Unfortunately, researchers have lived in a world where they didn’t have time to worry about scholarship as a system, because they live in the system. Those young (and less young) who have still to get tenure or research grants cannot fight the system at the peril of their own career: so they won’t fight it. Tenured professor who benefited from the system often simply don’t care. Everyone is in a rush, they have to publish or perish. If they publish, they need their paper to be in a high impact factor journal. It’s a cycle. It’s the ring. You cannot escape it.

Lured by power, by advancement of career, academics accepted an economy they knew well, and trusted the publishers as the Wall Street of this economy. That, in the end, was a very bad move.

Copyright is to blame

We already said that academics represent the whole industry for academic publishing: they produce, they process, they consume. The whole cycle lies within the same community.

Publishers simply provide a service: they coordinate scientific journals, the infrastructure of scientific publishing. They ask for good articles, contact peer reviewers, and then sell the journals to libraries. This role was crucial, in a paper era: publishers were the ones who brought content to the public.

With the digital revolution, everything should have changed: publishing articles online is extremely easy for anyone, distribution is not a problem any more. But things didn’t really change. The power of the ring is still too great.

Of course, there has been a resistance.

For decades, Open Access advocates challenged the current publication system, and providing several legal strategies to overcome the power of the ring, and those who hold it. There are now thousands of peer reviewed journals that can be read for free, millions of open access articles. But it’s hard to fight power when you start from zero: reputation can’t be built in one day. Creating an high impact factor journal needs time and effort. I’m thinking about PLoS, or eLife. It’s a very long, complicated battle, in which traditional publishing continues to have the upper hand.

Because copyright.

The Open Access movement very premise is the fact that:

“normal copyright” allows publishers to keep research articles closed

if you want articles to be free, they have to be free from the beginning. This means either:

a) you convince authors’ articles use open their copyright (using Creative Commons licenses).

b) you force openness via legal mandates.

This has been more or less the two strategies (one bottom up, the other top down) of the open access movement, because they wanted to fight the good fight with good weapons: they wanted to respect the law.

Until Sci-hub.

Sci-hub is a goal

What Sci-hub does is an elegant solution to the problem, and the solution is as radical as it’s powerful: Sci-hub deliberately fights copyright.

We advocate for cancellation of intellectual property, or copyright laws, for scientific and educational resources. *

Cutting the Gordian knot, Sci-hub becomes simply the easiest way to find scholarly literature.

It’s access to research as it should be: a simple, usable, unique search engine for science. You ask for an article, you download it. It’s easy and effective. It’s a librarian dream.

Alexandra Elbakyan is crystal clear in this idea: Sci-hub is a goal.

What was especially surpising for me is that there are many people who view Sci-Hub as some kind of a tool to change the system. Like changing the system was a goal, and Sci-Hub was a tool to achieve it. My view is completely different. For me, Sci-Hub has a value by itself, as a website where users can access knowledge. There are many websites where you can see pictures, share tweets, download music, read ebooks. And Sci-Hub is a website where you can read research articles.

Academic literature is a commons

It’s easy to dismiss Elbakyan’s work as rogue hacktivist piracy. But, if we frame it right, it’s also easy to see Sci-hub as a unlawful act of justice against an unjust, but lawful, system. For her, it’s a necessary act of civil disobedience.

Theoretically, she has a point. A very long tradition of sharing that dates back centuries makes scientific literature a commons, a common pool resource owned and governed by its community². We know this kind of culture very well: the open web is a direct consequence of academics working on the internet and putting their values of openness and collaboration in the technology. Tim Berners-Lee was working with researchers at CERN when he invented the World Wide Web: originally, it was a technology for communication and documentation between researchers. Robert K. Merton, (him, again), called this norm “communism of science”.

Publishers like Elsevier used their power as a mean for enclosing this commons, as Lords in 18th century England used fences to enclose public pastures owned by the community.

Publishers managed to dispossess the ownership of research by the hands of the community who owns it. They managed to insulate themselves and maintaining the power of the system from outside of it, asking for exorbitant sums for the little value they provide.

Sci-hub hits now publishers where it hurts. But is it enough?