Yatendra

 

The good thing about fire and knowledge is that they can’t be kept private, their true nature is to expand endlessly. That is how they survive.

 

According to Greek mythology, Prometheus, a titan known for his trickery, stole fire from the workshop of Hephaistos and Athena and gave it to humans. This led him to become a victim of Zeus’ rage. However, for humans his fire became an indispensable gift, necessary for their survival. It gave humans the power to be free from gods’ mercy.

 As ‘The Internet’s Own Boy’1, Aaron Swartz writes in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto2

 “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”

 The good thing about fire and knowledge is that they can’t be kept private, their true nature is to expand endlessly. That is how they survive.

 The device on which you are reading this, is also a product of centuries of sharing of knowledge and effort of hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers. The utility of that same device proves that the true nature of science is being sharable.

 All Knowledge must be Free and Accessible

 What about intellectual property and copyright?

Can knowledge be owned like property?

The concept of intellectual property is rarely examined critically. That is, “Whether knowledge can be someone’s property?” is rarely discussed.

 Private property in material wealth begins by fencing off what is a gift of nature, and then enforcing the right to property by legal and extra legal means. The right to private property then becomes power over others, over the propertyless. The communist ideal challenges private property by demanding that all wealth should be shared by the entire humanity.

 Property in knowledge attempts to create exclusionary control over what is essentially a result of the accumulated intellectual labour of the entire humanity. Should all humans have equal access to the shared knowledge of humanity, or some should have more than others? Intellectual property is almost never questioned from this perspective. But the Robinhoods of twenty first century science do.

 “If there’s no private intellectual property and all scholarly publications are nationalized, then all people will have equal access to knowledge.”

 The above quote is by Kazakhstani communist web-developer, Alexandra Elbakyan.

 

Alexandra Elbakyan

She developed Sci-Hub3, a web application that provides the user with research papers which are not accessible without going through the paywall, or are blocked by the Government. Attempts like these have existed almost since the inception of the internet.

  #ICanHazPDF YES YOU CAN!

One  such effort started when researchers started using the hashtag #ICanHazPDF4 on Twitter. The users would put a request for an article by tweeting its title, and DOI with other linked information like the publication’s link along with their email addresses. The people who had the access to that article would email it to them. The original tweet was then deleted. The idea was inspired from a meme that was trending at that time- #ICanHazCheeseburger where people used to post their pets’ photos along with this hashtag.



 The fact that it was a meme, reflects that it was the inborn response of the internet against such barriers.

Sci-hub, the website is just “#YesYouCanHazPDF” on a larger, unlimited scale.

All you have to do is to go on the website, enter the DOI or the title of the research paper you want and SNAP! You have it! Or “YouCanHazIt”.

 

Sci-Hub got live in 2011 and ….. began providing access to about 40 articles an hour. It now provides more than 200,000 articles an hour.

 

Even before Sci-Hub, there were a lot of ‘illegal’ practices on the internet which were used to access scientific literature free of cost. One such example is Anonymizer5. It is a proxy server that acts as a privacy shield between a computer and the Internet. It is a gateway that protects the identity of the user by hiding her/his computer's IP address. Such servers are also used to access the information that is restricted in a particular region. That is why researchers used to use such practices for bypassing the security protocols or paywalls. A similar process may also be used in place of Anonymizer by using a VPN(Virtual Private Network). They are easy to use, are available on the internet, and some of them are free. Sci-Hub just made this whole process easier by becoming the first and the most used website where you can download scientific literature on a massive scale, not just e-books. Before Sci-Hub there were other websites to get research papers for free, but they were different from Sci-Hub in design.

  It took Alexandra two or three days to write the code and upload it to free PHP web hosting. A web hosting service allows people to make their website accessible over the internet. So, Sci-Hub got live in 2011 and started processing requests from users. It became popular among the local community almost immediately and began providing access to about 40 articles an hour. It now provides more than 200,000 articles an hour.

 Who uses it? You may ask. The answer is- everyone! Sci-Hub gets traffic from every corner of the world. It is a place where curiosity finds its way beyond all restrictions.

One hour of Sci-Hub activity in February 2016


 The only problem is that it is “illegal”

The work of Sci-hub is often considered as ‘piracy’ because it violates the law of copyright. However,  in most cases the copyright itself does not belong to the people who had worked on the papers. The moment they submit it to the big science publications like Elsevier, the copyright gets transferred to them. The point that must be noticed is that all the work like writing, referring to the other papers, peer reviewing, etc is all done on a voluntary basis i.e., for free, but for accessing the same article, you have to pay extremely high prices.

 This has created an informational inequality, because only students and employees of the most wealthy universities and institutions have full access to scholarly information, while the institutions at the lower tier and the general public are completely deprived of it. Many people believe that this is wrong beyond its legality. Therefore, Sci-Hub ‘fits’ the natural law which is further described by Alexandra in the talk “Why science is better with communism? The case of Sci-Hub”6

  Well, this is ironically creepy that while I am writing this article, a copyright infringement suit7 has been filed by three publishing giants against Sci-Hub and Libgen before the Delhi High Court on December 21, 2020. My views for Sci-Hub, or any such practice stand strong regardless of the result of the lawsuit. The lawsuit and the greed of these publishers shows that this is high time that all of us must come together and stand against any attempt that can become a barrier between science and ourselves. It’s time we remind them that it is not about Sci-Hub, or Alexandra, or LibGen. These are the outcomes of the response of peoples’ struggle for knowledge, science and a better world for all. Even if they succeed in getting Sci-Hub and Libgen completely blocked in India through dynamic injunction, it is foolish of them to underestimate peoples’ will to fulfill their curiosity. It will find its way to fulfill itself by one way or another.



 As shown in Elsevier’s logo8, the tree represents the publisher, the vine- scholar, the fruit- knowledge and latin term ‘non  solus’ means ‘not alone’. It shows that the scholars need publishers, just like the vine needs the tree to produce fruit. But the same tree is becoming the largest barrier between knowledge and the people. What good is the fruit if it is out of reach of the people it is meant for?

 It is time to show them that it is up to the vine to make its own way. It is time we go open source. I know it is easier for people like me who are not involved directly and solely with academia to say this, but it is more difficult for the people in academia. One thing is clear that this theft of researchers’ and peer reviewers’ labour needs to end. Knowledge is meant to be free and it will find its way. That  is why we must come in solidarity with Alexandra and others by any means necessary.

 The links mentioned in the article are of course “for educational purpose only”, but they are also for redefining the educational purpose.

 

Yatendra is an engineer and runs a Hackerspace in Greater Noida.

 

[1] http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy/

[2] https://openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com/

[3] https://sci-hub.se/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymizer

[6] https://sci-hub.se/alexandra/works/communism.pdf

[7] Sci-Hub Case: The Court Should Protect Science From Greedy Academic Publishers

[8] What does "Non Solus" mean in Elsevier's logo?

 

[For legal reasons, I would say “I don’t support piracy” but don’t ask me how I did research for this article.]