Re: [LIS-Forum] Sci-Hub Case: The Court Should Protect Science From Greedy Academic Publishers

Dear friends, Looks like many of our library colleagues are being carried away by the high costs of journals, and monopolistic behavior of commercial publishers, and pinned hopes on Open Access; but they have forgotten the crux of the real problem. Let me ask my friends who support SciHub and Libgen answer these questions: 1. The commercial publishers have been playing a major role in the scholarly communication system for more than 300 years. They are in this business for profit (journals behind pay-wall) and not for charity? Due to the 1986 recession and rising cost of printing, journal prices certainly have soared beyond the reach of any academic library, and this has become the bone of contention for us and authors. 2. The subscription model had survived for so many years because of its inherent quality, peer review, and prestige attached to the journals; authors prefer to publish in these high-ranking journals by giving up their copyrights in return for recognition and tenure promotions, etc. If cost is the only factor, then we have seen cost escalation in almost every product or service all these years; can anyone deny? 3. Since 1995, the Internet has opened up new avenues for publishing and distributing scholarly literature freely to everyone. Around 2003, Open Access initiatives paved the way for producing scholarly literature for free. It is good to say that public-funded research articles should be made available in open access, but who should pay for and how much? Despite having thousands of OA journals, why authors are still publishing in commercial journals? 4. If Open Access model is best suited for the academic & research community, why authors still publish in commercial journals? What is the reason for the mushrooming growth of low-quality predatory journals without peer-review and high APC, if not for money? Who will take the responsibility of maintaining the quality, reputation, prestige, and impact factor of OA journals? 5. Sci-Hub and Libgen are ‘pirate websites’ without any institutional affiliation, neither academic nor research. If they are really serious about helping the scientific community, they should publish journals on their own and give for free. Even the famous physics archive “ArXiv” stores and distributes only pre-prints of articles. What right Sci-Hub and Libgen have done is to simply download already published copyrighted material from the Internet to their server and make it freely available to everyone in the guise of helping science? What these two websites have done, can also be replicated by any/many science philanthropists. 6. As long as the academic community does not fully embrace open access and stop publishing in commercial journals, subscription model will continue to exist. Authors can either, wait and let the funding agencies dictate the terms, or they can work actively to let the transition takes place. In my opinion, nothing comes for free in this world, there is always some cost involved in every activity be it printing, publishing or web-hosting. In this case, what Sci-Hub and Libgen had done is totally wrong and illegal. We should remember that authors, publishers and libraries have a symbiotic relationship and are integral part of the scholarly communication system. People may not like but scholarship and business can co-exist in a knowledge society provided all the stakeholders agree to work together for a common goal of knowledge creation. Dr M Koteswara Rao Retd. Librarian, Univ of Hyderabad ________________________________ From: LIS-Forum on behalf of Murari Tapaswi Sent: Thursday, December 24, 2020 2:17 PM To: Vinit Kumar Cc: LIS forum ; madhan muthu Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] Sci-Hub Case: The Court Should Protect Science From Greedy Academic Publishers I disagree with Prof. Vinit Kumar's arguments that (1) the publishers charge heavily to compensate sci-hub downloads. The subscription of the journals of these publishers were as high as of today before sci-hub was born. (2) such acts would reduce the publication avenues in good journals - this has not reflected in last 10 years (since sci-hub was born), and (3) mushrooming low quality journals as a result of sci-hub, and reduction in the avenues for publishing. May be this would be a good project for Vinit Kumar and his students to prove this with numbers after providing linkages. Regards, Dr. Murari P. Tapaswi, Phone/WhatsApp: 9763341967 On Wed, 23 Dec, 2020, 10:33 pm Vinit Kumar, wrote:

These pirate websites are killing revenue of academic publishers indirectly harming science communication. To compensate their losses due to these pirate websites the publishers increase subscription costs which are again have to paid by funding agencies. No doubt reforms are needed to regress academic publishers' increasing subscription prices and Article Processing Fees but such kind of gross copyright infringements will hamper publishers' rights and ultimately reduce the publication avenues for authors. We have seen mushrooming of low quality free journals in recent years compelling UGC to come up with a white list. The copyright laws are to promote and incentivise intellectual output by protecting the rights of creaters.

In my opinion, rather than asking everything for free we need to increase funding towards research.

Regards -- Vinit Kumar, PhD Assistant Professor Department of Library and Information Science, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University (A central university) Lucknow 226025

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On Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 1:28 PM madhan muthu wrote:

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Sci-Hub Case: The Court Should Protect Science From Greedy Academic Publishers

A court of law in India shouldn't allow itself to become a tool for perpetuating inequalities in access to scientific literature in the developing world.

https://thewire.in/law/sci-hub-elsevier-delhi-high-court-access-medical-lite...

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