Elsevier’s successful court battle against sites providing unlawful access to millions of journal articles sends a message that publicly funded research has become a “corporate asset and private property”, according to a scholarly publishing expert.

On 21 June, a US court ruled that Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) and similar sites should pay the Dutch publishing giant $15 million (£11.8 million) damages for copyright infringement.

John Willinsky, Khosla family professor of education at Stanford University, said that, although Sci-Hub had committed a “property crime”, the academic community would likely view lack of access to journal articles as more serious for higher education than Elsevier losing money.

“The clear message that Elsevier sends with its ‘success’ is that it is earnestly turning the often publicly financed research conducted by public and tax-exempt institutions into a corporate asset and private property,” he told Times Higher Education. “Many will find it easier to imagine the damage caused by keeping 26 million scientific papers from those who seek such knowledge…than to imagine Elsevier losing $15 million in sales as a result of this access.”

Professor Willinsky, founder and director of the Public Knowledge Project – a multi-university initiative to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing – added that, through pursuing Sci-Hub, Elsevier missed a chance to say that it would be “redoubling its efforts to capitalise on open access in the service of its shareholders and humankind”.

In response to the court’s ruling, Elsevier’s lawyers said that the defendants’ “unlawful activities have caused and will continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier”, and welcomed the outcome.

But Bastian Greshake, author of one of the first academic studies of Sci-Hub and a doctoral student in applied bioinformatics at Goethe University Frankfurt, said that the result could lead to more people using the site, possibly inspiring them to create their own “legally dubious” means of accessing journal articles.

“I think there is a good chance that the ruling, and the free publicity it gives to Sci-Hub, will be a further driver to transform academic publishing towards open accessibility,” he said. “Initiatives [such as] the Open Access Button and Unpaywall are at least partially inspired by Sci-Hub’s access ideals and, in the field of the biosciences, preprints are finally getting traction.

“The increased media spotlight [therefore] might inspire more people to…create new ways of making content openly available while being legally dubious. Elsevier will have to wonder whether the ‘irreparable injuries’ of which [their] attorney spoke aren’t self-inflicted here.”

Aileen Fyfe, head of the Untangling Academic Publishing project and reader in the University of St Andrews’ School of History, said that the settlement size should “set alarm bells ringing even more loudly” about academic publishing’s future.

“It is a clear indication of the growing disjuncture between commercial interests and the scholarly desire to circulate knowledge,” she said. “The popularity of Sci-Hub, despite its illegality, demonstrates that the commercial system of academic publishing is already failing many users.”

Graham Steel, an open access advocate and adviser to Open Knowledge International, added that while the likes of Sci-Hub were not the answer to open access, academics “shouldn’t have to be potentially illegally sharing the research that’s publicly funded”. Mr Steel added that this whole “debacle” simply went to highlight the major problems that “we have with the $10 billion [academic] publishing industry”.

john.elmes@timeshighereducation.com