S et aside for the moment all legal and ethical considerations, and behold the wonders of online piracy.
Consider, for example, Library Genesis, a site housing more than 1.5 million books published by both for-profit conglomerates (e.g., Elsevier, McGraw-Hill, Penguin Random House, Springer, Wiley) and nonprofit university presses (e.g., Alabama, Columbia, Harvard, Manchester, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Princeton, Texas, Virginia, Yale).
Or consider BookZZ, which claims to be the world’s “largest ebook library,” a favorite source among college students for what, in the non-pirate market, are outrageously expensive textbooks.
Or, most impressive, Sci-Hub, an elegantly simple interface sitting atop a database of more than 47 million scholarly articles, each and every one free of charge, perfectly reproduced, and downloadable with a click.
How much do readers love Sci-Hub? According to a recent article in Science, they love it to the tune of 200,000 downloads per day.
And who loves Sci-Hub? Scholars at well-endowed institutions: It contains material even the wealthiest colleges and universities lack. Scholars at poorer institutions: It is their only source for journals their institutions cannot dream of purchasing. Educated readers without institutional affiliations (most educated readers), and those who lack access to academic databases, interlibrary-loan privileges, and bank accounts sufficient to cough up $30-plus for a single article. In short, readers across the globe: A heat map of Sci-Hub use shows heavy activity in every continent but Antarctica.
There is much to love. The ideal animating Sci-Hub is as simple as it is powerful: Nobody who needs scholarship should go without. Whatever you think of Sci-Hub’s legality and ethics, you cannot deny the beauty or nobility of that ideal.
Who, after all, should not enjoy access to publicly funded literature? Which engineers in which countries beset by pollution and deforestation should not have access to studies about wind turbines? (Top recently downloaded article in Sci-Hub: “Full-Scale Modal Wind Turbine Tests.”) Which doctors in Gambia should forgo medical articles on treating anemia? (Fifth-most-downloaded article: “Iron Deficiency: New Insights Into Diagnosis and Treatment.”) Which scientists in Kamchatka’s boreal forests should be denied studies of invasive beetles? (Eighth-most-downloaded article: “Conifer Defense Against Insects.”)
No model and no tool has come close to providing so many readers what Sci-Hub now provides. Scholars, librarians, publishers, academics, think-tank fellows, foundation boards, and administrators of all stripes have spent years talking themselves blue in the face about the dysfunctional politics and funding models that now govern publishing, models that fail to provide research to those who need it. Conferences, white papers, and millions of dollars in grant funding all brought us only incrementally closer to what until 2011 remained a utopian idea: unimpeded access to academic literature for all.
The ideal animating Sci-Hub is as simple as it is powerful: Nobody who needs scholarship should go without.
Thanks to Sci-Hub, that utopian ideal is no longer utopian. Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakh science student living in Russia, programmed a tool that, almost overnight, seized the ideal and made it a reality. Her gambit solved the problem our institutions have proved almost comically unable to solve. She embarrassed us in our ineptitude. The academy failed. Elbakyan succeeded. Sci-Hub works. And millions love it.
So now to the legal and ethical considerations.
The first — the legal question — is easy. Sci-Hub is flamboyantly illegal. It makes a mockery of (admittedly mockable) copyright law. Were Elbakyan to enter the United States, she would be arrested, charged, and easily convicted. Sci-Hub harvests its articles by illegally burrowing into university computer networks. It relies on faculty and staff members to share credentials they pledge never to share — credentials that employees could and probably should be fired for providing. Credible accusations persist that Sci-Hub also obtains credentials through phishing attacks. (Elbakyan denies that she herself has engaged in phishing, but, notably, has not denied that others employ phishing attacks on Sci-Hub’s behalf.)
