10/7/21, 6:29 PM A World Without Sci-Hub – Palladium

PALLADIUM
GOVERNANCE FUTURISM

JASON PARRY
• SEPTEMBER 24, 2021 •
ARTICLES

A World Without Sci-Hub

NOAA/Plotting the position of the survey ship PATHFINDER, Alaska

A
aron Swartz was 26 years old when he took his own life. He did so
under the shadow of legal prosecution, pursued by government
lawyers intent on maximal punishment. If found guilty, he
potentially faced up to 50 years in prison and a $1 million dollar fine.
Swartz’s crime was not only legal, but political. He had accessed a private

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 computer network and gained possession of highly valuable information

with the goal of sharing it. His actions threatened some of the most
powerful, connected, and politically protected groups in the country. Their
friends in the government were intent on sending a message.

It’s the kind of story you would expect about some far-off political
dissident. But Swartz took his life in Brooklyn on a winter day in 2013 and
his prosecutor was the U.S. federal government. When Swartz died, he was
under indictment for 13 felony charges related to his use of an MIT
computer to download too many scientific articles from the academic
database JSTOR, ostensibly for the purpose of making them freely available
to the public. Ultimately, Swartz potentially faced more jail time for
downloading academic papers than he would have if he had helped Al
Qaeda build a nuclear weapon. Even the Criminal Code of the USSR
stipulated that those who stored and distributed anti-Soviet literature only
faced five to seven years in prison. While prosecutors later pointed toward
a potential deal for less time, Aaron would still have been labeled a felon
for his actions—and to boot, JSTOR itself had reached a civil settlement and
didn’t even pursue its own lawsuit.

But Aaron’s cause lived on. This September marks the ten-year anniversary
of Sci-Hub, the online “shadow library” that provides access to millions of
research papers otherwise hidden behind prohibitive paywalls. Founded
by the Kazakhstani computer scientist Alexandra Elbakyan—popularly
known as science’s “pirate queen”—Sci-Hub has grown to become a
repository of over 85 million academic papers.

The site is popular globally, used by millions of people—many of whom

would otherwise not be able to finish their degrees, advise their patients,
or use text mining algorithms to make new scientific discoveries. Sci-Hub
has become the unacknowledged foundation that helps the whole
enterprise of academia to function. 

Even when they do not need to use Sci-Hub, the superior user experience it
offers means that many people prefer to use the illegal site rather than
access papers through their own institutional libraries. It is difficult to say
how many ideas, grants, publications, and companies have been made
possible by Sci-Hub, but it seems undeniable that Elbakyan’s ten-year-old
website has become a crucial component of contemporary scholarship.  

The success of Sci-Hub has made it a target for injunctions and

investigations. Academic publishers have sued Sci-Hub repeatedly,
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 opponents have accused the site’s creators of collaborating with Russian

intelligence, and private sector critics have dubbed it a threat to “national
security.” Elbakyan recently tweeted out a notification she received that
the FBI had requested her personal data from Apple. 

Whatever happens to Sci-Hub or Elbakyan, the fact that such a site exists is
something of a tragedy. Sci-Hub currently fills a niche that should never
have existed. Like the black-market medicine purchased by people who
cannot afford prescription drugs, its very being indicts the official system
that created the conditions of its emergence. 

The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a

typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars.
Beyond paying for the articles themselves, academics often have to pay
steep fees to publish their research. Meanwhile, most peer reviewers and
editors charged with assessing, correcting, and formatting papers do not
receive compensation for their work. 

It’s particularly ironic that this situation exists alongside a purported

digital “infodemic” of misinformation. The costs of this plague are massive,
from opposition to the pandemic response to the conspiracy theories that
drove a loving father to fire his gun inside a pizza parlor and a man to kill
a mafia boss accused of having ties to the deep state. But few public figures,
if any, draw the direct connection between the expensive barricades
around scientific research and the conspicuous epistemic collapse of
significant portions of the American political discourse. 

