Journals and Articles are Increasingly Out of Reach: SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN - Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange

"If you are involved in any type of academic research, you know how totally out of control prices are for your community members. I was recently looking for an article I wrote – and the publisher offered to charge me $36 to look at it for 24 hours!! (Note that as the author, I get $0 of that price.) I laughed out loud.

Subscription costs for journals keep spiraling upward, but library budgets do not match them. As library people, we want to support our community members in their search for information, and we are responsible for ensuring everyone follows copyright laws and DRM requirements, along with publisher requirements. It can all be a serious challenge to anyone who needs to find academic research material.

So I am always intrigued to read about the “pirates” of the research world – sharing articles with anyone. We are definitely not advocating steering your patrons to these illegal sources (that tend to be easier to use than your catalog, and cost them nothing) – we would much prefer for journals to become more accessible for people in a more fair system.

But you should be aware of the developments in the world of academic research, so we are sharing this article from The Verge about one woman’s efforts to share research – not just with scholars in the US, but also around the world.

“In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”...

If you’re looking to access an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to pay, says Peter Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. But there is a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access repositories like Cornell’s Arxiv.org.

Suber is one of the loudest voices for Open Access movement. He was one of the original architects of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that established the most widely used definition of Open Access: “free availability on the public internet,” with the only constraint on sharing of research being authors’ “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” It also established the movement’s mandate to make Open Access the default method of publishing within a decade.”

You will want to read the rest of this article; click here to do so!!"