft. On October 28, a court in New York decided to block Sci-Hub and LibGen domains at the provider level, however, projects again earned on independent domains [6] .
US Internet and intellectual property management experts believe that closing a new domain is a matter of time [15] . According to the data for December 2015, the new domain name was registered in the UK, and the Tor network was used to encrypt Sci-Hub and LibGen [15] .
Other experts draw parallels between scientific pirates and the iTunes program, the appearance of which provoked a storm of indignation at record studios, undermining their monopoly by the distribution of cheap and affordable music [15] .
Alexandra Elbakyan and other scientific pirates believe that litigation is not a reason to stop the dissemination of information, and admit that they are by no means going to stop their activities, feeling how many people around the world need them [15] .
On June 21, 2017, a US court ruled in favor of Elsevier , which provided a list of 100 articles illegally distributed by Sci-Hub [17] . The lawsuit for the payment of $ 15 million was satisfied by the court, since representatives of the accused parties - Sci-Hub and Library Genesis - did not appear at the hearing. However, the media noted that the publishing house is unlikely to ever receive its compensation, and this decision will not convince these and other representatives of scientific pirates to stop their activities [18] .
Criticism of Scientific Piracy
On the other hand, some scientists who are potential consumers of information give scientific piracy restrained or even negative assessments. A survey by Science magazine showed that 61.25% of scientists and other users believe that sites like Sci-Hub violate the law [9] [7] .
The deputy editor-in-chief of the journal also notes that downloading bypassing subscriptions distorts the statistics of article downloads, which may lead to an underestimation of the impact of a particular scientist’s work on the scientific community, and its contribution will be less noticeable, making it harder to get funding for further research [19 ] .
Illegal downloading also creates difficulties for scientific libraries, which without statistics cannot evaluate how much readers need to subscribe to a particular journal. Another danger is the damage that scientific piracy can cause to non-profit projects that share scientific information - the university press, non-profit scientific societies that subsidize universities [19] .
Most obviously, the costs and losses are felt, of course, by copyright holders selling a paid subscription. Searching for topics, editorial work, evaluating the significance and authenticity of scientific results, writing texts, supporting news departments, printing or working websites all require funding, although scientific pirates believe that the amount requested by publishers is exorbitant [19] .
Scientists rally against access restrictions
The largest owner of scientific articles is the Elsevier Publishing House, which publishes about 2,000 scientific journals and 250,000 articles per year [20] . Its pricing policy causes a lot of indignation: despite the fact that the publisher’s contribution to the publication is small [21] , the profit of the Elseiver Science & Medical department is 36% (whereas the market average is 5%) [22] . The so-called “bundle subscription” is widespread when the university cannot obtain access to one journal, but is forced to pay for a whole package, which is not made by himself, but by the publisher [23] . Elsevier is also actively lobbying for copyright laws ( SOPA , PIPA , Research Works Act ) and denies access to all libraries that disagree with its pricing policy.
In this regard, Harvard University , the Library of Congress , Cornwall University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other large American organizations have demonstratively refused their subscription [24] . In protest, the editorial board of the magazine “Topology” quit in full force and entered into a contract with another publishing house [23] .
The largest protest rally was the movement The Cost of Knowledge , initiated on January 21, 2012 by a mathematician from the University of Cambridge Timothy Gowers, who called for boycotting publisher magazines without publishing them, without subscribing, and posting their articles in the public domain. In just three months, the number of participants reached 10,000, later this number increased to 16,000 [25] (as of September 18, 2018, the exact number was 17,223) [26] . The action was supported by The Guardian magazine, stating that
| editors, examiners, researchers, foundations, librarians and readers can work together to disseminate and consume scientific knowledge. The same publishers of the old school, which can exist only in an era without the Internet, can no longer bring tangible benefits to this process [25] . |
On January 1, 2017, 60 German university libraries announced a boycott to the publisher, without agreeing on a subscription price. Elsevier disabled their access until February 15 [27] [28] .
Most of these actions do not make any impression on the publisher: according to him, 38% of the scientists who announced the boycott had to change their minds and publish in one of the Elsevier magazines [28] .
Scientific Piracy and Open Science
The movement for open science is also gaining strength and popularity. Unlike scientific piracy, its supporters urge to switch to legal open access to scientific information and publish articles in publications where they can be read and used for free and without restrictions. Proponents of this idea also suggest lowering the "threshold" for entering into science, believing that everyone should have the right to participate in research. Projects in this vein are called “ Citizen Science ” or “Scientific Crowdsourcing”. In such projects, users participating, for example, a computer game, can search for the desired protein or RNA conformation, helping professional scientists, and if they manage to make valuable discoveries, become co-authors of this scientific article. “Raw” data that needs processing is laid out in open access - for example, the results of astronomical observations or reading of genomes .