Even the champions of the academic publishing industry appear unable to

formulate coherent defenses. In 2019, rumors began to spread that the
Trump administration was considering issuing an executive order that
would require published articles funded by government grants to be made
immediately available to the public. An association of academic publishers
issued the following warning in response: 

In addition to financing and managing a world-leading peer review process,

publishers make extensive investments in education, research, and innovative
digital platforms that advance American competitiveness and help ensure the
quality and integrity of American science. Undermining the marketplace is
unnecessary, counterproductive, and would significantly harm the system of peer-
reviewed scholarly communication that fuels America’s leadership in research and
innovation.

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
In this case, “financing” the peer review process means not paying anyone
to do the actual work of peer review. Likewise, the “extensive investments”
in “innovative digital platforms” failed to produce a user experience
superior to that made by Elbakyan when she was in her early twenties. As
for ensuring the “quality and integrity” of science, this seems to mean
operating journals with surprisingly high retraction rates and inconsistent
reliability. A 2018 study found that the costly involvement of academic
publishers made “no significant differences” to the quality of scientific
papers. Given the flimsiness of these arguments, it is unsurprising that a
large number of Nobel laureates wrote a separate letter encouraging the
Trump administration to go ahead with its plans—which, in any event,
never came to fruition. 

Whether intended or not, the impossibly high paywalls of academic

publishers only serve to keep scientific information out of the population’s
hands. What makes this even more discordant is that the people being
prevented from accessing the information are often also the taxpayers who
helped fund the research in the first place. 

By framing the debate about Sci-Hub as one concerning property rights,

both advocates of Elbakyan’s site and its detractors fall afoul of what John
Gall called the “operational fallacy.” In his book The Systems Bible, Gall
defined the operational fallacy as a situation where “the system itself does
not do what it says it is doing.” In other words, what a system calls itself is
not always a reliable indicator of its true function. In this case, the name of
the “academic publishing industry” implies that it is supposed to be
involved in the dissemination of scholarship. But the effective function of
the academic publishing industry as it actually exists is to prevent the
dissemination of scholarly work. 

Given the example of Sci-Hub, the easy logistics of internet publication, and
the funding structure of academic research, it seems clear that in the
absence of the academic publishing industry, scholarship would be more
widely available, not less. If the academic publishing industry did not exist,
scientists could still do their research—in fact, it would be easier to do so as
more people would have access to scholarly literature. The peer-review
process could still function normally—though there are good reasons to
change that as well. And the resulting papers could simply be posted in a
place where anyone could read them. 

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 When we explore the actual function of the academic publishing industry

—restricting access to scholarly research—we see that these publishers
have little in common with the companies that have opposed other file-
sharing sites. When several record companies sued Napster in 2001, they
could make the legitimate case that the economic well-being of the
musicians, producers, and all the people who were needed to distribute
recorded music was at stake. No such parallel exists in the case of Sci-Hub.
Scientists are not paid by the publishers. Peer reviewers are not paid by the
publishers. Distribution itself, as proven by Sci-Hub and its more law-
abiding brother arXiv, is cheap enough to be provided to the public for
free. It’s not surprising, then, that polls reveal that scientists
overwhelmingly support Sci-Hub. 

All of this makes clear that the academic publishing industry does not
derive its power from the satisfaction of its customers. Aaron Swartz’s case
was only made possible due to both the vast protections that academic
publishing has convinced its political friends to establish and the
government’s willingness to target individual threats to that system
through the legal process. It’s unclear what exactly the political motivations
for prosecutors might have been, but one theory is that Aaron’s political
activities advocating for an open internet made him a useful target in a
period when the U.S. government was attempting to clamp down on 2010s-
era rogue digital activism and hacker culture.

Like the clandestine networks that helped to promote and popularize

prohibited ideas and research in earlier eras, Sci-Hub functions as an
infrastructure for circumventing artificially imposed limits on human
thought. Few people today are priced out of streaming films or buying
MP3s, but access to scientific information has become a true luxury item.

