QUOTH THE RAVEN, “NEVERMORE”: Open Access and the fight for free knowledge

QUOTH THE RAVEN, “NEVERMORE”:

Open Access and the fight for free knowledge

Griffin Hon

For hundreds of thousands of researchers and students every day, the little red key and the black corvid that bears it are a comforting sight for sore eyes. With an ever-growing collection of 85,258,448 articles, shadow library Sci-Hub offers free access to 95% of all scientific journal literature. Sci-Hub spells out its goal on the front page of its infamous website, sci-hub.se: “... to remove all barriers in the way of science.” To this extent, it’s been a crucial tool in the education of millions worldwide and an unsung part of the most important scientific discoveries of the last decade. Despite this, our passerine hero has been banned in 11 countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden. Sci-Hub’s creator, dubbed the “Robin Hood of the academic publishing world” and the “Pirate Queen of Science,” is being sued for $15 and $4.8 million in compensation from several corporations. She has for years been living in hiding in Russia for fear of being arrested by international authorities. But to understand how we’ve reached this present dystopia, we must travel back to a primordial, ancient time. That is, before the Internet.

Historically, publishing lengthy scientific articles with colorful and complex figures were expensive. If you wanted your work distributed broadly, you sent it to a particular institution - a scientific journal like Nature or Science - that would manage the review process, revisions, accept the article, and distribute your work. For years, this exclusive scientific journal model worked - authors were paid, and others could pay to access the published hard copies. However, in the wake of mass digitization, subscription prices for journal articles have skyrocketed. This chronic increase is known as the serials crisis, and its specter looms over the academic world. Journal article prices have outpaced inflation by 250% over the past 30 years. Research has found 15 entire scientific disciplines where the average price for one journal is >$1000 yearly, with chemistry and physics journals standing at the top - an average of $4227 and $3649, respectively. Even lower-demand subjects like agriculture are pricing knowledge at $1317 a year. To consider the extremes, the organic chemistry journal Tetrahedron notoriously charges $40,000. The paradox is that these journals are barely involved in the research process. They don’t fund researchers nor peer-reviewers yet charge exorbitant prices for access to their findings. With much of scientific research being government and publicly funded, scientists are essentially financed by taxpayers to make discoveries - which are then restricted from these very taxpayers by journals.

Especially in universities and libraries in low and middle-income areas, lack of access to scientific literature could make or break a student’s entire education. Researchers are prevented from conducting their best science if they don’t have access to every discovery in their field. Worse, researchers looking to pay for an article cannot be sure if it is relevant until it is paid for. Many researchers tell awful stories of shelling $40 fees by the dozen to read irrelevant papers due to misleading abstracts.

Open access aims to rectify all of these problems by removing paywalls and copyright reuse barriers through two main components: free to read and reuse. The first condition is the most well-known: all scientific publications are available to everyone, free of cost. The second condition guarantees that all literature can be data mined to build new tools. Reuse rights would allow scientists to make enormous discoveries by finding significant, otherwise unseen relationships across literature - like a certain molecule that shows up across multiple articles. Presently, the lack of reuse rights could have prevented important discoveries from being made simply because a researcher couldn’t connect with a paper they didn’t have access to.

Unfortunately, the fact is that a “true” open access model, known as the “gold” OA model, isn’t widely embraced yet. The main impediment here is the slow movement of scientific, cultural practices. Many scientists nominally claim support for open access but still want their articles published in Nature or Science due to the prestigious impact factor. The irony here has been widely criticized, with the below screenshot exemplifying this having become a widely-circulated meme among the scientific community and laypeople alike.

Figure 1: Irony often presents itself in cruel ways

Unfortunately, this position of power allows these big-name journals to ignore popular cries for open access. Instead of adopting a gold OA model, some journals have opted for the controversial hybrid “double-dipping” model. Researchers are given the option to publish their work as open access, but for a punitive fee.

This leaves one last chance for scientists’ open access: the “black” OA model. This refers to large-scale, unauthorized, and illegal digital copying of literature into shadow libraries, the most prominent of which is Sci-Hub. Heather Joseph, an advocate for legal open access, explains that “[researchers have] been forced into a system of workarounds to try to get access to the articles that they need to do their research. Typically, a researcher will have legal access to only between 50 and 70 percent of the articles that they need to do their work.” Sci-Hub’s success comes from its retaliators; these are not statistics that make publishing companies like Elsevier particularly happy. Elsevier, recognized as one of the major villains in the pursuit of open access for its abusive copyright and paywall practices, is suing Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub, for losing the company $15 million. This is one lawsuit among many, including a $4.8 million one from the American Chemical Society, for similar reasons to Elsevier. However, Sci-Hub will endure, as it has because it is needed. Until open access is widely embraced, the “black” OA model will continually serve as a placeholder; Sci-Hub remains an unfortunate but necessary instrument for scientists worldwide.

Looking forward, evidence suggests that open access is the future of science. Open access articles enjoy a “citation advantage.” They’re significantly more commonly mentioned and cited on blogs, Twitter, and English Wikipedia. Articles available on Sci-Hub are cited over two times more than their unavailable counterparts. Furthermore, governments around the world have also made strides towards the right direction by pursuing the FAIR data policy: information that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The 2016 G20 summit in Hangzhou announced its commitment to FAIR principles. The European Commission announced its plan to make all data derived from EU-funded research projects FAIR, allocating €2 billion in Horizon 2020 funding to this “European Cloud initiative.” The Obama administration directed more than $100 million in 2013 to “make the results of federally funded research freely available to the public—generally within one year of publication.” The NIH’s Public Access Policy requires all peer-reviewed research funded by the NIH to be publicly accessible. 2012 Intel ISEF Grand Prize winner Jack Andraka spread awareness of the issue in his statement that open access would “[open] the playing field from only a few hundred thousand to millions and millions of people.”

Open access is the next step for science. We must remember our right to science and culture, expressed in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By encouraging open access policies like FAIR principles, governments can help fulfill this human right, provide researchers with more resources, and give taxpayers access to the findings that their dollars helped fund. Researchers in lower-income and less-developed areas will be given an equal chance to access these resources, moving the entire world forward in science.

References:

Next Generation Diplomacy

QUOTH THE RAVEN, “NEVERMORE”: Open Access and the fight for free knowledge

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