Critics of this movement point out that such data can be used for evil - for example, information about the genomes of dangerous viruses can help the creators of biological weapons. On the other hand, such a policy of granting the right to read articles to anyone who wants it leads to the need to carefully check their results before publication. Open science also contributes to the search for fresh, innovative solutions, helps to cope with large amounts of data, and faster to exchange information within the scientific community itself.
It seems that the open science movement is opposed to scientific piracy, but this difference in views is illusory. As the scientific pirates themselves, for example, Alexandra Elbakyan, note, the real purpose of their activity is to convince publishers that the legal intellectual property schemes for scientific information are hopelessly outdated, and trying to monopolize the research results will not work, as programmers learn to bypass any prohibitions. When publishers realize that a paid subscription does not make sense, the world will switch to universal open access licenses - this is the approach that both the proponents of open science and scientific pirates see [4] .
In Russia
В нашей стране существует ассоциация « Открытая наука », директором которой является Дмитрий Семячкин, один из основателей КиберЛенинки , российской электронной научной библиотеки, также основанной на парадигме Open Science. Публикуемые КиберЛенинкой статьи (их на сайте чуть больше миллиона) распространяются по лицензии Creative Commons (открытого доступа), что не является нарушением закона [29] . Звучат призывы к борьбе с информационным неравенством и на уровне Минобрнауки [30] .
Открытый доступ
Поскольку учёные не получают никакого дохода от публикации, многие из них не видят никакой пользы в ограничении доступа к ней. Более того, им выгоднее, чтобы росло число читателей статьи, и, в конечном счёте, её цитируемость и их импакт-фактор , поскольку именно от этого зависит финансирование дальнейших исследований. Помимо научного пиратства, существует и легальный способ делиться научными публикациями — открытый доступ .
One way is to deposit the article (publish it in a journal by subscription and put it in parallel on specialized resources, for example, the university repository , arXiv.org or CiteSeer , which have existed for more than 25 years, or the recently published repository of biological scientific articles bioRxiv.org, which however, it is already striving to incorporate the “Central Service” created by ASAPbio [31] ). Another way is the initial publication on the resource, which immediately puts the articles in the public domain. However, one must understand that now far from all articles can be obtained in this way. According to the idea on which the work of the Sci-Hub project is based, the information does not become less if it is shared, and the concept of copyright in relation to scientific research is hopelessly outdated, therefore open access should become a “new and progressive model of scientific communication ” [12] . According to the creator of the site, Alexandra Elbakyan, “copyright laws make the work of electronic libraries legally illegal and block access to knowledge for most people, while at the same time allowing individuals to extract huge profits from this situation, creating and supporting not only informational, but also economic inequality " [12] .
The Russian Ministry of Education and Science takes steps towards open access: in 2017 it is planned to issue a “national subscription”, thanks to which the majority of scientific and educational state institutions of the country will have access to the databases of Eurasian and Russian patents, as well as the databases of scientific publications Scopus and Web of Science [32] . Alexandra Elbakyan called such spending “unreasonable” [33] .
On April 7, 2017, the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) project was launched, aimed at making links and citations for 14 million articles indexed by Crossref available for free. Unlike the Google Scholar project, I4OC offers to open articles not only for viewing and reading, but also for citation and for any use, using the most free license. The initiators of this project were the Wikimedia Commons Foundation, the Australian University of Curtin and other organizations, now 29 publishers have supported it. The goal for the future is to open access to 40% of indexed articles (now only 1% is available) [34] .
| Citation networks form the fabric that connects scientific knowledge, and play a crucial role in identifying who first made a scientific discovery. |
- says one of the project participants, publisher Bernd Pulvever [34] .
Also on April 4, a new extension for Google Chrome called Unpaywall appeared . It allows you to legally search for free versions of articles for which publishers offer to pay for access. Among the top works, it can be used to access 84% of publications, but the less popular and highly impact articles have a much lower probability of finding a free version [35] . The new service has already been dubbed "scientific privateering."
See also
- Copyright
- Intellectual property
- Science Magazine
- Elsevier
- Open science
- Open access
- Open patent
- Copyleft
- Richard Stallman
- Sci-hub
- Alexandra Elbakyan
Notes
- ↑ Alfred Tennyson. The Lover's Tale .
