DSHR's Blog: Elsevier and the Streisand Effect

"Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and #icanhazpdf. Although these mechanisms had been in place for some time they hadn't received a lot of attention. Below the fold, a look at how and why this has recently changed. In 2001 the World Health Organization worked with the major publishers to set up Hinari, a system whereby researchers in developing countries could get free or very-low-cost access to health journals. There are similar systems for agriculture, the environment and technology. Why would the publishers give access to their journals to researchers at institutions that hadn't paid anything? The answer is that the publishers were not losing money by doing so. There was no possibility that institutions in developing countries could pay the subscription. Depriving them of access would not motivate them to pay; they couldn't possibly afford to pay. Cross-subsidizing their access cost almost nothing and had indirect benefits, such as cementing the publishers' role as gatekeepers for research, and discouraging the use of open access. Similarly, peer-to-peer sharing of papers didn't actually lose the major publishers significant amounts of money ... Then last June Elsevier filed a case in New York trying to shut down Library Genesis and Sci-Hub. Both are apparently based in Russia, which is not highly motivated to send more of its foreign reserves to Western publishers. So the case was not effective at shutting them down. It turned out, however, to be a classic case of the Streisand Effect, in which attempting to suppress information on the Web causes it to attract far more attention. The Streisand Effect started slowly, with pieces at Quartz and BBC News in October. The EFF weighed in on the topic in December with What If Elsevier and Researchers Quit Playing Hide-and-Seek? ... But the Streisand Effect really kicked in early last month with Simon Oxenham's Meet the Robin Hood of Science, which led to Fiona MacDonald's piece at Science Alert, Kaveh Waddell's The Research Pirates of the Dark Web and Kieran McCarthy's Free science journal library gains notoriety, lands injunctions. Mike Masnick's Using Copyright To Shut Down 'The Pirate Bay' Of Scientific Research Is 100% Against The Purpose Of Copyright went back to the Constitution ... The Library Loon has a series of posts that are worth reading (together with some of their comments). She links to A Short History of The Russian Digital Shadow Libraries by Balázs Bodó, a must-read analysis starting in Soviet times showing that Sci-Hub is but one product of a long history of resistance to censorship. Bodó has a more reflective piece In the Name of Humanity in Limn's Total Archive issue, where he makes the LOCKSS argument ..."