Should Knowledge Be Free?
I was in the final year of my engineering course where I was researching on brain signal, electroencephalogram(EEG) and how technology can be used to create make a brain interface with a computer especially for people with quadriplegia or ALS who are not able to use a mouse or a keyboard. This task had me searching throughout the web for researchers who might have published their findings to make it available to the world wide web. I did have success in finding a lot of papers published but faced a big hurdle here. The publisher sites hosting the papers were asking for a expensive subscription for a single research paper. On top of it, a single subscription does not open up the way for the rest of the publications as each of them had their own paywall.
I was angry and frustrated on the way knowledge had been monetized. Should knowledge be free? I thought to myself. So I dig deeper and found out that the payment only goes to the publisher and not to the authors who have put in all the effort to work on the research and put their findings into the paper. On top of that the authors might have to pay up for the conferences just to get their papers published in a journal. Heck, even the reviewers who peer review these papers mostly do it for free. So neither the researchers, authors or the reviewers were spared in this paywall of sorts. Why do they still publish? What's the price for? One must ask. It looks like it is for the reputation that these publishers of the journals have, which adds to the credibility of the paper and it’s discovery by other researchers.
So a few days later I work through the same activity with my friend in the college lab. I ask him, what do you do with this paywall? He quickly grabs my keyboard, changes the domain name and presses enter and I was shocked. The paper which I had been wishing to read and cite was long behold in front of me, in its fullest form as I wanted.
The site was Sci-Hub and recently I was more shocked (in a good way) to read that Sci-Hub was created by a woman in tech. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, a now 32 year old web developer from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Who is often referred to as the "Queen/Robinhood of Science"
Alexandra had stumbled the same fate as mine before me. Using her skills in web development and scripting, she was able circumvent the paywall and make these research papers available to the masses via the internet. She called it Sci-Hub and built it on top of three ideas that I too resonate with. Knowledge to all, no copyright & open access. Thus Sci-Hub was born on the 5th of September, 2011.
Sci-Hub now hosts more than 85,483,812 papers and the usage trends clearly shows its popularity among people who seek for the knowledge they need.
The success wasn't all good news for its founder Alexandra as Sci-Hub has been slammed with a number of lawsuits from publishers in a number of countries for piracy and copyright infringement. Recently she even received a notice from FBI that they have gained access to her Apple account and the date in there.
Meanwhile Alexandra keeps fighting against the big publishers to make knowledge accessible to the scientific community and the public.
More reading : Science’s Pirate Queen by The Verge
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