Introduction

One plenary session of the 2019 Researcher to Reader (R2R) Conference was a debate on the proposition “Resolved: Sci-Hub is doing more good than harm to scholarly communication.” Arguing in favor of the resolution was Daniel Himmelstein, a postdoctoral fellow in genomics at the University of Pennsylvania. Arguing against it was Justin Spence, partner and co-founder of PSI Ltd., and the IP Registry. (Video of the debate can be found here.)

At the beginning of the program, the audience was polled as to its agreement with the resolution. Of the 100 attendees who voted, 60 were opposed and 40 were in favor. Each debater then opened with a ten-minute statement, following which each offered a three-minute response. There was then a period of discussion with the audience, and then the poll was repeated. The second poll found that 55 were opposed to the resolution and 45 in favor. Though the overall verdict was anti-Sci-Hub, the shift in five votes meant that Daniel was accordingly declared the winner of the debate.

Daniel’s and Justin’s opening statements and responses are reproduced here. Further discussion is welcome in the comments section.

Opening Statement in Support of the Resolution (Daniel Himmelstein)

Is “Sci-Hub doing more good than harm to scholarly communication”? This question boils down to: should science be paywalled? Is open or toll access a better model for communication?

While we might never agree on the ethics of Sci-Hub, we can agree that making publicly-funded research available to all is a worthy goal. Sci-Hub enables us to reach that goal. But first, how did we get into this predicament.

Before the internet, print journals were the best way to distribute articles to academic communities. Since physical distribution has a non-negligible per-unit cost, toll access made sense. However, with digital publication the bandwidth to deliver an article costs a mere fraction of a penny, yet readers encounter paywalls demanding £30 sterling or more! Why? Because we inherited a toll access system from the print publication era.

Toll access in today’s world is bad for two reasons. First, it deprives access. Second, it leads to exorbitant costs. Scholars publish to add upon the eternal scholarly record. How good, however, is a record locked behind paywalls, such that the vast majority of earth’s inhabitants have no access?

Do journals fund the research? No. Do journals pay royalties to authors? No. Do journals pay the peer reviewers who evaluate the quality of submissions? No. Do journals pay the academic editors who manage the process? Usually not. In rare circumstances, journals may provide copyediting… I’ve never experienced that luxury however. Then why do journals receive an exclusive right to sell access?

The legal answer is that the authors transfer copyright. The social answer is that authors prefer to publish in prestigious journals, whose toll access status is not causal but simply vestigial. The ethical answer exists not. The rights to scholarship should be dedicated to society at large.

Copyright laws cover “original works of authorship”, such as prose and composition. Yet when a reader buys access to an article, they pay to access to the findings and ideas, which although explicitly outside the realm of copyright, are so entangled by the medium of publication that no alternative route of access exists. As a result, journals pervert copyright to collect revenue on the complete value of a work, primarily its ideas and findings despite having contributed only slightly to their creation.

Consequently, the cost of subscriptions has reached crisis levels. Here’s librarian Dana Roth commenting on the situation in 1990: “the only solution available to the library in 1981 was to use monograph and binding funds to help offset the shortfall in the…journals budget…libraries were extremely hard hit, and only now after nearly seven years have they recovered (just in time for the current crisis).”

Has the situation improved? Hardly! The Association of Research Libraries estimates inflation-adjusted subscription expenditures tripled from 1986 to 2015. How can libraries bear this financial burden? Until recently, they had little choice. To stand on the shoulders of giants, scholars must first have access.

Then Sci-Hub arrived. Scholars no longer depend on institutional access. Librarians may not even be aware that Sci-Hub is the force that freed them from subscriptions. Simply, patrons no longer complain when a journal is excluded from the catalog — it’s more convenient to just use Sci-Hub.

One look at SPARC’s Big Deal Cancellation Tracker shows libraries are ditching subscriptions at an accelerating rate. Universities in Germany and Sweden have foregone access to new articles from Elsevier’s 2,500 journals. These universities are pursuing read & publish deals, which, like Sci-Hub, would eventually result in the demise of toll access. However, successful negotiation requires a credible threat of cancellation, which Sci-Hub now affords. Industry insiders are well aware, as a publishing consultant recently expressed to Nature News: “Esposito thinks that the German institutes have leverage over Elsevier because their researchers can access papers on the illicit sharing site Sci-Hub.”