But while the legal question is simple, the ethical considerations are not, revolving as they do around an exceptionally difficult question: When does the need to obtain information become sufficiently acute to justify illegal means for obtaining it? When a doctor in a developing country needs the latest study on a disease afflicting a gravely ill patient? When a protest movement in Russia would benefit from political-science literature on political mobilization? When a sociologist’s career depends on information locked behind a paywall? When a student at a community college requires the same literature available to students at wealthy private institutions? When publishing at large becomes dominated by models that deny most information to most people?
I am not an ethicist, and I do not presume to answer these questions. But I am convinced that an ethical case could be crafted for Sci-Hub. Whether that case proves compelling remains to be seen, but however the case is formulated, it should, at a minimum, consider these factors:
- Sci-Hub hurts good publishers. We have no data proving a causal relationship between pirate sites such as Sci-Hub and the travails facing nonprofit university presses that vet, edit, and significantly improve scholars’ work. That said, the piracy of material on which university presses rely for revenue cannot but hurt those presses.
- Sci-Hub hurts bad publishers: those that charge libraries $20,000-plus for a single journal subscription (Elsevier); those that charge authors $3,000 to make their articles open access (Wiley); and those that charge readers $54 — twice the minimum monthly wage in Venezuela — for a single article (Taylor & Francis).
- Reputable open-access publishers that charge neither authors nor readers have nothing to fear from Sci-Hub. In fact, they share Sci-Hub’s ideals, though certainly not its methods. Such publishers share commitments that, if universally adopted, would make Sci-Hub obsolete.
- No matter how noble the cause, illegal activity always has a downside; it is always dangerous. The remarkable good that Sci-Hub provides cannot be considered without also considering what is lost when operating outside the law. Even civil disobedience comes with costs. And it is debatable whether Sci-Hub qualifies as civil disobedience. Its genesis certainly constitutes a civil action, and its very existence is disobedient. But its founders have not subjected themselves to the consequences of their actions — one of the hallmarks of the most successful civil-rights movements. Elbakyan and colleagues appear unwilling to face jail time; in this sense, at least, they lack the full courage of their convictions.
- It is immoral to deny information to those who need it. The U.N. Declaration on Human Rights asserts that everyone has the right to “receive and impart information” (emphasis added) “regardless of frontiers.” Information, in other words, is a basic human right. It is a right to which current models of publishing are hostile. Only with difficulty can we summarily dismiss as unethical the most successful tool now available for promoting this right.
- Ethical conundrums cannot ignore questions of efficacy. We must acknowledge that there is no stopping online piracy. Attempts to do so amount to games of Whac-a-Mole. Efforts that focus only on shutting down pirate sites will fail. There are clear parallels between Sci-Hub in 2016 and Napster in 2000. Sci-Hub threatens to destroy publishing as we know it; Napster nearly did destroy the recording industry. What saved music sales was not enforcement; it was a decision by Apple to offer online music at a price consumers were willing to pay. Until or unless academic publishers adopt a similar model, piracy will persist.
This is all to say that an ethical case for Sci-Hub is difficult, and an ethical case against Sci-Hub is difficult. A successful case for Sci-Hub cannot ignore Sci-Hub’s seamy side. And a case against Sci-Hub will be credible only if it offers a credible alternative. Yes, Sci-Hub is illegal. So is the theft of food and medicine. Yet we rightly cry “hypocrisy” when those who deny food stamps and Medicaid to the needy condemn those people when they steal bread and pharmaceuticals. Outrage against Sci-Hub may well be warranted. But such outrage has meaning only if it is linked to a commitment to fill a need that, to date, only Sci-Hub has filled.
So if you are an author repulsed by the illegality of Sci-Hub, will you begin publishing in open-access journals? If you are a university press angered by Sci-Hub’s threat to your business model, will you engage your university administration in conversations about new models? If you are a librarian disgusted by piracy, will you move your dollars to ventures that make piracy superfluous?
Sci-Hub threatens a status quo that fails to deliver what readers need. What will you do to change that status quo and make Sci-Hub unnecessary?
Bryn Geffert is librarian of the college at Amherst College.