[ANPPOM-Lista] Is piracy of journals wrong?

[Carlos Palombini]

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.

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.
http://goo.gl/YreyzE

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor colaborador ppgm-unirio
www.proibidao.org
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini <http://goo.gl/KMV98I>
www.researchgate.net/profile/Carlos_Palombini2
scholar.google.com.br/citations?user=YLmXN7AAAAAJ
-------------- Próxima Parte ----------
Um anexo em HTML foi limpo...
URL: <http://www.listas.unicamp.br/pipermail/anppom-l/attachments/20160414/19c99eae/attachment.html>