Hi, I’m new here. I heard about this platform from my friends and I really liked the idea of freedom of speech through decentralized content storage. From what I understand about how blockchain works, this seems like a perfect place to write and build a community around info-anarchism, abandon media, archiving, and technologies older than blockchain but still P2P-based – torrents.
What’s the goal?
I’d like to raise a few issues related to what “piracy” is today, what its goals are and, above all, what its benefits and shortcomings are.
What will this look like?
First I need to get my bearings a bit and experience for myself what the conventions are here, how the community works, and what you, dear readers, are most interested in. To reward you for clicking this link and making it all the way here, I’d like to take you on a journey through my inspirations – the things that made me become a pirate and fall in love with this world and the ideas behind it.
Sci-Hub – a sad story funded with our money
Do you like paying twice for the same thing?
On the pathology of the scientific publishing market
To make this easier to follow, let’s introduce a little narrative: let’s imagine we’re a young computer science researcher working on distributed networks. After a few years of work funded by taxpayers, we manage to produce a scientific article: “The impact of P2P networks on network infrastructure performance”. As part of the research we used various kinds of software, recreated the most popular infrastructures, and ran performance tests. On that basis we calculated statistics and correlations. We found similar research done by other scientists and compared our results with theirs. We even ventured into drawing some conclusions, and we seasoned the whole work with a rich bibliography.
Every researcher’s ambition is to publish in the most prestigious journals possible. That increases the prestige of the article itself, the institution, and the researcher. Additionally, in many countries the systems used to evaluate researchers take into account the prestige (usually expressed as some kind of top-down point system or the journal’s Impact Factor) of the journals in which they publish. For now let’s set aside the pathologies this leads to – that’s a very deep rabbit hole. In our story, our researcher decides to publish their article in the journal “Science of Computer Programming”.
The journal’s editors receive the researcher’s manuscript via a submission form or by email. They anonymize it, find experts (also not always :D) in that field and send it out for unpaid peer review. Then, after the reviews come back, the authors make corrections, there’s some back-and-forth over specific points, and eventually a final version is produced. It’s worth noting that this process can go on for months, but it usually filters out basic blunders and improves the quality of the whole thing (also not always, but that’s another rabbit hole). At last!
After acceptance, instead of glory and a text message: Look mom, I’m in the paper!, our researcher gets a bill, usually paid from a grant or by the university (though sometimes out of the researcher’s own pocket). You need to assign a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and often pay additional fees related to the machinery of the publisher. So far this still sounds somewhat fair – the publisher has to earn money somehow, maintain servers, and has facilitated the review process.
The funding comes through, the invoice is booked. An email arrives: published, here’s the link. The researcher clicks. 29.99$ for 24-hour access. Questions pop up: How come? Weren’t all the fees already paid? Maybe at least I’ll get some percentage of this?
Here’s where the real problem shows itself: with minimal work, the publisher earns money at least 2 (sometimes 3) times on the very same article, without sharing any of it with anyone involved. First, when they receive the paper for free, even though it was produced with taxpayers’ money. Second, when the institution has to pay the publication fees. Third, when they fleece readers for access. You might ask: “But what about open access?” Sure, it exists… usually as an extra paid option :D. And to wrap up this paragraph: access for researchers is paid for by institutions – again, usually with our tax money.
I really have to stress this. The publisher got the work for free, didn’t pay for any reviews, charges for publication and access, and in the end doesn’t pay the author a single cent. Yes, this is the best business in the world!
Alexandra Elbakyan – The hero we needed but don’t deserve
So who is Ms. Elbakyan? First and foremost, she is the person who founded Sci-Hub. This Kazakh programmer began her scientific journey in Astana, where she studied computer science with a specialization in information security policy. Fun fact: she worked on a brain-computer interface project.
As is often the case on the internet, if a community is annoyed enough, it will patch any game. In this case, the community – or more precisely, our titular heroine – patched the entire system. By cooperating with various people who voluntarily shared their login credentials to different scientific portals, she created a website which, given a DOI, opens the corresponding article for the user and saves the PDF for future use – with no fees.
As you can imagine, such subversive activity is very unwelcome among publishers who feed off the way the system is built. That’s why Sci-Hub constantly changes domains and locations, is flooded with lawsuits, and its mirrors are blocked at the level of entire countries. Despite this, the site keeps running and continues to provide unrestricted access for millions of researchers, journalists, activists and ordinary people all around the world. On the day of writing this post, the number of publications opened this way is well over 1.8 million.
Since we’re talking about the present, unfortunately recently publishers including Elsevier have won in India, blocking access to Sci-Hub there. If you’re wondering: “So I guess only less developed countries use Sci-Hub?” I’ll answer with this graphic:
She is the person who, single-handedly and through the beautiful project she created, has contributed more to the development of science worldwide than anyone else! It’s no surprise that there are very strong voices within the academic community calling for her to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
Whoa, can I help somehow?
Yes – very much so, and in several ways.
- I have some free disk space
Head over to: https://libgen.li/torrents/scimag/
Sci-Hub distributes torrents via LibGen (also a great project!). Download as much as you can and seed it, until the end of the world and one day longer.
- I have some spare money
To keep this post from going out of date (addresses can change), I’ll just say: visit the site we’re talking about here (link in Sources) – there you’ll find options to donate with BTC and ETH.
- I’m a researcher and I’ll be publishing
You can add an acknowledgment at the beginning or end of your paper for Sci-Hub or Ms. Elbakyan, who runs several projects (including Sci-Net).
Quick guide
Did this story catch your interest? Maybe you’d like to read more about this in some solid article? Perhaps “Pirate open access as electronic civil disobedience: Is it ethical to breach the paywalls of monetized academic publishing?” by Jack E. James sounds like suitable reading?
How unfortunate :D
To solve this problem, we copy the DOI from the article’s page. In this case it’s: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24351 and paste it into Sci-Hub.
Voilà
Sources
[inspiration]
