Science is built, enhanced, and developed through the open and structured sharing of knowledge. Yet some publishers charge so much for subscriptions to their academic journals that even the libraries of the world’s wealthiest universities such as Harvard are no longer able to afford the prices. Those publishers’ profit margins rival those of the most profitable companies in the world, even though research is largely underwritten by governments, and the publishers don’t pay authors and researchers or the peer reviewers who evaluate those works. How is such an absurd structure able to sustain itself—and how might we change it?

When the World Wide Web emerged in the ’90s, people began predicting a new, more robust era of scholarship based on access to knowledge for all. The internet, which started as a research network, now had an easy-to-use interface and a protocol to connect all of published knowledge, making each citation just a click away … in theory.

Instead, academic publishers started to consolidate. They solidified their grip on the rights to prestigious journals, allowing them to charge for access and exclude the majority of the world from reading research publications—all while extracting billions in dollars of subscription fees from university libraries and corporations. This meant that some publishers, such as Elsevier, the science, technology, and medicine-focused branch of the RELX Group publishing conglomerate, are able today to extract huge margins—36.7 percent in 2017 in Elsevier’s case, more profitable than Apple, Google/Alphabet, or Microsoft that same year.

And in most scholarly fields, it’s the most important journals that continue to be secured behind paywalls—a structure that doesn’t just affect the spread of information. Those journals have what we call high “impact factors,” which can skew academic hiring and promotions in a kind of self-fulfilling cycle that works like this: Typically, anyone applying for an academic job is evaluated by a committee and by other academics who write letters of evaluation. In most fields, papers published in peer-reviewed journals are a critical part of the evaluation process, and the so-called impact factor, which is based on the citations that a journal gets over time, is important. Evaluators, typically busy academics who may lack deep expertise in a candidate’s particular research topic, are prone to skim the submitted papers and rely heavily on the number of papers published and the impact factor—as a proxy for journal prestige and rigor—in their assessment of the qualifications of a candidate.

And so young researchers are forced to prioritize publication in journals with high impact factors, faulty as they are, if they want tenure or promotions. The consequence is that important work gets locked up behind paywalls and remains largely inaccessible to anyone not in a major research lab or university. This includes the taxpayers who funded the research in the first place, the developing world, and the emerging world of nonacademic researchers and startup labs.

Breaking Down the Walls

To bypass the paywalls, in 2011 Alexandra Elbakyan started Sci-Hub, a website that provides free access to millions of otherwise inaccessible academic papers. She was based in Kazakhstan, far from the courts where academic publishers can easily bring lawsuits. In the movie Paywall, Elbakyan says that Elsevier’s mission was to make “uncommon knowledge common,” and she jokes that she was just trying to help the company do that because it seemed unable to do so itself. While Elbakyan has been widely criticized for her blatant disregard for copyright, Sci-Hub has become a popular tool among academics, even at major universities, because it removes the friction of paywalls and provides links to collaborators beyond them. She was able to do what the late Aaron Swartz, my Creative Commons colleague and dear friend, envisioned but was unable to achieve in his lifetime.