What should we think about Sci-Hub? February 22, 2016

So, Sci-Hub is the talk of the town. Everyone’s talking about it. I spent Friday afternoon at Manchester University library, giving a couple of taks about open access, and hearing several others about copyright. It was fascinating being a room full of librarians, all of them aware that Sci-Hub is out there, all of them torn between disapproval and excitement. As Martin Eve said on Twitter:

SciHub. I can’t condone and don’t think it’s the answer. But it is a symptom of the problem.

Me, I’m not so sure whether I can condone it or not.

All About Alexandra

I like that its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, isn’t at all shifty or covert about what she’s done. She’s loud and proud, and when Elsevier sued her in a New York court, her letter to the judge was defiant and well argued. When confronted with the illegality of Sci-Hub, she has argued that the business model of Elsevier and the other barrier-based legacy publishers is itself illegal, citing article 27 of the UN declaration on human rights:

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Other have chipped in: the extraordinary open letter In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub has been publicly signed by fourteen people who are prepared to be known as supporters.

And yet there is also a very widespread uneasiness about what is self-evidently a pirate site that systematically violates copyright law.

What should we think about it?

Previously on Scholarly Piracy

The first thing to say is that there is precedent, and plenty of it. Aaron Swartz, before the FBI hounded him to his death for downloading scholarly articles, wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, which unashamedly advocates violating copyright in the name of fairness and progress:

Many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Sci-Hub is essentially the implementation in software of Swartz’s vision. And honestly, I do find it hard to be outraged by Karin Hildebrand’s copyright violation:

So happy when I discovered SciHub last week! FINALLY can learn more about my daughter’s rare birth defect w/o paying $30 a pop.

It’s worth bearing in mind, when Elsevier brings its legal machinery to bear on Sci-Hub, that people like Karin are among the ones who will suffer — along with disability-rights campaigner Stef Benstead, M-CM patient advocate Christy Collins, and many others.

Illegal ≠ Immoral

Nor do I find it a slam-dunk argument to be told that what Sci-Hub is doing is illegal. Even assuming that the human-rights argument won’t wash and the courts do definitively decide that Sci-Hub is in violation of the law, that won’t in itself make it wrong. Rosa Parks was in violation of the law when she declined to give up her seat for a white man. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in violation of the law when he preached pacifism in Nazi Germany.

[Note for the hard of thinking: no I am not saying that scholarly paywalls are the moral equivalent of state-sanctioned racism or that Elsevier are as bad as Hitler. I am using extreme examples to demonstrate the principle that an illegal action is not always or necessarily an immoral one.]

None of this means that Sci-Hub is necessarily in the right. What it does mean is that it’s not immediately clear that it’s in the wrong, either. There are subtleties and complexities here. Not to mention a certain poetry in the idea that single Russian researcher, acting alone, has gone right ahead and made the anyone-can-access-any-paper system we’ve all been dreaming about for years.

What are the publishers doing?

Elsevier’s lawsuit is an oddity. Although they’re the ones suing, as the Chronicle of Higher Education found they are not really standing behind it:

An Elsevier representative, Thomas Reller, vice president for global corporate relations, refused to answer questions for this article, saying only that “Elsevier is simply the named plaintiff in the lawsuit that is filed on behalf of the industry.” He urged The Chronicle to speak with officials at the Association of American Publishers.

The AAP has spoken, but its statement is rather bizarre in places:

These activities also have a detrimental effect on public health and safety [because] Sci-hub and LibGen also provide indiscriminate access to content. Certain information, regulated for distribution by publishers, may be available to parties not intended to have this technical knowhow.

They may or may not have a strong moral case against Sci-Hub; but if they do, this ain’t it. Anyone who knows anything at all about scholarly publishing will see through this flimy argument in a second — state secrets can’t be protected by a $30 paywall — so why even make such an argument?

Also relevant here is the question of what publishers can do. As the Library Loon has noted, in her excellent though irritatingly mannered pseudonymous blog, their choices are few and unappealing. When Elsevier won the New York court case, an injunction resulted in the old sci-hub.com domain being shut down, but it took no time for the site to pop up again as sci-hub.io. The site’s not going to be possible to block, any more than The Pirate Bay has been vulnerable to the many, many attempts to shut it down. What does that leaves the publishers? Going after individuals? Even by their standards, that would surely be a PR nightmare.

So what should we think?

Heck if I know.