The Story of Sci-Hub

Should scientific knowledge be freely available for everyone?Scihub_raven

Alexandra Elbakyan, a software developer and researcher from Kazakhstan thought so, and she decided to take matters into her own hands. Academic papers are usually stored behind paywalls, which means people pay a price of around $30 for access to a single paper. In 2011, Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a project meant to share paywalled academic content to make it freely available for anyone who’s interested.

Her efforts did not go unnoticed. She has been called “the Robin Hood of science” and at one point, her site was used by around 80.000 people each day. In the meantime, the response from certain publishing companies has been less welcoming. Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier is currently in a legal case against Sci-Hub. There have been expressions of support for both sides, like the Electric Frontier Foundation for Sci-Hub and the Association of American Publishers for Elsevier.

One of Elbakyan’s main goals with Sci-Hub was to make scientific articles freely available for institutions around the world. She herself noticed the problem of high academic paywalls while studying in Kazakhstan University. Her university couldn’t afford journal subscriptions and she was forced to pirate research. With Sci-Hub, this process of pirating for the first time became as easy as the click of a button.

I think it doesn’t need much clarification when I say that freer global access to academic papers would benefit the scientific community at large, not just the communities in the poorer regions of the world. A greater audience for your paper means a greater possibility that it will be used in further research, as well as more chance for feedback. Even if you make the argument that limited access is a good thing because it upholds quality over quantity and valuable insight over information in bulk, it‘s hard to see why money should be the decisive factor.

There’s an interesting parallel between the development of piracy in the scientific community and piracy in the entertainment industry. In 2000, it was download service Napster that was challenged by Metallica for similar reasons. This lawsuit was the kick-off of a piracy debate that’s going on to this day, with The Pirate Bay as the new main player on the pro-piracy side.

There’s a lot to be said for both sides of this debate, but what did become clear is that the music industry couldn’t keep going the way it was. Nobody is arguing that musicians don’t need to be paid, but the whole payment system was in dire need of reform. The music industry needed to take a good hard look at why people aren’t willing to pay for music anymore.

Already, a lot has changed in the music industry. Streaming services like Spotify have conquered huge parts of the market. Even though Spotify has a free option, roughly 30 million people have a paid subscription, enjoying ad-less playing and a higher sound quality. Another “alternative” to the standard revenue model is Bandcamp, a platform where every artist can upload their music to stream, and assign their own prices – including free – for digital downloads and physical orders. This is a service that centralizes the idea of try before you buy, and it assumes that if people really like the music, they will want to support the artists.

In a letter to the judge of the Sci-Hub vs. Elsevier case, Elbakyan wrote:

Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them. Later I found there are lots and lots of researchers (not even students, but university researchers) just like me, especially in developing countries.“

A possible solution to this problem would be to offer a model similar to Bandcamp‘s, where you can preview papers and download them for a fee that‘s defined by the publisher him- or herself. This would allow for unlimited skimming of papers, which is simply needed for proper research, while maintaining important advantages for people that are prepared to pay for it.

I‘m not exactly an insider in the scientific community, and there‘s undoubtedly many people who are more credible to come up with good ideas concerning the current situation. But for that to happen, it should be made clear that something indeed needs to happen.

The rise of pre-recorded music made people think that they were witnessing the end of the music industry. It didn‘t happen. The rise of online filesharing made people think once again think that they were witnessing the end of the music industry, and it once again seems that they were wrong. Now, the rise of piracy in the scientific community makes people think that this is going to be the end of science. I predict that it‘s not. But it just might be the end of the scientific community as we know it. With a bit of wishful thinking, it might even be the start of a new era of more open, more free scientific inquiry.

Moving forward, the scientific community should ask itself: do we want to be fueled solely by our own curiosity, or should we maybe take a look at the world around us?


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