Anyone who has been in touch with academia for the past few years will have an idea of the insurmountable importance of file sharing websites like Libgen or Sci-hub for both researchers and professors alike, especially in a developing country like India. For the uninitiated, Libgen is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, and magazines, while Sci-hub provides free access to the same, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.
“You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapons in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!” So had said The Tenth Doctor in Tooth and Claw, from the second season of Doctor Who. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that all knowledge should be free and open-access, and not in the possession of a few private groups, but not according to three academic publishers— Elsevier Ltd., Wiley India Pvt. Ltd., American Chemical Society— who recently filed a petition in the Delhi High Court calling for the ban of Sci-hub and Libgen in India, next scheduled to be heard on the 6th of January.
Together, these three companies publish more than 40% of all scientific research, in an industry which has an estimated market value of $10 billion. Journal publishing is believed to have an outrageously high profit margin, with Elvesier itself having a 37% margin— twice that of Google.
Gatekeeping is the norm for these industries, with shockingly high licensing rates, which even universities like Harvard are struggling to afford. Robert Darnton, ex-director of Harvard Library, says "We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”
The battle for making knowledge free and open access has been a long and tiring one, and laced with tragedy. Aaron Swartz’s name immediately comes to mind— co-founder of Reddit and a brilliant programmer-cum-hacktivist— who was institutionally murdered by the authorities to stop his battle of making knowledge open source, thus toppling over the monopoly of the publishing houses. Swartz had used JSTOR, a digital repository, to download a large number of academic journal articles, through the portal of his university in a bid to release them in the public domain free of cost. Upon being discovered multitudes of lawsuits were filed against him which ultimately resulted in his death by suicide. Aaron’s rallying call for the open access movement is inspiring: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive . . . With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”
Another veteran in the war against privatisation of knowledge is Alexandra Asanovna Elbakya- Kazakhstani computer programmer, communist, and the creator of Sci-hub, who has been dubbed ‘Science's Pirate Queen’. With the creation of Sci-hub, she single-handedly inflicted a massive blow to the circle of elite gatekeepers, and opened almost every article or journal to the world. She now faces millions of dollars in lawsuits in multiple countries, is in the risk of extradition, and remains in the watchlist of multiple law enforcement agencies. Even today Sci-Hub and Libgen both have to frequently change their domain names.
In third world developing countries like India, where a majority of the student population does not even have access to a laptop, the importance of Sci-hub and Libgen is priceless. Whereas the price of an article at jstor starts from $19.99, an amount which is beyond the reach of most Indian students, all Sci-hub took was a decent internet connection. Particularly for marginalised communities, where they still continue to be discriminated against in institutionalized academia, these websites provided a pathway for their education and upliftment. The massive effect that a ban on these websites will have in our country, is beyond comprehension.
With the Delhi High Court already prohibiting new materials to be uploaded on the websites till January 6th, the battle ahead seems a futile and uphill one. Academic information cannot flourish if there is a barrier between those who produce it and those who seek it. If you are either an academician, be it a faculty member or staff or scholar, and oppose and condemn the lawsuits, please consider signing the following Google form petition through this link.
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