Should all scientific work be publicly available?

Like Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is now hiding, probably somewhere in Russia after she illegally posted millions of documents to the Internet. She did not disclose state secrets, but took a position on the protection of the right of society to receive information, giving free access to almost all scientific articles ever published, from acoustics to zymology.

The protest against paid access made Alexander a celebrity among freedom of information activists. At the same time, she showed how difficult and expensive it is to gain access to the data that is needed to make important decisions in areas such as health, economy and environmental protection.

“In reality, only scientists from the largest, well-funded universities in developed countries have full access to published research,” says Michael Eisen , a professor of genetics and genomics at the University of California at Berkeley, co-founder of PLOS , which has long promoted the idea of ​​open access. “The current system is hindering science, making it difficult for workers to communicate, limiting the number of people who have access to information, and stifling data analysis.” Such an analysis is possible when the articles are not “sitting in separate bases”.

Publishers of scientific journals in the amount earned $ 10 billion over the past year, mainly due to scientific libraries that pay an annual subscription cost from $ 2,000 to $ 35,000 for each individual journal, unless they take kits worth millions of dollars. The biggest publishers like Elsevier , Taylor & Francis , Springer and Wiley usually work with a margin of more than 30% . They consider such a margin justified, because they call themselves curators of scientific works, choosing only the most worthy ones for publication. Moreover, they manage the verification, editing and storage of articles.
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Such arguments were brought by Elsevier publishing house when it filed a lawsuit against Elbakyan with the support of other players in the publishing business. During the consideration of the claim last fall, an injunction was imposed on the operation of the Sci-Hub website. “As if content theft is considered justified, because it seems expensive. I find this amazing, ”said Alicia Wise, director of universal access for Elsevier. “It's not as if you went to the grocery store and paid for the theft of the organic chocolate bar by leaving Kit Kat on the counter.”

But the US federal laws do not work in Russia (Elbakyan does not give out his place of residence), especially on the Internet, so Sci-Hub continues to operate and deliver hundreds of thousands of scientific articles daily to 10 million site visitors. In the postal correspondence, Alexandra said that her motives were both practical — she needed articles for her own research, as well as philosophical ones. It views the Internet as a “global brain”, and paid stubs of scientific journals impede the free flow of information and, thus, prevent humanity from fully acquiring “consciousness”. The next round of court hearings is scheduled for March 17.

The silent shadow of the programmer and freedom of information activist Aaron Schwartz hangs over the process and hanged himself in 2013 after he was charged with unlawfully downloading more than 4 million documents from the JSTOR database, an archive of academic journals and research papers. Although the documents are available for free online, some customers pay 10 cents per document if they use a special interface. The activist was charged with 13 points; he was threatened with up to 35 years in prison.

In response to the lawsuit, Elbakyan submitted a letter in which she indicated that Elsevier, like other publishers, received scientific articles completely free of charge. Moreover, they pay nothing to reviewers and editors. At the same time, publishers charge for access to these articles from the very authors, reviewers and editors, not to mention the general public, for whose taxes research is usually conducted.

“This is a big difference from the music or film industry, where the authors get income from each copy sold,” writes Elbakyan. “I would also like to mention that we [Sci-Hub] have not received a single complaint from the authors or scientists.”

Legal downloading of one article, if you do not have a subscription, will cost about $ 30, which results in considerable expenses, because a search on a narrow topic often yields hundreds if not thousands of articles. And the crazy prices for a subscription with an unlimited number of downloads hit the libraries budget a lot.

“Prices are growing twice as fast as prices for health care in the last 20 years, there is a real chaos to be revealed,” said Peter Suber (Peter Suber), head of research at Harvard University. “It is important to emphasize that even Harvard suffers from such prices, although it has the largest budget among all scientific libraries in the world.”

True, Suber was quick to add that he does not justify the Elbakyan methods: “Illegal access creates free access to a bad reputation.”

According to him, one of the solutions to the problem would be to persuade researchers to publish work in open journals. For example, these are collected in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) library. But its financial model assumes that the authors themselves pay the publisher from $ 1,500 to $ 3,000 for each article in order to offset the costs of publication.

Another option is to upload articles to the so-called preprint repositories, where they are open before they are reviewed and accepted in a scientific journal. But there is a generally accepted opinion that publishers with less hunting take to print articles that are already in the public domain.

After the death of Aaron Schwartz in the White House, they adopted a directive that obliges all agencies that receive more than $ 100 million in research grants to develop plans to open access to research within a year after publication. In addition, the FASTR law was later passed, reducing this period to six months. Private foundations, such as the Wellcome Trust , the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , also began to issue grants for the open publication of articles and, if possible, initial research data.

Researchers in various scientific disciplines, including physics and mathematics, created open journals opposing a paid subscription to the scientific press, or formed consortia that cover the costs of authors for publishing articles in the public domain.

“We are seeing a new era with experimentation and how open access can work,” said David Crotty, editorial director of journal regulation at non-profit publishing house Oxford University Press , which adheres to an exclusively open model when creating new journals.

Perhaps the most important obstacle to free access is the fact that scientists are judged by where their articles are published. This is important when competing for jobs, promotions and grants. The most prestigious magazines such as Cell, Nature and The Lancet , as a rule, most zealously guard access to their articles.

“The leaders of the scientific community are really to blame - Nobel laureates, heads of academic institutions, university rectors - who have the opportunity to change things, but never raise this problem, in part because they themselves benefit from such a system,” says Dr. Aizen. “University rectors love to announce which important researchers work for them because they were published in those journals.”

Until the system changes, Alexandra Elbakyan intends to distribute scientific articles to everyone who needs it. Recalling article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, she says: "Everyone has the right to participate in scientific progress and to enjoy its benefits."