We’ve estimated that Sci-Hub’s usage has been growing at 80% a year, measured both by Google search interest and download logs. In 2017, Sci-Hub provided access to half a million PDF downloads…each day that is…20 times more than the University of Pennsylvania whose libraries spent $13 million dollars for their access. Sci-Hub contains 85% of articles published in toll access journals. However, based on which articles have been recently cited in the literature, we estimate that Sci-Hub fulfills around 96% of requests. Extrapolating forward, it’s clear that subscription publishing is doomed.

In the words of Elsevier’s Vice President, “What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?” A rare instance where an Elsevier executive agrees with Sci-Hub’s creator, who wrote: “The effect of long-term operation of Sci-Hub will be that publishers change their…models to support Open Access, because closed access will make no sense.”

The transition is underway as we speak. At the turn of the millenium, 1% of articles were published in Gold OA journals. In 2018, that number reached 13%. While these trends are promising, continuing pressure from Sci-Hub will be crucial to flip existing journals open.

But why is open so preferable to closed? Besides the obvious that people benefit from access to knowledge, we must consider the future. Currently, there are more than 4 million new articles published per year. No expert can read every one. Researchers are increasingly turning to text & data mining. A 2018 study found major benefits when mining 15 million fulltexts compared to abstracts alone. However, widespread open access is essential to enable large corpuses of preprocessed articles. Experts increasingly believe that curing complex diseases will require using artificial intelligence to analyze the wealth of knowledge currently locked in PDFs. Every additional study published without an open license is a lost opportunity to bring us one step closer to a cure.

In addition, open access is cheaper. A report for the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee found the per-article cost of toll access was 53% higher. This makes sense. Similar to President Trump’s border wall, erecting and maintaining paywalls is expensive. Negotiating subscriptions is cumbersome — a waste of human capital. Furthermore, with toll access, authors are removed from the costs, and lack incentives to publish in modern journals with efficient workflows. In the words of Dr. Thomas Munro: “Paywalls raise costs, by allowing authors to externalize these ruinous costs to society: a vast public subsidy — tens of billions of dollars a year — of the concealment of publicly-funded research from the public. … Sci-Hub is hastening the end of this grotesque situation.”

One criticism of open access is that APCs (article processing charges) burden authors financially. Yet, empirically this hasn’t been the case. Less than one third of the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals charge fees to authors — they’ve found alternative means of funding. And even when APCs exist, only one in ten times are they paid for by the authors, according to a 2011 study, which found 59% were paid by funding agencies and the remaining 24% by universities. Finally, most open access journals provide waivers, such that lack of publication due to financial hardship is rare. Preprints — increasingly accepted with each passing day — also provide authors a zero-cost option.

Another criticism is that APCs give rise to predatory publishers that take authors’ money but do not perform rigorous peer review. However, this is like saying society should never have switched from snail mail to email because spam is bad. In short, like spam, there are easy solutions to predatory journals. There is no easy workaround however to the vast majority of scholarship being paywalled…well at least that was the case until Sci-Hub.

While Sci-Hub is easy to use, creating Sci-Hub was not an easy technical feat. Founded in 2011 by Kazakh graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub has been able to pirate articles at an unprecedented scale. However, Sci-Hub has no commercial ambition. Instead, they deposit acquired articles to Library Genesis, which bundles them into torrents to be preserved by budding librarians around the globe. Furthermore, Sci-Hub has been invaluable in delivering content to underserved communities. Whether it’s medical students in Latin America or scholars in Iran and India, Sci-Hub is succeeding in its self-proclaimed mission to “fight inequality in knowledge access across the world”.

In conclusion, the opportunity offered by a completely open scholarly record is too large to cast aside. While open access advocates have lobbied for such a future for decades, entrenched structures in academia have been slow to change. Sci-Hub is the black swan that will break down paywalls and move publishing towards a model designed for the digital age. Yes, Sci-Hub pushes the boundaries of civil disobedience, but in doing so it offers us the opportunity to liberate scholarly communication!

