The Face Of Disruption 02/23/2016

"If you ask publishing giant Elsevier, Alexandra Elbakyan is a criminal -- a pernicious pirate. If you ask the Lifeboat Foundation, or blogger PZ Myers, or millions of students around the world, Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero. Labels can be tricky things, especially in a world of disruption. Elbakyan certainly doesn’t look like a criminal. You would walk right past her on a campus quad and think nothing of it. She looks pretty much like what you would expect a post-grad neuroscience student from Kazakhstan to look. But her face is the face of disruption. And she’s at the receiving end of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier that, if you were to take it seriously, would be worth several billion dollars. Just over a year ago, I wrote a column about the academic journal racket. The work of thousands of researchers is published by Elsevier and others and remains locked behind hugely expensive pay walls. Elbakyan, as a post-grad research student at a university that couldn’t afford to pay the licensing fees to gain access to these journals, got frustrated.  In a letter she wrote in response to the lawsuit, she elaborated on this frustration ..."