Insight

Elsevier, a major scientific publisher, has a 36 percent profit margin - bigger than Apple, Amazon, and Google. And it's just one of many. But Sci-Hub could change all that by releasing every article for free.

We will see whether the gatekeepers can hold the door closed. (Getty Images)

Imagine you want to research a sci-tech topic you're interested in. One of the best ways to get the latest and most reliable information is by reading research papers. But here's the catch: the average cost of a journal article is $30 and it's expected to rise.

If you were to subscribe to a journal, that number could go all the way up to $14,000 annually. That’s the actual price of the Journal of Coordination Chemistry (I have no idea what that is, but apparently it's really important).

At present, universities, think tanks, governments and corporations pick up most if not all of the tab for journal subscriptions. But why limit it to these kinds of institutions, when knowledge just wants to be free? And what about independent researchers?

Frustrated by the whole business of research papers, in September 2011, a grad student from Kazakhstan created a shadow library on the internet. Her website, Sci-Hub, contains 64,500,000 million research papers and the number is ever-growing, according to data provided by the website’s founder, Alexandra Elbakyan.

Having founded the website, Alexandra's helped out a lot of independent researchers. But there's a problem. She and her team basically plundered the journals and made all the articles available for free.

The publishers weren’t too excited about it and in fact, Elsevier sued her and won. Sci-Hub was ordered to pay Elsevier $15 million. There's more. The American Chemical Society (ACS) also won a lawsuit against Sci-Hub on the charges of copyright infringement, trademark counterfeiting, and trademark infringement. Sci-Hub was again ordered to pay, this time $4.8 million.

Why?

There are 15 entire disciplines where the average fee for one journal per year is over $1,000. These numbers add up to really high amounts. So high that even Harvard University, which has one of the largest endowments of any educational institution, came out against the practice. The former director of Harvard Library Robert Darnton said, “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”

How did it all begin?

What Mr Darnton is referring to is the unique business model of science publishing that was born in the aftermath of the Second World War, spearheaded almost single-handedly by the British tycoon Robert Maxwell.

In this model, production of scientific knowledge is paid for by either government grants (essentially taxes), and public or private universities or corporations (the most controversial of the three due to their vested interest in specific outcomes).

So by the time a paper is ready for publishing, the cost of creating the information has already been paid for. Scientists submit the paper for free to one of these publications to be peer-reviewed and published. Other scientists peer review these papers mostly on a voluntary basis. So the only cost to the publication is paying for copy editing, distribution costs of printing and shipping (which are minimised in the digital age).

This is how you end up with a company like Elsevier that has a profit margin of 36 percent, bigger than Apple, Amazon, and Google.

This is possible because there are few giant publishers like Elsevier that have made themselves indispensable to the scientific community, libraries and universities. They have gathered thousands of individual journals under their brand name, therefore making it impossible for you as an institution to carry on with research without a subscription to one of these big brand-name publications.

This has led people to seek borderline or outright illegal solutions. Before Sci-Hub there was a decentralised way people went around the rules, like the Twitter hashtag #ICanHazPdf where strangers provided each other with articles acquired through their library or university affiliations.

Co-creator of the RSS feed, Reddit, Creative Commons among other things, Aaron Swartz wrote in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitised and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”

Let's hope it won't come to this. (Getty Images)

Now what?

The scientific publishing business is too profitable for these major companies to let it go. These publishers have already blocked a number of domains belonging to Sci-Hub and are trying to block access to these sites by removing access to the website through search engines and taking down the IT infrastructure. According to a preprint from PeerJ, Sci-Hub gives instant access to 69 percent of all research papers. For some publishers like Elsevier, the percentage is as high as 97.

The ease of access to all these research papers is a major threat to the publishers’ business model. No matter what one thinks about the issue, Sci-hub is a game-changer for the industry. The current business model isn't healthy for anyone except the publishers themselves who get the lion’s share. Publishers will continue their attacks and Sci-Hub could eventually face the same end that Napster or some major torrent sites did.

But, even if it collapses, it showed everyone the demand for easy access to academic papers is serious. The publishers might have to change their business model in order to stay relevant. Sci-Hub might lead to the creation of a science version of Spotify, a cheaper and completely digitised platform for article sharing.

Source: TRT World