Friends, Allow me to add my two cents to the discussion generated by Mr Muthu Madhan's post on Paulo Coelho's 'interesting call.' Is Ms Alextandra Elbakyan a thief, or is she stealing from others? No, she is not a thief nor is she stealing from others. What she is doing is helping researchers achieve what they want to achieve but cannot achieve as individuals. Why do researchers around the world (including the tens of thousands in India and the rest of the Global South) write up their findings? Because they want to make their findings known to other researchers around the world, who in turn can use the findings along with the findings of many other researchers in their own research. As Sir Isaac Newton famously said in a letter he wrote to Robert Hooke as far back as 1675, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." By shoulders of giants, Newton meant the work of others. It is important for us to remember what Prof. Robert Merton has said about science; it is a communal (or community) activity, a collective enterprise of building knowledge brick by brick, the bricks coming from thousands of researchers and research groups (past and current), and institutions around the world. Ms Elbakyan and SciHub are making it possible for individual researchers around the world, no matter where they live and work, to make their own contribution by facilitating access to the bricks made by others. All one needs is access to the Internet and a device (say a laptop or mobile phone). At a scale unimaginable till two or three decades ago. She deserves to be rewarded for her innovative solution to a long standing problem (of access to relevant information) and not accused of thievery. Whose work is she making available to researchers (and whoever is interested)? The work of researchers which they want to give away to others so it could be read, used to advance knowledge and used in other ways, say in teaching and in treating patients in hospitals. As far as I know, no researcher has objected to Elbakyan making their work available to a worldwide audience. In the course of my work I meet a number of physicists, and they all make their preprints available through arXiv. In recent years, biologists and chemists have started placing their preprints in bioRxiv and chemRxiv. Why? All of them want their work to be known by researchers all over the world and almost immediately. Which is exactly what Ms Elbakyan is doing. Which is what Aaron Swartz tried to do before his untimely death in 2013 at the age of 26. No owner of scientific/scholarly knowledge has objected to Elbakyan making their work publicly accessible or dragged SciHub to court. It is some intermediaries who use scientific journal publishing as 'a perpetual financing machine' (I did not coin this term; it was coined by the man who actually showed that journal publishing is a perpetual financing machine, Mr Robert Maxwell), who are suing SciHub and Ms Elbakyan. Please see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/ scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research . If you want to hear it from an Indian expert, please listen to the last 13 minutes of Prof. Balaram's 22-minute talk at the IISc DST CPR OA Week 2021 webinar. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdCoJUrqeQA&t=3s; see from 08.45]. In reality, it is these intermediaries (unfortunately, including a large professional society) who are keen to protect their revenue and profit margins at the expense of science, scientists and knowledge production who have gone to court. Does it cost money to produce knowledge? Undoubtedly, yes. You can't build and sustain TIFRs, IITs, IISc and other centres of scientific learning and knowledge production without investing huge sums of money. That is why enlightened governments and philanthropic organizations around the world continue to invest huge sums on setting up such institutions and supporting the research and allied activities of the scientists and students working in these and other research institutions. Often, governments have to make choices such as should one invest their limited resources in scientific research or should one invest in poverty alleviation or providing noon meal to poor children who might not otherwise be able to attend schools. Obviously, scientists and their institutions must be aware of the need to spend the funds with utmost care. That is why we should not support publishers who have made 'journal publishing a perpetual financing machine' and who report upwards of 35% profit year after year. That is why we should persuade our government and its various agencies not to underwrite the immoral and unethical practice of paying APC to journal publishers. That is why we should collectively insist that the many institutional archives and central repositories in our country be run professionally. Please visit *https://kisdfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Top-21-Free-Online... https://kisdfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/The-Top-21-Free-Online...* . And if you have not watched the European Open Science Conference (EOSC 2022) held online on 4 and 5 February, please watch it. The replay will soon be up, any day this week, on the EOSC website. Thanks Madhan for starting this discussion. Subbiah Arunachalam On Sun, Jan 3, 2021 at 6:50 PM madhan muthu wrote:

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: madhan muthu Date: Thu, 31 Dec, 2020, 12:16 Subject: Re: [LIS-Forum] Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written! - Paulo Coelho To: Sathyanarayana NV Cc:

Dear Sathya:

"For someone denounced as a criminal by powerful corporations and scholarly societies, Elbakyan was surprisingly forthcoming and transparent. After establishing contact through an encrypted chat system, she worked with me over the course of several weeks to create a data set for public release: every download event over the 6-month period starting 1 September 2015, including the digital object identifier (DOI) for every paper."

"Elbakyan also answered nearly every question I had about her operation of the website, interaction with users, and even her personal life. Among the few things she would not disclose is her current location, because she is at risk of financial ruin, extradition, and imprisonment because of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier last year."

......"It’s hard to discern how threatened by Sci-Hub Elsevier and other major publishers truly feel, in part because legal download totals aren’t typically made public."

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-ever...

Why publishers are not revealing "article level" download statistics to even institutions that take subscription to their journals?

Madhan

On Thu, 31 Dec, 2020, 08:34 Sathyanarayana NV, < sathya@informaticsglobal.com> wrote:

...

Dear Madhan,

Interesting call by Paulo Coelho!

The universe owned by the authors should turn Gandhian by changing the currently used copyright statement “All rights reserved” to a new statement “All rights unreserved”.

Gandhi wrote his famous book “Hind Swaraj: Indian Home Rule” in 1915 during his journey by ship from South Africa to India. He released this book in Gujarathi and English with both imprints carrying the statement “All rights unreserved”. Gandhi was a lawyer by profession as we know. Back in India, he intended this book to serve the purpose of launching his non-violence style of freedom movement. It is another story that his Gujarathi edition was banned by the British Government. They didn’t bother about Indian edition as they thought that none would read English version!

The important message here from Gandhi to the authors of the scholarly communication in particular -- which is a far better message than Paul Coelho, is: declare your papers at the pre-print level itself with the statement: “All rights unreserved” and post it in a public repository site like arXiv or chemrXiv or medrXiv or biorXiv. This may start a new “Sathyagraha” (civil disobedience) movement leading to free the scholarly journals from the pay-wall controlled subscription model for ever! Gandhi taught us to be truthful and not steal from others. Instead of giving a call to defend thieves and pirates like Alexandra Elbakyan, OA movement should pursue the leading scientists and researchers of India and the world to rigorously pursue the Gandhian model.

OA movement needs to be re-invented, two decades after its first-round of limited success so far, waking up the scholarly world only partially! We need a Gandhian of the scholarly world to emerge for this. Who could this be?

*Sathya*

N. V. Sathyanarayana

*| *Chairman & Managing Director *| *Informatics India Ltd.* | *Bangalore 560004 *|*INDIA *|*

*| **www.informaticsglobal.com* http://www.informaticsglobal.com *|*

*From: *LIS-Forum *Date: *Wednesday, 30 December 2020 at 11:08 PM *To: *lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in *Subject: *[LIS-Forum] Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written! - Paulo Coelho

My thoughts on S.O.P.A.

Paulo Coelho

https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2012/01/20/welcome-to-pirate-my-books/

As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey.

Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.

-- Madhan, M

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