Piracy of academic articles - Muscat Daily

"Online piracy played a big role in pushing the entertainment industry to create convenient and affordable legal options for acquiring content on the Internet.  Sci-Hub, the controversial website for pirating academic articles, might be the push that forces the academic publishing industry to address the needs of members of society to have fair access to academic literature. The academic publishing industry is an extremely lucrative industry that operates using a bizarre model. The actual product delivered by this industry, i e the academic articles, are written and peer-reviewed for free by academics. Once an article is written, reviewed, and accepted for publication, the author would normally be expected to transfer all his or her rights to the publisher so that the article could be widely distributed through the academic journals owned by the publisher. To have access to these journals, universities have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to the publisher in annual subscription fees. If a member of the public not affiliated with a university wants to access any of these articles, that individual must pay about US$30 to view each article. Academics publish in these articles because this is a requirement for their promotion, and universities must pay to access these articles because they need them for teaching and research ..."