- ↑ Readers of scientific libraries in the Russian Federation are denied legal access to Western publications (unlike visitors to western libraries), because for the purchase of access to publications (as declared) "no funds." For example, the RSL in the catalog provides access to "Remote Network Resources", including publications from leading Western publishers (Cambridge Journals, Oxford Journals Online, Taylor & Francis Online Journal Database, etc.) Remote network resources . Catalog of the Russian State Library . Moscow: RSL. Date of appeal September 17, 2019 . But the vast majority of them are available to readers for a fee - exactly the same as when buying without visiting the library. And the transfer of the library of federal significance to one of the universities led to the occupation of the library premises by the departments of the university, violation (and sometimes complete cessation) of readers' services.
- ↑ “The marginality of this business is huge”: with the head of CyberLeninka about the future of scientific publications . indicator.ru (February 15, 2017). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Marks . Interview with the creator of the free scientific literature repository: open science or scientific piracy? (Russian) , Geektimes (July 15, 2015). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ Richard Stallman, Free software: ethics and practice - Lecture at Moscow State University . eSyr's wiki (March 3, 2008). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 Scientific piracy: A student from Kazakhstan has created a site that helps all scientists in the world - Meduza (Russian) , Meduza (February 11, 2016). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone (Eng.) , Science | AAAS (April 25, 2016). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ Guido Bendezú-Quispe, Wendy Nieto-Gutiérrez, Josmel Pacheco-Mendoza, Alvaro Taype-Rondan. Sci-Hub and medical practice: an ethical dilemma in Peru . The lancet . Elsevier (September 2016).
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 “Download from everywhere except Antarctica” , Gazeta.Ru (April 29, 2016). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ Nature's 10 (Eng.) // Nature. - 2016-12-22. - Vol. 540 , iss. 7634 . - P. 507-515 . - DOI : 10.1038 / 540507a .
- ↑ Magnificent ten: who had the greatest impact on science in 2016 . indicator.ru (December 19, 2016). Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 3 Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science . sci-hub.cc. Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ Guillaume Cabanac. Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing // Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. - 2016-04-01. - Vol. 67 , iss. 4 . - P. 874–884 . - ISSN 2330-1643 . - DOI : 10.1002 / asi.23445 .
- ↑ MolBiol.ru || Electronic articles . molbiol.ru. Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 Quirin Schiermeier. Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers // English . - 2015 .-- DOI : 10.1038 / nature.2015.18876 .
- ↑ Court Orders Shutdown of Libgen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub - TorrentFreak (Eng.) , TorrentFreak (November 2, 2015). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub (Eng.) // Nature News. - 2017. - DOI : 10.1038 / nature.2017.22196 .
- ↑ Elsevier beat Sci-Hub in a $ 15 million lawsuit . indicator.ru (June 23, 2017). Date of treatment June 23, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 3 Marcia McNutt. My love-hate of Sci-Hub (Eng.) // Science. - 2016-04-29. - Vol. 352 , iss. 6285 . - P. 497–497 . - DOI : 10.1126 / science.aaf9419 .
- ↑ Elsevier. About Elsevier . www.elsevier.com Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ In “Nature” they became insolent, and we should honor the Criminal Code. Or vice versa? . The Trinity Version - Science (June 22, 2010). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ The Business of Academic Publishing . southernlibrarianship.icaap.org (2008). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 Elsevier - my part in its downfall . Gowers's Weblog (January 21, 2012). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ ICSTI - Projects | National Information Resources . www.icsti.su. Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 Neylon, Tyler . Life after Elsevier: making open access to scientific knowledge a reality (English) , The Guardian (April 24, 2012). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ The Cost of Knowledge . thecostofknowledge.com. Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ Elsevier Publishers returned 60 German universities access to their journals . indicator.ru (February 15, 2017). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 German university libraries threatened to break off relations with Elsevier . indicator.ru (December 19, 2016). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ Free scientific library of CyberLenink, information about the project, partners and cooperation. Open access to science (Open Access). . CyberLeninka. Date of treatment April 1, 2017.
- ↑ Newspaper Search: Change for the better? The Ministry of Education and Science will launch a fight against information inequality. (inaccessible link) . www.poisknews.ru (February 3, 2017). Date of treatment April 1, 2017. Archived April 17, 2017.
- ↑ The plan to create a unified bioprint preprint service has caused heated debate . indicator.ru (February 14, 2017). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ Web of Science and Scopus publication databases will be available to universities . indicator.ru (February 8, 2017). Date of treatment April 2, 2017.
- ↑ Politicization of the popularization of science in modern Russia: on the Dynasty Foundation . APN (April 9, 2017). Date of treatment April 11, 2017.
- ↑ 1 2 Links and citations from 14 million articles will be available for free . indicator.ru (April 7, 2017). Date of treatment April 10, 2017.
- ↑ New extension for Chrome finds free versions of scientific articles (Russian) , XXII CENTURY. DISCOVERIES, EXPECTATIONS, THREATS. (April 5, 2017). Date of appeal April 14, 2017.