Scihub, it's a problem. It contains access to 'nearly all scholarly literature' (Himmelstein, 2018). What does the persistent existence of Scihub and it's 'success' say about libraries, publishers and federated access management (FAM)? We acknowledge that the user journey, the properly sanctioned and paid for one, is quite a painful journey, but our solution seems to be making it more painful. Yes we now have discovery systems all wonderfully wayflessly linked together, but now what do I spy, is that a reCAPTCHA on half of the sodding articles i'm trying to access? I suppose it might do something to stop piracy but it's hardly encouraging our users to go through legitimate routes. It's certainly winding me up.
What should we as librarian's think of piracy? SciHub, ResearchGate, all of it? Should we be against it on principle as a threat to our jobs and futures? It might genuinely be one. Those of us who have pitted our career on enabling digital access might find things go quite awry when being the financial gatekeeper to that knowledge stops being a thing. So again, what should we think of it?
We know piracy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When piracy thrives it is because the alternatives are poor, or at the very least unsatisfactory, and the consequences of committing piracy are perceived as low by those downloading the material, and quite often by those uploading it too.
Why do I think the consequences are perceived as low? At the National Police Library (thoughts are mine not my employers!) our customer base is largely police officers and staff. We have a fair sized customer base and we serve them well, be simply don't have the budget to fulfill ILL requests for the whole of policing, so if we don't have it or we can't find it legitimately freely available for you we won't supply it. And that's a problem. It's a problem because they might then Google search and find A copy and conclude that we aren't necessary and perhaps it really is 'all free online now anyway’. That that paper may well have been made available illegally isn't something that really crosses their minds.
So if police officers aren’t aware that their actions might be illegal, and if academics aren’t aware (or don’t care) that their actions are illegal, the response cannot be more user education and a slightly less poor FAM solution. Perhaps for an academic library it's easier to make that argument, but for a Specialist/Government library where usage is very much optional for most of the user base it's problematic. It's hard enough to get users to access and use guides provided, or pay attention at any kind of 5 minute training session we squeeze into conferences and CPD training.
We know we aren't the first industry to suffer from piracy. As a young person a tiny bit involved in the music piracy issue of the early 2000s, created by the existence of P2P sharing through service like Napster and Limewire, and having previously been a member the Open Rights group, I can empathise with our users. When I want to listen to an obscure song from 1995 I’m not going out to buy the album. These days I’ll stream it on youtube or Spotify, in 2001 I’d have downloaded a poor quality rip because the content wasn’t that valuable to me and the risk was low. We all heard the scare stories about people who got prosecuted, but we also knew they couldn’t prosecute everyone and they were likely to go after the biggest downloaders, not us. The perception of risk was generally low. And then streaming came along and it massively reduced the access barriers whilst eliminating the risk and so piracy decreased markedly. I’m not saying it went away, but it stopped being the default position for 20 yr olds.
So what is the perception of risk when downloading an article illegally? I would say close to zero. Firstly, as I already stated, there is a very low understanding of what might constitute an illegal download. I have had conversations with academics and even librarians who do not understand the difference between open access and freely available, and there’s still enough questionable material in Research Gate for me to wonder if academics still don’t know or care what they might have the right to do with ‘their‘ work. Secondly I think there is the issue of cost. When you are part of an academic institution or have access to a Library, your journal subscription access is ‘free’. Academics may understand the true cost of journals, students do not. When you don’t have access, the cost is £40 an article, or to put it another way, more than the cost of many books. It’s not a realistic cost. So we have the interlibrary loan system which generally plugs the gap -provided you have access to it-, but there may still be a (lower) cost, and there is clearly a higher cost in terms of making the request and waiting for it to be processed – though this might be a lot lower than it once was if say for example you let your academics have a BL account. But this doesn’t factor in those occasions when for reasons of embargo etc you are not able even to acquire such an article via ILL and perhaps your request will be rejected. All this implies a fair amount of patience on our customer’s part and it isn’t often patience they have. So the cost of acquiring something legally is frequently seen as too high.
And this is the nice, Western academic perspective on the whole thing. If you're trying to research from a developing country the risk might be irrelevant if piracy is your only way of accessing content.
----
Perhaps when we librarian's think about piracy we should think of it as something we've helped to create. We have access routes that aren't always user friendly and that do not necessarily result in the end user getting the paper they want (admittedly because most of us can't afford to provide access to everything). And whether we like it or not some still see libraries and elitist and not for them - something not always helped by enthusiasm for promoting user education over providing support with their own user journey when asked.
But if we've helped to create it, we're also trying to resolve it. Open Access, whatever criticism I may have of it's current multiple incarnations, is a wonderful response and it's amazing to see it develop and grow. I don't know if it can be considered a response to piracy, i'm not sure the timelines work on that and I think really it was more of a response to the cost of journals, but it is a response and should ultimately negate the need for piracy. Piracy is essentially about cost, and on that I think our ire should be saved for the publishers.
-----
This has been an unashamed opinion piece, but if you want to read around the topic I will include some reading in the references - using only the legit links of course. If you choose to Google search to acquire them another way I do not judge.
References / Reading
Doctorow, C (2008) Content: selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright, and the future of the future. Tachyon: San Francisco, CA.
