If you are involved in any type of academic research, you know how totally out of control prices are for your community members. I was recently looking for an article I wrote – and the publisher offered to charge me $36 to look at it for 24 hours!! (Note that as the author, I get $0 of that price.) I laughed out loud.
Subscription costs for journals keep spiraling upward, but library budgets do not match them. As library people, we want to support our community members in their search for information, and we are responsible for ensuring everyone follows copyright laws and DRM requirements, along with publisher requirements. It can all be a serious challenge to anyone who needs to find academic research material.
So I am always intrigued to read about the “pirates” of the research world – sharing articles with anyone. We are definitely not advocating steering your patrons to these illegal sources (that tend to be easier to use than your catalog, and cost them nothing) – we would much prefer for journals to become more accessible for people in a more fair system.
But you should be aware of the developments in the world of academic research, so we are sharing this article from The Verge about one woman’s efforts to share research – not just with scholars in the US, but also around the world.
“In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”
It wasn’t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. “I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like ‘Well, that’s… that’s a real problem.’ There’s no literal translation,” Elbakyan tells me in Russian. “It’s basically ‘That’s an ass.’ But it doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It’s more like ‘That’s fucked up. We’re fucked.’”
The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business.
That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.
But as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers.
Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. But that conversation — at least in English — took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place. Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. Now, even though Elbakyan stands at the center of an argument about how copyright is enforced on the internet, most people have no idea who she is.”
“The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009,” Elbakyan says. As a student doing research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she ran across an obstacle encountered by students the world over: paywalls. Most science journals charge money to access their articles. And the prices have only been rising.
How much? Exact estimates are hard to come by. Research by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) suggests that the cost of libraries’ subscriptions to journals only increased by 9 percent between 1990 and 2013. But as Library Journal’s annual survey pointed out, there was a change in ARL’s data collection. That estimate, Library Journal said, “flies in the face of reality.” Library Journal’s records showed that a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal in the US ran, on average, for $4,773; the cheapest subscriptions were to general science journals, which only cost $1,556 per year. Those prices make these journals inaccessible to most people without institutional access — and they’re increasingly difficult for institutions to finance as well. “Those who [have] been involved with purchasing serials in the last 20 years know that serial prices represent the largest inflationary factor for library budgets,” the Library Journal report says.
Taken together, universities’ subscriptions to academic journals often cost $500,000 to $2 million. Even Harvard said in 2012 that it couldn’t afford journals’ rising fees, citing, in particular, two publishers that had inflated their rates by 145 percent within six years. Germany’s University of Konstanz dropped its subscription to Elsevier’s journals in 2014, saying its prices had increased by 30 percent in five years.
The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Over half of all research, according to one study, is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. That’s a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. And that’s just for natural and medical science papers; the social sciences have it worse. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five’s pages; now it’s more than half. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players.
Profits and market caps for the publishers have also swelled. Elsevier’s parent comapny RELX Group, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. It has reported a nearly 39 percent profit margin for its scientific publishing arm — which dwarfs, by comparison, the margins of tech titans such as Apple, Google, and Amazon.
If you’re looking to access an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to pay, says Peter Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. But there is a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access repositories like Cornell’s Arxiv.org.
Suber is one of the loudest voices for Open Access movement. He was one of the original architects of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that established the most widely used definition of Open Access: “free availability on the public internet,” with the only constraint on sharing of research being authors’ “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” It also established the movement’s mandate to make Open Access the default method of publishing within a decade.”
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