When sharing is a crime

Recent lawsuits for copyright violations raise an important question amongst researchers: if access is too expensive, is sharing a crime?

During a usual workday, Abhinav Sharma, a theoretical physicist at the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research in Dresden, Germany, surveyed literature for one of his projects. Just as he came across an interesting paper, Sharma hit a $50 paywall for accessing the article. Unwilling to spend this amount on one article, he resorted to a popular website: Sci-Hub.

Sharma is among the millions of researchers all over the world who use Sci-Hub, a platform that provides free access to scientific papers. Neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan started this website in 2011 after becoming frustrated with paywalls for accessing journal articles. Its massive popularity—it accounted for approximately 3% of downloads from all publishers worldwide—placed this Robin Hood of researchers in Nature’s “ten people who mattered” list of 2016. Last year, Elsevier, a major publishing house, filed a lawsuit against Elbakyan for copyright infringement, submitting to the court a list of around 100 articles provided illegally through Sci-Hub and demanding $15 million in compensation.

“Sci-Hub is a pirate organization involved in the mass theft of copyrighted material. It should not be confused with any legitimate article-sharing platforms, such as Mendeley, nor any legitimate data-sharing platforms, such as Figshare,” said John Tagler, Vice President & Executive Director of the Association of American Publishers.

“It’s not data sharing; I think it’s all illegal. It’s just data put there, stolen,” agreed Sharma. “But at the same time, the very reason for its existence is just the ridiculous cost that one has to pay to these journals.” He pointed out that even top institutions in developing countries cannot afford to pay expensive journal fees. In such situations, students may feel they have no choice but to find what they need on Sci-Hub for free.

Miquel Banchs Pique, a graduate student at the University of Portsmouth, UK, seconds this opinion. “Whether it’s a crime or not has nothing to do with if it’s for the good of science or not. So, I don’t care much if it’s a crime,” he said. “I care if it’s good for society or science in general.”

Is Data Sharing a Crime?

Diego Gomez Hoyos, a Colombian biologist, describes a similar situation in Latin America, where access to scientific papers is limited to the major universities or research centers, and researchers at provincial universities struggle to legally access journals. But regardless of the situation, sharing copyrighted scientific content is a crime, as he found out the hard way.

In 2011, Gomez was a graduate student at the University of Quindío in Armenia, Colombia and part of a herpetology research group. “We did not have access to all documents necessary to begin research activities. Therefore, we were looking for documents and sharing these on the internet with academic and non-profit intentions, like any researcher around the world,” Gomez wrote via email. Two years later, he was shocked to face a lawsuit that could have resulted in 8 years of jail time if he was found guilty of violating the copyright of the author of a PhD thesis he had shared online.

“At that moment, I was thinking that it was a mistake because I never did anything against the law, at least that I could think of at that moment,” Gomez said. According to him, the copyright laws in Colombia are obsolete and particularly unsuitable for the internet era.

Researchers vs Publishers?

After 4 years of struggling against the Colombian laws, Gomez’s copyright infringement case ended with a not-guilty court verdict on May 24, 2017.

Elbakyan was not as lucky; the US court found her guilty of illegally distributing copyrighted papers. “Elsevier got awarded so many millions as damages for copyright infringement,” said Banchs-Pique. “It’s the scientists who should have the copyright.”

Sharma agrees that publishers have too much power in that they charge heavily for publishing scientific content and also own the copyright of the published content. He believes that publishers thrive on the “publish or perish”’ pressure in academia. “The only currency we have is papers. They know it, and they control it,” he said.

Although a variety of publishing business models exist, only 26%–29% of journals are open access, according to a 2015 STM report. For some closed journals, authors may have the option to pay a fee in order to publish an article as open-access. Researchers who cannot afford this have little choice but to contribute to the paywalls by publishing their paper in non-open-access journals.

Kit Stolz, a freelance science reporter who often relies on the generosity of friends and researchers to provide him papers for his work, thinks that there is a fundamental disconnect between the spirit of science, which encourages broadcasting results, and the restrictive nature of scientific publishing. “I understand that publishers need and want to protect their business, but we are talking about science here!” he said. “I feel like the world of scientific publishing is just not serving science.”

Tagler disagrees, however, asserting that publishing companies serve the needs of researchers and the scholarly community. For more than two centuries, journals have been the main platform for broadcasting sound scientific data, validated through the process of peer-review, to the scientific community and to the general public. Their invaluable contributions to public education through disseminating information secured a high place for science in society. Publishers coordinate peer-review, edit the manuscripts, and lay out the articles, making them readable and providing assurance that their content is trustworthy. In this sense, researchers and publishers are necessary for each other’s survival. Tagler believes that as long as the academic community seeks to disseminate their discoveries via a reputable, peer-reviewed, unbiased process, scholarly publishers will continue to fulfill this need.

Is Practical Illegal?

Given increasing mistrust of publishers and the recent cases of copyright violations, how can researchers avoid extravagant article costs legally? Stolz recommends Readcube, software that helps researchers manage references and access academic articles at a low cost, as a possible solution. Robert McGrath, the CEO of Readcube, said he hopes to enforce a sustainable model by preserving copyright and providing affordable content to researchers in a fast and efficient manner. “We are not quite there yet; we will get there,” McGrath said optimistically.

Unpaywall is another fast, legal tool providing access to paywalled papers. Other options for paper access include contacting authors to ask for copies of papers, waiting an embargo period and accessing NIH-funded studies on PubMed Central, or for authors to publish their work through free portals such as ArXiv and BioArXiv—something that might become more attractive if journal policies allow posting of papers pre- and post-review prior to official publication.

Additionally, a number of organizations have come together to develop How Can I Share It, a sharing resource for the scientific community to guide researchers on how to share quickly and easily while following copyright rules.

While Sharma, Banchs-Pique, and Stolz agree that publishers need to make data more accessible, their answer for a sustainable long-term plan to alleviate the friction between publishers and researchers is also unanimous: “I don’t know.”