The rationale for restricting information may be different than in previous

eras. For the academic publishers, it is about extracting rents rather than
enforcing ideological or theological orthodoxy. But making scientific
journals prohibitively expensive unfortunately achieves the same effect as
censoring them. Indeed, it is a more clever strategy because it allows the
publishers to defend themselves using the moral language of property
rights. Perhaps the KGB would have enjoyed a better reputation if they had
merely charged astronomical sums for copies of Solzhenitsyn. 

There are some other prominent examples of academics and other

organizations confronting artificial barriers to information. The Cost of
Knowledge campaign, led by a mathematician in the UK, has asked its
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 signatories to boycott involvement with the Dutch publisher Elsevier. In

Germany, several scientists resigned from their positions on the editorial
boards of journals published by Elsevier after the publisher did not agree
to increase open access. In 2018, when a Swedish court forced the internet
provider Bahnhof to cease all traffic to Sci-Hub, the company protested the
decision by also blocking access to Elsevier’s website. 

While these acts serve to draw attention and rally support, they still largely
fall under the frame of activism. The open-access movement has often used
such acts of protest to advance its aims. But the publishers have adopted
different strategies. There are approximately zero people holding signs
denouncing Sci-Hub and demanding greater acceptance of paywalls.
Instead, the academic publishing lobby nurtures direct relationships with
politicians, uses its influence to advise policies, and maintains well-funded
legal teams that can use lawfare against opponents. 

Overwhelmingly, the lobbying strategy has outperformed the activist

strategy. According to Open Secrets, the parent company of Elsevier spent
just under $2 million on lobbying in 2021. With that amount greasing
whatever arguments they bring forth to politicians in favor of their
position, they have been able to secure enough political support to persist
in their activities. Focused political action with the right strategy meets
success. Those who came of age during the height of the activism strategy,
on the other hand, have yet to make a similar strategic update. While
scattered individuals like Tim Berners-Lee have directly worked with
governments to influence their decisions, we are still very far from a world
in which restricting access to scientific research is as unthinkable as
making JSTOR documents available was for Aaron Swartz’s opponents.

Sci-Hub can make information accessible because it has escaped the

economic and political constraints it would have faced by merely trying to
reform existing institutions. But for such projects to succeed, their
proponents would need a machine that can defend and entrench their
existence, both politically and legally. 

The component parts of such a machine already exist. Beyond individuals

working in universities and hospitals, the cause of open access to
information enjoys broad support in both the crypto community and the
machine learning field. Sci-Hub’s importance as an essential platform for
contemporary research means that it enjoys backing from a broad, if
unlikely, coalition of industries that together have the resources and
capacities to foster and sustain the creation of a new political lobby. 
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 In fact, the academic publishers themselves may have provided such a

lobby with a political goal to rally around:

In their letter to the Trump administration protesting the rumored

executive order, the academic publishing industry wrote that moves to
increase open access “would effectively nationalize the valuable American
intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the
rest of the world for free.” To which a chorus of scientists and researchers
says in unison: Yes. Nationalization could not only address the problems of
academic publishing and make scientific work and innovation based on it
easier, it could also boost American soft power in an age of waning
American geopolitical dominance. 

David Wiley has proposed that the federal government take the intellectual
property of academic publishers using the power of eminent domain. The
fees that public universities have already paid (the University of California
system alone paid $13 million to Elsevier in 2021) could go quite a ways
towards the “just compensation” for property seizure specified in the Fifth
Amendment. 

Recently, supporters of Sci-Hub have begun creating copies of the site’s

immense archive in case it is taken down. Their hope is to make Sci-Hub
“un-censorable.” But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub
—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The
“effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic
publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-
century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world
by Uncle Sam.

Jason Parry holds a PhD in comparative literature from Binghamton University and
received a 2021 English PEN Translates Award. He tweets @JRhysParry.

    

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