[LIS-Forum] 'Content pirates' and the service they provide

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

This is in response to the post of Prof. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay.

Let me begin with thanking him for responding to my earlier post.

I do not think Ms Elbakyan will be cowed down by the big publishers. She
seems to be far too smart for that and she seems to believe what she is
doing is right. The fact that a very large section of academia around the
world (including in North America and Europe) is using the service she
provides is testimony to the tacit support she has from around the world.
Thousans of people are indebted to her! Of course, she cannot visit the US
(and possibly some western countries closely allied to the US) where she
could be arrested and incarcerated. In contrast, Aaron Swartz was living in
the US and he happened to be the pioneer; Elbakyan would have had the
benefit of learning from the experience of Aaron.

At the end of his missive,  Prof. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay has posed
three questions.

Dark OA is *NOT* taking over OA even in science and scholarship. Beginning
with arXiv, which was started in 1991, we have more than a dozen preprint
servers now catering to fields ranging from biology to social sciences.
Sure, most of them are in the early stages and will take a while to attain
the level of maturity of arXiv, but sooner or later they will. DOAJ has
more than 9,450 fully OA journals. There are many institutional and
national repositories although many of them are not fully interoperable
(for which the LIS community should take the blame).

I don't think 'romanticism' and similarity to 'Robinhood'-kind of robbing
the rich to help the poor have anything to do with scholarly communication.
While people do research, they need to access some literature and seek the
best option to access the literature. Publishers, of course, harp on ethics
and morals, but, in the first place they have lost the right to do so by
usurping the copyright to the content of research from the researchers.

There is no such thing as 'delayed OA.' Please see Peter Suber's definition
of OA which emphasizes 'immediate.'

The solution lies perhaps in moving away from the current journal system,
which had started going against the interest of the researchers ever since
Mr Robert Maxwell stepped into the business of journal publishing, to the
preprint and post refereeing system (a la arXiv).

Best wishes.

Arun
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658
http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009

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