Opening Statement Against the Resolution (Justin Spence)

We’ve been asked to debate the position that Sci-Hub is doing more good than harm to scholarly communication. I will argue the contrarian view — namely that Sci-Hub is doing significant harm to an already challenged market. Harm that carries long-term negative consequences that far outweigh any so-called benefits that Sci-Hub pretends to provide.

Sci-Hub does underscore again the need and demand for improved seamless access to important research. Of course, it is easy to set up a friendly cross platform interface when you steal the content you are hosting and don’t care about who should or should not have access, or about issues like version control, archival responsibilities for future generations, and a host of related concerns.

At the same time the publishing industry is already well aware of the need to streamline access to licensed content. There are several ongoing publisher/library initiatives working on improved remote access, widespread Open Access initiatives, and aid to areas of the world that cannot afford vital research.

Publishers have for many years worked with libraries and global NGO’s on efforts to make critical information readily available to those in need. The Research for Life (R4L) initiative is a good example. Cooperative work on R4L provides free or low-cost access to 90,000 leading journals and books to thousands of institutions from 120 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Conversely a recent Science Magazine analysis suggests that of the millions of documents downloaded via Sci-Hub, very little are used by those truly in need. In fact most Sci-Hub use originates from well-established and primarily well-funded locations in the western world.

My point is not to suggest the current system is flawless or to assign altruistic motives to efforts to improve same. Rather, I’d simply point out that the market was already speaking loudly, and publishers are applying significant efforts in response.

On the other side of the equation Sci-Hub is doing significant damage with both short- and long-term implications for libraries, institutions, publishers, researchers and end users in general. Most troubling, Sci-Hub muddies the landscape by recklessly creating a false perception is that is not sustainable. The perception that the creation and dissemination of high quality, peer reviewed research carries no appreciable cost — and that there is no harm in utilizing pirated content.

Indeed Sci-Hub is training researchers, particularly young researchers, to expect that high-quality scholarly information is essentially free. Even more worrisome, evidence suggests that some libraries, particularly in Europe, are beginning to use the availability of pirate sites as leverage in negotiations.

Sci-Hub is putting forth an academically indefensible argument, but also causing behavioral shifts that will undoubtedly cause great to harm scholarly communication as a whole — not simply the publishers that Alexandra Elbakyan claims to find so repugnant.

Elbakyan seems to suggest this illegal behavior is justified because she serves as some sort of modern day Robin Hood — singularly focused on the goal of ensuring that scholarly information is made more widely accessible. Asking us to believe she is tirelessly working to achieve some sort of altruistic goal. I confess, I am a clear cynic on this point — I think there is much more than that in play although that’s a subject for a different day.

And it’s important to note that the field of scholarly communication is not unique. There are similar debates regarding profit margins and operations in the field of education, healthcare, and utilities, to name a few. Such debates can and should be constructive, but no one can seriously argue that those industries don’t carry legitimate costs and without some source of funding would simply cease to exist.

Accordingly, the “motives” behind Sci-Hub are irrelevant. Theft is ethically indefensible and cannot be seen as a viable solution to perceived market inequities. I may think the healthcare industry — particularly in the US — is a “public good” industry that is significantly flawed. However under no circumstances does that justify my walking into my local pharmacy and simply stealing whatever prescription drugs I may want or need.

It’s also academically dishonest to suggest simply making things free is any sort of real long-term solution. The world of scholarly communication is complex and solutions to challenges are not always easy or fast.

Perhaps there is no better illustration of this point than the recent financial performance of Public Library of Science (PLOS). PLOS is an important effort with good intentions. It’s also an effort that enjoys a not insignificant allocation of public monies. And yet, despite that significant benefit, PLOS has struggled both financially and in terms of developing and maintaining a long-term manuscript flow. There are important things to learn from the PLOS initiative — not the least of which that there are no magic bullets. I think it’s also valid to ask why the scholarly research community is not flooding PLOS with vast amounts of the very best and highest caliber research. Probably because the dynamics of scholarly communication are complex and not simply a reflection of a universal altruistic desire to make all information freely accessible to anyone who has an interest.

