In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

Back when I was doing my undergrad in India, I was doing an internship in a lab there. It wasn’t a national lab, so calling that lab dirt poor is an understatement (they used to wash and reuse microfuge tubes). They would typically work with a budget that’s 1/100th of a regular American lab.

Naturally their research was also for the most part mediocre or worse. Except one paper that got published in a British journal in the early 00s.

I had the privilege of working with the first author of that paper and asked him how he used to get the papers to read back in the nineties when internet wasn’t a thing in India. Be warned that this university’s library didn’t even have Nature or Science.

His answer was, if there’s a paper they’d want to read, if it’s at least in a fairly prominent journal, they’d money order 15 rupees to the Indian institute of immunology in New Delhi with an ILL request and hope they respond. If they’re lucky they’d get a copy of the article in a few months.

They still did great research for what they were able to afford or read. Great research has always been done when access to articles wasn’t a given. It would be weird to assume that free unfettered access has anything to do with the spread of or lack thereof good scientific knowledge and research.

This is not even conjecture. We’ve already witnessed the never-before-in-humanity transformation of all general knowledge to the free public domain in Wikipedia and google, and yet, humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything.

In spite of all the roadblocks put by greedy publishers, access to literature has never been this easier in all of history even if you are broke. This even if you exclude scihub as an option (not that I am saying you should, I love that scihub exists and hope it continues to).

All I’m saying is, keep fighting this fight but don’t assume it’s anywhere near as important for any real problem in this society, general or academia.

I did train through times when access to articles wasn’t easy (because there was no scihub and I worked in india) and honestly getting the articles was not even my 10th biggest concern. I always had 50-100 pdfs ready to read, adding more to that queue was not an issue. Only times when access to literature was a problem was when you had a particular article you needed details from (which weren’t in the abstract). This was rarely a blocker and if it was there were options.

Again, I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer to have free unfettered access to all research ever performed, or that we should give these publishers a pass, but I want to emphasize that this is not a big issue for academics. Funding, focus, politics, the culture of publish or perish, the Ponzi scheme like training funnel, these are the bigger issues.

If you want an educated and informed populace (the kind you need for democracy to be worth a damn), then access to information for as many people as possible is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I don't buy that people are dumber today than they were a century ago. People did some pretty dumb things then as well. If you think things are bad now, presumably you would like the situation to improve. I don't see how the situation improves if most people would need to take out a loan to read academic papers.

Something that is worth noting, is that what these kinds of sites are doing is fundamentally the same as what local libraries do. Local libraries get a pass only because there was a precedent for their existence before copyright and IP law got out of hand. Would you have as blase an attitude if this were the big five trying to shutdown all the public libraries?

> There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.

This will happen a lot quicker if more people work to improve FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interop, Reusability) of content and information that's outside proprietary silos already. Whether old content that has become legally available due to its age, or content that's been published openly in the first place. That's what it would take for people to ignore the silos outright.

> ...if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll.

Most large publishers are pretty much IP trolls anyway. The incentives inherent in IPR regulation, combined with large monopoly power, push them towards that model.