<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><p style="text-align:justify">At the vanguard of the flotilla is the
Napster of scientific publishing, Sci-Hub. Launched five years ago from
Kazakhstan, it proclaims the loftiest of intentions – to make knowledge
freely available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford to pay the big
publisher’s charges. A typical paper might cost $30 to access online, if
you aren’t lucky enough to have access via a subscription. That’s
enough to discourage some researchers even in the comparatively
well-funded western world. For a scientist in a developing country, it
can be completely out of reach. Sci-Hub gets around the paywalls by good
old-fashioned piracy. When a user requests a certain paper, it first
looks in the Library Genesis Project, universally known as LibGen, to
see if a copy has been lodged there. LibGen has been illicitly
collecting and storing academic papers since 2012 and currently holds
over 48 million of them.</p>
<p>So far, so simple, but Sci-Hub is more than just a gateway to a
repository of pirated content. If it finds that a paper is absent from
LibGen, it goes straight to the source at a mainstream publisher. Using a
number of access keys provided by sympathetic academics with
subscriptions, it raids the vaults at Elsevier, Sage, JStor, Springer,
or wherever, and delivers the paper direct to the requester. It then
lodges a copy at LibGen for good measure. In many ways, this is simply
automating an informal process of swapping papers that has been going on
ever since emails could deliver attachments. It also seems
transparently illegal and indefensible. Is there really any moral
difference between ripping off a copy of the Arctic Monkeys’ latest
album and stealing a copy of the latest issue of the Journal of
Chromatography (annual sub a snip at a little over €20,000)? Is it
different from strolling into a High Street shop and slipping a magazine
or CD into your pocket? Well, yes it is. Of course it is. It has to be.
We’re talking about the growing sum of human knowledge, not some catchy
tune that turns into an earworm. To hold scientific papers back from
poorer researchers simply because it suits the big publishers to
continue to make fat profits is as immoral as insisting that books can
only be written in Latin in order to keep the plebs in their place.</p></div><a href="http://goo.gl/YreyzE">http://goo.gl/YreyzE</a><br><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)<br>professor de musicologia ufmg<br>professor colaborador ppgm-unirio<br><a href="http://www.proibidao.org" target="_blank">www.proibidao.org</a><br><a href="http://goo.gl/KMV98I" target="_blank">ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini</a><br></div><div><a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2" target="_blank">www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2</a><br><a href="http://scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ" target="_blank">scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ</a><br></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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