Despite all this, Sci-Hub continues to foolishly encourage a false and unreasonable set of expectations for a new generation of consumers. Long-term economics cannot support a system forced to endure such wide-scale theft and negative shifts in behavioral norms — and continuing on this path will produce negative outcomes for all.

The more immediate short-term damages caused by Sci-Hub are no less concerning

Sci-Hub represents a clear risk to the security of personal information. There is ample evidence demonstrating that Sci-Hub employs phishing, hacking, alterations of personal profiles, and password theft to illegally acquire content. This reckless violation of system security adds significant risk to all parts of the research chain. And it’s not clear that the security breaches are limited to stealing content. Joe DeMarco, a former US Assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and noted expert in cybercrime, stated at a recent Society for Scholarly Publishing conference: “I have never once met a cybercriminal who set out to gain access to a database for one purpose and only confined themselves to that one purpose once they got inside the database. It’s not how criminals think.”

Indeed, Rick Anderson wrote in a recent Scholarly Kitchen article about the dangers of security surrounding network credentials and the risk of unapproved access to email, academic information and grades, personal financial information, department budgets, hiring information, and personnel records.

Security concerns surrounding Sch-Hub and their ilk drives up costs of all facets of the industry. Combating wide-scale theft involves significant technical and staffing expense for publishers, institutions, and libraries alike. At PSI we work with libraries and publishers to help stop attacks and thefts of content. Over and over again we’ve seen instances where IT systems are slowed and or incapacitated, access to electronic resources is compromised for all, staff are required to divert work towards time consuming and urgent analysis, and security of all sites must be reset. Demands for related improvements to hardware and alternative access mechanisms are similarly expensive.

Sci-Hub corrupts usage reporting — even for Open Access content, compromising efforts to determine important readership patterns and further clouding efforts to pursue different economic models and the value of same.

And finally, the impact on smaller contributors to the world of Scholarly Communication is real. There are some popular “big players” that tend to get much of the blame for the perceived woes of the market — publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, etc. I’m not going to get into that aspect of the discussion, but for those that subscribe to this belief it’s worth noting that if Sci-Hub undermines revenue generation and drives up costs for all, common sense suggests that it will be the small publishers and societies that feel the brunt of things far sooner and to a far greater degree than the larger endeavors in the industry.

Time precludes my expanding further, so I’ll close with a final thought. Reasonably priced, ready access to important research that saves and improves lives is important — I think on that we can all agree. Unfortunately, some want to take that to an extreme, thereby suggesting that anything that moves us towards that end should be universally acceptable. In other words, the ends justify the means.

To that, I’d respond with a quote from Nick Harkaway — Author of “The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World” who says, “And don’t tell me the end justifies the means because it doesn’t. We never reach the end. All we ever get is the means. That’s what we live with.” Sci-Hub is nothing more than large scale theft. As a means it is neither sustainable nor defendable. In my view it’s also not something we should live with.

Response in Support of the Resolution (Himmelstein)

Do the ends justify the means? Sci-Hub is a spectacular example of YES.

We’ve inherited a broken system that harms every stakeholder besides publishers. Scholars, libraries, funders, and society suffer. By placing research behind paywalls, we squander the potential of public and philanthropic investments. A better system of widespread open access is just around the corner, thanks to Sci-Hub the disruptor.

The best and cheapest solution to piracy is open access, where an open license enables anyone, including Sci-Hub, to redistribute articles. Hence, Sci-Hub obsoletes itself. You may find Sci-Hub repugnant, but appreciate it, I ask, as a stepping stone to an open future.

As the over 12 thousand quality free-to-read journals already-in-existence demonstrate, open access is a viable business model. All of us at R2R have the power to recognize a turning tide and proactively support open models.

The opposing gentleman claims Sci-Hub is theft. But PDFs, unlike physical items, can be copied without depleting the original. Therefore, Sci-Hub is unlike pilfering a pharmacy. With education or utilities, paywalls fund the creation of the commodity. But not so with scholarly communications where authors, reviewers, and editors create value without remuneration.

The gentleman portrays Sci-Hub as motivated by criminal impulse. But what sort of criminal gives away all their loot? Shall we be as delusional as Inspector Javert? Or should we accept the ethical reality of the current dilemma? The true theft is toll access where authors, funders, and universities are compelled to forfeit ownership of their work to publishers, who have perverted the original intent of copyright to become gatekeepers of ideas destined for public consumption.