Doctorow, C. Selected blogs. https://boingboing.net/tag/sci-hub
Himmelstein, DS et al (2018) Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. eLife, 7:e32822. DOI: 10.7554%2FeLife.32822
Hoy, MB (2017) Sci-Hub: what Librarians should know and do about article piracy. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 36(1) pp.73–78. DOI: 10.1080/02763869.2017.1259918
Zimerman, M (2011) E‐books and piracy: implications/issues for academic libraries. New Library World, 112(1/2) pp.67-75. DOI10.1108/03074801111100463
What should we as librarian's think of piracy? SciHub, ResearchGate, all of it? Should we be against it on principle as a threat to our jobs and futures? It might genuinely be one. Those of us who have pitted our career on enabling digital access might find things go quite awry when being the financial gatekeeper to that knowledge stops being a thing. So again, what should we think of it?
We know piracy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When piracy thrives it is because the alternatives are poor, or at the very least unsatisfactory, and the consequences of committing piracy are perceived as low by those downloading the material, and quite often by those uploading it too.
Why do I think the consequences are perceived as low? At the National Police Library (thoughts are mine not my employers!) our customer base is largely police officers and staff. We have a fair sized customer base and we serve them well, be simply don't have the budget to fulfill ILL requests for the whole of policing, so if we don't have it or we can't find it legitimately freely available for you we won't supply it. And that's a problem. It's a problem because they might then Google search and find A copy and conclude that we aren't necessary and perhaps it really is 'all free online now anyway’. That that paper may well have been made available illegally isn't something that really crosses their minds.
So if police officers aren’t aware that their actions might be illegal, and if academics aren’t aware (or don’t care) that their actions are illegal, the response cannot be more user education and a slightly less poor FAM solution. Perhaps for an academic library it's easier to make that argument, but for a Specialist/Government library where usage is very much optional for most of the user base it's problematic. It's hard enough to get users to access and use guides provided, or pay attention at any kind of 5 minute training session we squeeze into conferences and CPD training.
We know we aren't the first industry to suffer from piracy. As a young person a tiny bit involved in the music piracy issue of the early 2000s, created by the existence of P2P sharing through service like Napster and Limewire, and having previously been a member the Open Rights group, I can empathise with our users. When I want to listen to an obscure song from 1995 I’m not going out to buy the album. These days I’ll stream it on youtube or Spotify, in 2001 I’d have downloaded a poor quality rip because the content wasn’t that valuable to me and the risk was low. We all heard the scare stories about people who got prosecuted, but we also knew they couldn’t prosecute everyone and they were likely to go after the biggest downloaders, not us. The perception of risk was generally low. And then streaming came along and it massively reduced the access barriers whilst eliminating the risk and so piracy decreased markedly. I’m not saying it went away, but it stopped being the default position for 20 yr olds.
So what is the perception of risk when downloading an article illegally? I would say close to zero. Firstly, as I already stated, there is a very low understanding of what might constitute an illegal download. I have had conversations with academics and even librarians who do not understand the difference between open access and freely available, and there’s still enough questionable material in Research Gate for me to wonder if academics still don’t know or care what they might have the right to do with ‘their‘ work. Secondly I think there is the issue of cost. When you are part of an academic institution or have access to a Library, your journal subscription access is ‘free’. Academics may understand the true cost of journals, students do not. When you don’t have access, the cost is £40 an article, or to put it another way, more than the cost of many books. It’s not a realistic cost. So we have the interlibrary loan system which generally plugs the gap -provided you have access to it-, but there may still be a (lower) cost, and there is clearly a higher cost in terms of making the request and waiting for it to be processed – though this might be a lot lower than it once was if say for example you let your academics have a BL account. But this doesn’t factor in those occasions when for reasons of embargo etc you are not able even to acquire such an article via ILL and perhaps your request will be rejected. All this implies a fair amount of patience on our customer’s part and it isn’t often patience they have. So the cost of acquiring something legally is frequently seen as too high.
And this is the nice, Western academic perspective on the whole thing. If you're trying to research from a developing country the risk might be irrelevant if piracy is your only way of accessing content.
----
Perhaps when we librarian's think about piracy we should think of it as something we've helped to create. We have access routes that aren't always user friendly and that do not necessarily result in the end user getting the paper they want (admittedly because most of us can't afford to provide access to everything). And whether we like it or not some still see libraries and elitist and not for them - something not always helped by enthusiasm for promoting user education over providing support with their own user journey when asked.
But if we've helped to create it, we're also trying to resolve it. Open Access, whatever criticism I may have of it's current multiple incarnations, is a wonderful response and it's amazing to see it develop and grow. I don't know if it can be considered a response to piracy, i'm not sure the timelines work on that and I think really it was more of a response to the cost of journals, but it is a response and should ultimately negate the need for piracy. Piracy is essentially about cost, and on that I think our ire should be saved for the publishers.
-----
This has been an unashamed opinion piece, but if you want to read around the topic I will include some reading in the references - using only the legit links of course. If you choose to Google search to acquire them another way I do not judge.
References / Reading
Doctorow, C (2008) Content: selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright, and the future of the future. Tachyon: San Francisco, CA.
Doctorow, C. Selected blogs. https://boingboing.net/tag/sci-hub
Himmelstein, DS et al (2018) Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. eLife, 7:e32822. DOI: 10.7554%2FeLife.32822
Hoy, MB (2017) Sci-Hub: what Librarians should know and do about article piracy. Medical Reference Services Quarterly, 36(1) pp.73–78. DOI: 10.1080/02763869.2017.1259918
Zimerman, M (2011) E‐books and piracy: implications/issues for academic libraries. New Library World, 112(1/2) pp.67-75. DOI10.1108/03074801111100463
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