Although open access has become more mainstream since its inception as demonstrated from our “Modern Open Access” post, it didn’t do so undetected. Inevitably both the public and publishers found out about open access and reacted in their own unique ways.

Publisher Reactions

We have already had a glimpse at the reactions of publishers back in our post “The Adventure Begins”, where they were worried about E-biomed bringing in the US government as competitor. This was because E-biomed was being supported by the National Institute of Health, however this was not the only instance of a big reaction from publishers.

Another example was the introduction of “predatory” open access publishers. After seeing the success of PLoS ONE, these publishers adopted a business model that would allow them to declare themselves open access but charge a very large publication fee without providing editorial or publishing services normally given in legitimate journals. Methodology and outcomes varied, from smaller publishers giving poor service to those who outright use open access to charge a massive fee to naïve academics. The problem became so bad that Jeffrey Beall, an academic librarian and researcher at the University of Colorado, created the Beall List. This list contains the names of publishers that have been deemed to be “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open access publishers”. Though it must be noted that these are just advisory and that academics should check out the publisher before deciding. To this day the list is still being updated when possible to ensure academics are aware of potential predatory open access publishers.

In addition to this there was also the event where in 2007 a group of scientific publishers became concerned at the success of open access and hired a communications consultancy, Dezenhall Resources, to deal with it. The idea was that they would use simple messages such as “public access equals government censorship” to try and discredit open access, however it ultimately failed.

As open access continued to progress in the US, lobbyists were able to persuade the government to introduce legislation that restricted it. In 2011 the Research Works Acts (RWA) was created in order to keep the private sector publishing research and keep its integrity. The main issue with the act was that it had been drafted in way that gave publishers veto powers over publicly funded research to be made available through PubMed Central, who in 2008 made it mandatory to deposit such research.

Luckily the act was not widely supported and was not in the end enacted. In fact, the outrage from academics was massive to the point where people like Tim Gowers, mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal, refused to publish with certain journals because of it. All of which led to the boycott we touched on back in our “Modern Open Access” post.

Additionally, the RWA wasn’t the only major event concerning the actions by publishers. In 2015 a group of academics resigned en masse from Lingua after Elsevier’s refusal to make the title purely open access. Afterwards they decided to create their own open access rival journal, Glossa. Furthermore, the publishers were also engaged in a race to bring open access into their fold. The acquisition of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by Elsevier in 2016 being one example. Although not much was changed it did give Elsevier the ability to mine information and metrics associated with scholarly publishing. This was seen by open access advocates as encroachment on their territory and although open access was making progress a few of the members of the movement had decided that open access had become almost no better than traditional publishing through the gold and green routes.

So far, we have seen the reactions of publishers to open access. Now we’ll look at the reaction of these actions in the form of piracy.

Piracy

Given the actions of publishers, many people felt disenfranchised with open access and believed that the only way to properly obtain it was to do it through illegal means. A particular example is the case of Aaron Swartz. He believed that open access was a partial solution to the issues in academic publishing but that it was flawed in that it would only apply to future works.

In 2008, Aaron published a document he titled the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, where he proclaimed that anyone who had access to academic publications should pirate them and make them freely available. He believed that this was a moral duty of all people who had access to paywalled papers regardless of the legal ramifications of those involved. In 2011 he was caught downloading 450,000 academic papers from JSTOR in 12 hours and in total had about 5,000,000. He was charged with numerous offences and facing up 35 years in prison. Two years after his arrest and still awaiting trial, Aaron unfortunately committed suicide.

Although Aaron was an example of individual piracy, there are also entire organisations centred on pirating academic papers. One such organisation is Sci-Hub, set up in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan. Claiming to have over 47,000,000 academic papers, Sci-Hub has a popularity with people wanting to gain unauthorised access to blocked off papers. Some claim it is because legal methods of access are too expensive or that searching for them is a complex route. In comparison to Sci-Hub who didn’t charge for access and had a simple search engine.

Actions taken against Sci-Hub for their piracy seem to follow a circular route. An injunction is made against the site to bring it down, but then the site’s domain is changed, resulting in another injunction needing to be filed in order to try and bring it down again. The process then repeats itself. Given how easy it is to send files over the internet and that digital storage capacities are ever increasing, it does not seem likely that these piracy sites will be taken down permanently any time soon.

This brings us to end of this episode. Our next, and final, segment on open access will be about the immediate future of open access.