Online Piracy of Academic Materials Extends to Scholarly Books

University presses have become aware in recent weeks that unauthorized copies of hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of their books are available on pirate websites, and officials are still struggling with how to respond.

Several press leaders said they wanted to be sure any stance they take against piracy isn’t perceived as an attack on the open-access movement, which is gaining popularity among some academics and librarians. It also appears that few, if any, presses have formally notified their authors that digital copies of their books are available free on an illicit website.

“Many of these books are our best sellers,” said Dean J. Smith, director of Cornell University Press. “This is really painful to a university press.”

The unauthorized copies are available through a site called Library Genesis, which also offers more than a million popular books from commercial publishers.

The site appears to be a sister site to Sci-Hub, an unauthorized collection of scholarly-journal articles created by Alexandra Elbakyan, a graduate student in Kazakhstan. While the workings of the two sites aren’t exactly clear, several press directors said they believed Sci-Hub is the tool that also powers the Library Genesis database.

Both sites were ordered shut down last year as a result of a lawsuit filed by a commercial journal publisher, Elsevier.

Other versions of the sites, which feature instructions in both Russian and English, subsequently reappeared under slightly different web addresses. A kind of manifesto posted on the sites argues that the information in the articles and books should be free from commercial restraints.

A Dawning Awareness

The Cornell press publishes about 100 new books a year. Nearly 500 of its titles were listed on the Library Genesis site as of Monday. The site also listed more than 800 books from the Johns Hopkins University Press, nearly 2,000 from Harvard University Press, and more than 4,800 from MIT Press.

More than 17,000 items from the biggest of all university presses, Oxford University Press, are on the site (including a book by this reporter), but it could not be immediately determined if that count also tallies some of the 380 journals it publishes.

“Awareness of the situation is only beginning in the university community,” said Peter M. Berkery Jr., executive director of the Association of American University Presses, in an interview on Monday.

While much of the recent news coverage of Sci-Hub has focused on its trove of journal articles, there has been little mention of the electronic files of books on Library Genesis, including PDFs, MOBI files (used for Kindle editions), and files used by book aggregators like ebrary, JSTOR, and Project MUSE.

In an email on March 31, Mr. Berkery informed his 100-plus members that their books were on the site. He noted that while the information would probably leave them feeling “some combination of outraged and nervous,” there was very little that they and the association could do about it in the short run besides issuing a statement condemning the site, which he promised would come soon.

“The presses are going to have to work with the aggregators to beef up their security” on digital copies, said Mr. Berkery, in the interview. In the longer term, he said, the presses will need to be part of larger conversations with the rest of the academic community.

People need to appreciate the difference between open access, which many university presses are already embracing, and the actions of this website, which “is just plain and simple theft,” said Mr. Berkery. “We don’t want people to think we’re taking a position against open access. We’re taking a position against theft, and hacking, and phishing.”

‘Gems of the Backlist’

Mr. Berkery said he had not taken a full accounting of how many presses had had their books pirated by the site, but he had heard the site contains “the gems of the backlist” for many of them. What’s more, “presses are having a terrible year this year, as a group,” with several reporting slow sales on books they expected would take off. Whether the site is responsible for that pattern, he said, “we don’t know.”

Oxford officials declined to speak specifically about the potential impact of the pirate site, but David Crotty, its editorial director for journals policy, who has been closely following Sci-Hub, said it could certainly pose a threat, with longer-term implications: “If you’re losing a huge chunk of sales, fewer books are going to get made.” Oxford publishes 3,000 new titles a year.

Mr. Crotty has tangled directly with Ms. Elbakyan in the comments section of Scholarly Kitchen, a blog about academic publishing. The online exchange was prompted by Ms. Elbakyan’s claim that nonprofit organizations such as university presses should not be selling in the first place.

Richard Brown, director of Georgetown University Press, which publishes just 40 new books a year, said the argument highlights Ms. Elbakyan’s misunderstanding of the position of most university presses. The Georgetown press has made 85 of its monographs available in open-access versions, but “we have to sell stuff” to remain self-sustaining, he said. About 200 of its books are on the pirate site.

The emergence of the pirate book site is especially painful for Mr. Smith. Before taking the post at Cornell, he directed Project MUSE and spent a lot of time with publishers, “making them comfortable with this idea” of sharing their books in electronic formats. “I hadn’t expected something like this, a systematic widespread downloading of content,” he said.

University presses provide a lot of editing and do a lot of work “helping first-time writers getting their tenure books ready for publication,” said Mr. Smith. “Any kind of situation like this kills the business model.”

The ‘Dark Web’

In an interview with The Washington Post, about Sci-Hub, Ms. Elbakyan claimed that 150,000 papers are downloaded from the site each day. If the book site got a comparable level of use, “that would be profound,” said Gregory M. Britton, an editor at the Johns Hopkins press.

The breadth of the site’s collection isn’t the only thing about it that unnerves him. The site is part of the “dark web,” which means it may not show up in a standard Google search. But unlike some such sites, which require special protocols, it’s got “a remarkably easy search engine,” he noted. Last week he tested it out by downloading a few of his press’s books, and they all came through perfectly. This reporter did the same with her book, and received a perfect copy within 10 seconds.

The university-press directors said they recognized that sites like Sci-Hub and Library Genesis can seem appealing to librarians and others, especially when the sites portray themselves as vigilantes against commercial journal publishers whom the librarians blame for driving up the cost of subscriptions. Indeed, that’s part of the appeal the pirate site makes in its “solidarity letter,” claiming at one point that “closed access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits, and its central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest.”

But while “there’s no love lost between librarians and big commercial publishers,” said Meredith Babb, director of the University Press of Florida, the pirate sites can harm libraries too. The sites undermine library usage, which could mean libraries’ per-user costs for licensed scholarly content will go up, she noted. That might make it harder to justify many subscriptions. And the sites, which depend on stolen passwords, could also threaten library and university security systems.

What’s more, she said, the rationale for supporting open access, and perhaps even piracy, for journal articles is based on the idea that publicly financed research should be made more freely available. But “there’s a completely different paradigm for university-press books,” said Ms. Babb, who is also president of the university-press association. Most university-press books, she said, are not produced with government grants.

It’s that argument, coupled with a push that attempts to distinguish university presses from the Elseviers of the world, that the AAUP will very likely be making in the weeks and months to come.

“We’re not commercial publishers,” said Mr. Berkery. “We’re mission-driven publishers,” and the pirate sites “are crippling our ability to carry out that mission.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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