Chemistry's piracy problem | Opinion | Chemistry World

"Open access (OA) is, depending on your viewpoint, either the hottest debate in academia or a painful exercise in publishers, researchers and libraries passing around a rather hefty bill. No one doubts that all of that good quality, peer-reviewed research should be available as widely as possible; the issue, described with terms such as ‘gold’ and ‘green’ OA, is how you pay for the mechanics of it and a happy solution is yet to be found.

Impatient for a resolution, some researchers opt for a third route of questionable legality: so-called ‘black’ OA. Here, obtained credentials are used to grab papers behind a paywall and stick them up for free. Black OA proponents paint themselves as information vigilantes who want to make science available to all; the publishers (and the law) consider it copyright theft, a leeching of revenues that make the whole academic publishing cycle sustainable."