The world’s largest pirate websites for scholarly work confront big corporations that own influential but expensive journals.
A group of academics have joined a legal battle in India that has pitted those who believe in free access to knowledge against powerful corporations that control half of the world’s publishing business.
The case being heard at the Delhi High Court could have international ramifications as the debate around open access to scholarly work has intensified in recent years.
The court will deliberate on whether it’s legal for researchers and students to use the Sci-Hub and LibGen websites, the self-proclaimed digital “pirates” trying to disseminate scholarly literature to whoever wants it.
Since 2019, global publishing giants Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society have tried to block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen in India.
These three publishers together own around 40 percent of all the scientific journals in the world. They say Sci-Hub and LibGen commit copyright violations by sharing content stolen from the journals they own.
A blanket ban on the Sci-Hub and LibGen (short for Library Genesis) websites, which are sitting on the world’s largest pirated depository of scientific articles and books, could negatively affect millions of students, lawyers say.
Krishnesh Bapat, a lawyer who is part of the legal team of the Delhi-based NGO Internet Freedom Foundation, which is representing the academics, says Indian universities don’t have funds to pay the exorbitant subscription fees charged by Elsevier and other publishers.
“If these websites are blocked in entirety then a lot of material simply goes away,” he tells TRT World.
The onset of the pandemic has emphasised the problems doctoral students and researchers face in getting hold of relevant papers.
Even if a university has access to one of Elisiver's journals, a student needs to login from the university library to have a look at it. This makes it difficult for students to find articles from the confines of their homes.
Around the paywall
At the centre of the case is the issue of paywalls that restrict access to books and scientific papers that many believe should be publicly available.
One of the researchers who has become part of the legal proceedings is Tejaswi Chhatwal, a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the Center for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Recently she needed articles and books such as “Caste and Law” by Dag Erik Berg and “Are prisoners obsolete?” by Angela Davis for her work on scheduled tribes, say the petition filed this week.
But she wasn’t able to find them in the university's library. Paying the exorbitant price that the publishers were charging was out of the question. Her only recourse? To use Sci-Hub and LibGen.
Universities, especially those in developing countries, don’t have the funds to get subscriptions to expensive journals. Some estimates suggest universities spend between $500,000 and $10 million in annual subscription fees that go to publishing houses.
Access to a single article can cost between $30 and $60.
Subscription fees can dent the budgets of the publicly-funded universities so much that even the biggest US institutions run into trouble.
In 2019, the University of California, which paid $10 million annually to Elsevier in subscription charges, dropped its services for the same reason.
Elsevier owns 2,650 journals including The Lancet, Cell and the Journal of Molecular Biology. It reported revenue of more than $3.6 billion last year from its publishing business, most of it coming from digital subscriptions. The group also owns the copyrights to popular medical textbooks such as Gray’s Anatomy.
Sci-Hub backers say publishing houses don’t pay for scientific research and experiments, which are mostly carried out in state-run universities. They only publish the articles, so there’s no reason for them to make so much money from academic journals.
The girl from Kazakhstan
It was precisely to circumvent the issue of paywalls that Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakh science student, created Sci-Hub in late 2011.
Over the years, Sci-Hub has become the largest pirated repository of scholarly work with more than 80 millions papers on subjects ranging from the latest developments in genetics to obscure economic theories.
Elbakyan says she was able to get hold of the articles and papers using login information to various journals that supporters passed on to her.
With Sci-Hub’s popularity growing worldwide (it’s used in every continent except for Antarctica) Elbakyan has been sued in the US by Elesiver and the American Chemical Society in copyright infringement cases.
Her website has been taken down multiple times in countries where even students can get into legal trouble for using it and she faces millions of dollars in penalties.
Fear of extradition to the US has forced her to keep her location secret and she generally communicates with journalists via secure chat rooms.
Unlike the US, where Elbakyan didn’t bother to hire a lawyer, she is legally represented in India, adding to the importance of the case’s outcome. The court has adjourned the matter until February but a ruling is expected sometime later next year.
Elbakyan may have a better chance of winning the case in India.
Bapat, of Internet Freedom, says India’s copyright law is more progressive than many developed countries. “By that I mean that there's a research exception provided under the copyright act. It means that if you are using copyright material for research then it would not constitute infringement.”
He adds: “She has a stronger legal case in India.”
While the latest stats on Sci-Hub users are not available, a 2016 Science magazine story said India was among the top three countries where Sci-Hub was being used to download articles.
A paywall protects that Science magazine article. But you can copy the link and paste it on the Sci-Hub website to view it for free.
Source: TRT World
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