Summary

This page discusses my thoughts on pirating papers through Sci-Hub. Over time, I've moved from being reluctant about pirating academic papers to being supportive of it.

Note: I'm not an expert on this topic, and my views may change over time.

Early thoughts

I generally maintain a deontological rule against illegal activities, mainly for similar reasons as Eliezer Yudkowsky explains in his "Ethical injunctions" sequence. For this reason, as well as to avoid malware, I generally avoid pirating content. For example, when I watched the Terminator movies in 2014 for the first time, I paid the $3-4 price to rent each one on Amazon Video.

I maintained a similar anti-piracy stance regarding academic papers until 2016, although I used whatever copies of papers I could find on Google Scholar, whether they were uploaded legitimately or not. My general sentiment was that "There are enough good papers that are available, so I may as well focus on those and ignore the ones that aren't available." In rare cases where I needed a specific paper, I emailed the author.

No realistic legal solution

In 2013, as I left Microsoft and began doing more reading of academic literature, I asked for suggestions on accessing paywalled content, but I didn't get great answers.

I thought to myself: There ought to be a Pareto-improving solution to this problem. For example, maybe I could pay a university some amount of money in return for access to its journal subscriptions? In 2013, I emailed a local college to ask whether I could enroll in order to access its network, without taking courses. I was told that this wasn't allowed. How about just paying for library access? I was told that this was also not possible. Alas, many apparently Pareto-improving trades aren't feasible in the real world (a lesson that would be instructive to some dogmatic libertarians).

When I asked the local public library about the topic, I was told that they could get journal articles via interlibrary loan (ILL), but this could take a few weeks. ILL would not just be exasperating for me but would also waste the time of library staff. A strict adherence to the letter of the law, in using ILL over pirating, would be pretty negative from the perspective of actual social welfare according to mainstream (taxpayer) values.

One person on Facebook said: "There has been a lot of back and forth about an itunes model where you would pay 99cents for an article but it hasn't gone anywhere." I would gladly pay $1 per academic article. I try to access paywalled articles about once a day on average, and $365 per year would be a pretty reasonable cost to pay for legal article access. But sadly, this is not to be. As another person explained on the Facebook thread: "If a way existed for the academic publishers to make their work available more broadly for a low price without universities taking advantage of the discount, they would be keen for the profits and incidentally great social value would be realized, but they don't have any easy way to do so." Most academic articles cost $40 these days, and paying ~365 * $40 = $15K per year for academic-article access is not an option.

I have legal access to one collection of academic articles—JSTOR—through Swarthmore College's "Alumni" page. However, probably ~90% of the paywalled articles I want to download aren't on JSTOR.

Embracing Sci-Hub

In 2016, Sci-Hub was in the news, and more of my friends began using it. I was initially reluctant, but eventually I decided that it was too useful not to take advantage of and began using it myself on a regular basis. Given that tons of researchers (even at universities) use Sci-Hub, I assumed it was unlikely to be a really bad idea. (By the way, the link in the previous sentence goes to a paywalled article that you need Sci-Hub to read.)

These days, I don't have any remorse about using Sci-Hub. I generally feel that

if publishers stubbornly won't provide a way to sell papers at $1 apiece or less, then they deserve to be pirated, and

if publishers can't provide cheaper papers because efforts at price discrimination would undercut high prices charged to universities, then publishers shouldn't care about my piracy, because I'm not a potential customer anyway. (I would never buy an academic paper at a $40 price tag—I would rather just email the author or ask a friend with university access for it.)

There's a further debate about whether society would be better off if big academic publishers went out of business, such that piracy is actually morally good, not just morally neutral. I'm not informed enough to comment on this, and I'm unsure how the approach of illegally undermining a bad system squares with ethical injunctions. I tentatively agree with this statement: "I believe copyright law is now at odds with the public interest, and that some bad actors among otherwise beneficial publishers have supported an unnecessarily restrictive information apartheid to unaffiliated researchers."

Of course, even people who have university access still use Sci-Hub for reasons of convenience or because universities and other large research organizations don't have all papers either. This post says: "I work for the main research organization (the CNRS) of one of the richest country in the world, and I have access to only 60% of the papers I need to read."