In December 2016, negotiations between the publishing behemoth Elsevier and scientific and/or government associations in Germany, Taiwan and Peru were floundering. The demands from the associations were many: lowering prices, increasing access to published research papers, etc. It was looking like researchers from these countries would soon be going without direct access to Elsevier’s catalogue of more than 3,400 journals. It was also a flashpoint – the beginning of a backlash against big publishers and their perceived profiteering in scientific publishing.

But one year later, nothing much has changed. The roughly 200 German universities whose contracts with Elsevier ran out at the end of 2017 will continue to receive access ‘without a contract’ until an agreement is finally reached. In Taiwan, despite a disruption of a couple months, an agreement was reached and subscription to Elsevier’s flagship database, ScienceDirect, resumed in June 2017. It seemed like the status quo would continue for a few more years.

Except in Peru.

Peru used to have access to Elsevier through Hinari, a WHO-led initiative for developing countries. But Peru’s eligibility for the programme ended in 2012 and for a few years, its scientists lost access. In 2014, their national council for science negotiated a three-year license for a whopping $10 million, according to Nature. This license expired in 2017 and their government refused to fund another one. María Luisa de la Rocha V. of the Instituto de Investigación Científica, Universidad de Lima, told The Wire that now, “due to the high cost of subscription, only two or three private universities work with Scopus. Three other universities have a joint subscription.” Scopus is another database of science journals.

Germany’s GDP per capita was about $44,000 in 2017. In Taiwan, it was $24,000. In Peru? $6,500. It didn’t seem like a coincidence. Where will researchers in Peru turn to now when they need access to the scientific literature? They have limited options: inter-library loans if their university is a part of a network; asking on Twitter with #icanhazpdf and hoping somebody cares; writing directly to authors; and checking if Unpaywall finds an open version. Or they can pirate their papers through websites like SciHub. Of all these, in terms of coverage and ease of use, there is sadly no competition.

A recent analysis led by Daniel Himmelstein of the University of Pennsylvania shows that the SciHub database contains 85% of all papers published in paywalled journals. This includes 97% of all papers in Elsevier’s database. There has been no precedent for this kind of access in the history of scientific enterprise.

Unparalleled coverage

The analysis by Himmelstein et al was based on the digital object identifier (DOI) given to each text by its publisher. These texts might be journal articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, etc. They compared the DOIs of the texts available with SciHub with the entire corpus of DOIs listed on CrossRef’s database. CrossRef’s 81 million DOIs are as good a usable definition of ‘all scientific literature’ as is available (if books are excluded, etc). SciHub contains almost 70% of this entire corpus. This rises to 80% if only journal articles are counted, and further to 85% if only paywalled journals counted – the statistic that matters most to researchers in less privileged nations. The average coverage of the most cited journals exceeds 90% with most major publishers being thoroughly covered.

There is no subject area where SciHub’s coverage is less than 75% of all journal articles.

The same paper compares the coverage of SciHub with the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). UPenn has an endowment of over $10 billion, spends more than $1.2 billion on research every year and, in 2017, spent more than $13 million on access to electronic scientific resources, including journals and ebooks. Based on a sample study, the authors claim that SciHub’s current coverage exceeds that of UPenn.

It’s essential to also remember that all of the above estimates are conservative. SciHub will attempt to gain access to any requested paper that it doesn’t already have in its database. This technological feat is reportedly done using the login credentials of users who have legitimate access to libraries or publishers. The source of these credentials is ambiguous – even to Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of SciHub, who has written that they “come from various sources, including illicit ones.” Elbakyan is upfront about this and most other aspects of the working of SciHub despite being widely denounced as a criminal by the academic publishing industry.

It was her proactive data-sharing that enabled the Himmelstein et al paper as well as a previous analysis by John Bohannon, a journalist, who found that SciHub was being accessed from all over the world. Bohannon’s report analysed SciHub access logs from September 2015 to March 2016. It showed more than three million unique IP addresses – but again this is a lower bound.

He also found that the data seemed to show “a map of scientific productivity, but with some of the richer and poorer science-focused nations flipped… Someone in Nuuk, Greenland, is reading a paper about how best to provide cancer treatment to indigenous populations. Research goes on in Libya, even as a civil war rages there. Someone in Benghazi is investigating a method for transmitting data between computers across an air gap. Far to the south in the oil-rich desert, someone near the town of Sabha is delving into fluid dynamics.”

That six-month period showed 3.4 million download requests from India. The largest clusters were found in Chennai and Bangalore, major hubs of education. Surprisingly, there were large numbers (>100,000) of downloads from Tavdi Gaam in Gujarat and Gugal Pimpaari in Maharashtra. While the former cluster could be due to students at the nearby Navsari Agricultural University, it’s not clear at all why the temple-laden countryside outside Washim should show up on a piracy map.

Open access movement

A recent nine-author study, led by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem, estimates that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is open access (OA). The study, referred to as the ‘State of OA’ report, also found that the most recent year analysed, 2015, also had the highest percentage of open access articles at 45%. This means that the OA movement is growing and that each year, a greater share of the world’s knowledge is openly accessible.

But this has been a long, hard and uphill struggle. The OA movement has been alive for decades. (An exhaustive timeline can be found here.) It’s been more than 15 years since the Budapest Open Access Initiative. At the same time, the progress made by the movement, however slow, has primarily been aided by the adoption of OA policies by funders rather than publishers. In fact, most publishers are still only partially committed. This is despite numerous studies (including the aforementioned State of OA report) finding that OA articles receive more citations on average. Other advantages to researchers include “media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities.” (The wider academic, economic and societal impacts of open access are explored in this evidence-based review).

Publishers are making economically rational decisions guided by their profit margins. The industry is estimated to have made around $9.4 billion in 2011. Elsevier is reported to have a market cap of almost $35 billion, with an approximate 40% profit margin – which, as Ian Graber-Stiehl writes in The Verge, “dwarfs, by comparison, the margins of tech titans such as Apple, Google, and Amazon.” Their subscription rates have only increased – an estimate by EBSCO puts the price rise as 25% from 2013 to 2017.

In 2012, even Harvard University complained that two publishers had increased their online subscription prices by 145% in six years. Open access platforms like the Latin American SCIElo would radically reduce costs; Björn Brembs, a neurobiologist at the Universität Würzburg, Germany, and outspoken OA advocate, argues that it could come down from $9.4 billion to as little as $200 million.

These publishers have essentially reduced knowledge to a commodity. But as one of the leading OA thinkers, Peter Suber wrote in his 2012 book, Open Access, “The idea is to stop thinking of knowledge as a commodity to meter out to deserving customers, and to start thinking of it as a public good, especially when it is given away by its authors, funded with public money, or both.” Or, as Elbakyan might put it, quoting the sociologist Robert Merton, “The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as ‘private property’ in a capitalistic economy.”

But that said, there is some disagreement among OA advocates over whether SciHub contributes to the mental shift associated with the OA movement. This is a shift that has to take root in the minds of researchers, administrators, educators and the public about the way we develop, share and value scientific knowledge. This is what the rest of the OA movement has been doing for the last oh-so-many decades – pushing public and academic opinion towards the idea of scientific knowledge as a public good and as an intellectual commons for the use of the whole world. SciHub sidestepped this slow, painful work and went straight for the jugular. Whether it hastened the replacement of the current publishing paradigm and the onset of a more equitable, more cooperative future is still an open question.

Thomas Manuel is the winner of The Hindu Playwright Award 2016.