The gentleman claims Sci-Hub directly hacks academics. But without public evidence to verify this claim, it’s merely a smear. To the contrary, Elbakyan has stated, “Sci-Hub is not…phishing by itself.” According to haveibeenpwned.com, my info has been hacked at least 12 times. However, these intrusions occur regardless of Sci-Hub, which leverages — but does not cause — the poor security practices of scholars.

The gentleman claims Sci-Hub creates an unreasonable expectation that scholarship can be free. I say, fantastic. Let it be free!

What does Sci-Hub mean?

Sci-Hub means access to the existing 70 million articles locked behind paywalls. This access currently serves populations most deprived by the current system: Portugal, Iran, Tunisia, Greece, Chile, and 50 other counties (many underdeveloped) rank above the U.S. and U.K. in terms of Sci-Hub downloads per capita. Sci-Hub also means a future of access and reuse, where a cancer patient doesn’t have resort to piracy to learn about their disease, where large-scale text mining can uncover 21st century cures, where permissionless innovation will unleash a Cambrian explosion in scholarly communication. Dislike Sci-Hub as you must, but do remember that it was Sci-Hub that ushered in widespread adoption of open access, the greatest advance in scholarly communication since the inception of journals over 350 years ago.

Response Against the Resolution (Spence)

I don’t believe the question of whether Sci-Hub is doing more harm than good boils down to whether science should be paywalled or whether Open Access is a better model.

The real question is are we comfortable allowing a shadowy group operating on the dark web to dictate policy. A group headed by a person that openly flaunts established law, refuses to be transparent about her funding sources, and dismisses concerns over hacking and security by saying she doesn’t “think” passwords are used for more nefarious reasons and that “as a rule” they are not.

Meanwhile a recent Sci-Hub attack on a UK university consisted of a 48 hour dictionary attack in order to secure six passwords. Proxy passwords that were then used to attack 350 publisher websites and request more than 45,000 PDF downloads.

My company has worked on a number of projects to block password sites that have openly supplied compromised credentials to well over 100 libraries around the world. The viral nature of groups using stolen documents is sobering.

And those who supposedly “donate” their credentials should consider that more often than not they will then find them on sites like Passfans which trades passwords for other illicit services. On the dark web a set of credentials can fetch up to $75.

For an industry that has spent so much time, effort, and money on important issues like DOI’s, Crossref, and Archival safeguards, it’s amazing that some libraries are now suggesting that patrons use Sci-Hub. It’s almost as if we have gone from a careful future-facing approach to charting the future of electronic scholarly communication to an approach more akin to a wild weekend in Las Vegas.

Safety and ethics aside, I also don’t see any evidence to suggest that Sci-Hub has had any positive impact on the growth of Open Access.

Open Access started in 2002 and 2003 in Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin. Sci-Hub on the other hand did not start stealing content until 2011. It’s not Sci-Hub that will bring about productive change in Open Access. Rather it is a total revamping of the scholarly reward system that Marc Schiltz mentioned at the very end of his keynote talk yesterday. I confess I was hoping that this important issue would have received more than a cursory mention given its obvious importance.

Yes, journal prices have increased significantly over the past thirty years — an issue that rightly demands careful attention.

But, again, it’s important to note that there are other areas of public good that are equally problematic such as housing, education, healthcare, insurance, and a host of similar industries important to public welfare.

College Board’s 2017 Trends in College Pricing Report states that the average tuition at a private non-profit four year institution in the US went from $15,160 in 1998 to $34,740 in 2018 — an increase of 129%. Of course that does not include room and board fees which have also increased precipitously.

At the same time Forbes Magazine calls student debt in the US a $1.3T crisis.

On the positive side, I was encouraged to see a recent announcement from NYU that it will be using its’ endowment to make medical school tuition free for any student accepted into their program. This is similar to efforts like those of the American Physical Society who have more than once in recent years actually reduced journal pricing. That is the sort of behavior that can bring about real, positive change and should be encouraged. Not undermined by outright theft and associated support of lawless behavior that does little more than created chaos in the market and thwarts progress.