Piracy has long been a major problem for big businesses, with Netflix just the latest in a growing list of companies to crack down on password sharing. But as recent research shows, piracy is also a growing issue in the world of academic research.
More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in arXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University. The researchers surveyed more than 3,300 academics to examine why and how they use scholarly piracy websites.
“It stems from our experience,” says Francisco Segado-Boj of the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, and lead author of the paper. “As academics, we spend most of our time looking for previous research, and many times you find you don’t have access to the papers you need to check. We also follow some pathways to access this kind of document behind a paywall that our institution isn’t subscribed to.”
The reason so many academics are willing to use illicit methods to access research is due in large part to journals’ tight access. Around 75% of academic articles are hidden behind a paywall, according to one 2019 study (though that figure varies depending on the subject matter).
“I’m never surprised by any sort of questionnaire that states academics use pirate sites,” says Zakayo Kjellström, who studies research piracy at Umeå University in Sweden. (Kjellström was not involved in the arXiv study.) “Because it’s easy, essentially. But not just because it’s easy, but because of how access looks.”
Accessing single papers can cost more than entire meals; buying a subscription to popular journals is an expense that some universities are willing to pay for, but many can’t afford. For many institutions outside the world’s largest universities and colleges, librarians and those in charge of overseeing academic subscriptions have to cherry pick subscriptions to make their budget go further. And even in the wealthier schools, access to journals isn’t necessarily distributed across departments equally.
“Those in the most privileged disciplines, in the most well-funded research areas, or from the highest-income countries have access to almost everything they need,” says Segado-Boj. “The picture is different once you look at those in less-funded areas, such as social sciences and humanities, and even more worrying for those in less-developed countries.”
(One academic, who spoke to Fast Company on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from their employer, highlighted their own example of using a piracy website. “A depressing use of SciHub is for accessing an article, which I wrote, but in a journal which my current institution doesn’t currently pay for,” they say.)
As a result, many academics turn to Sci-Hub, which was created by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 and claims to have paywall-free copies of around 95% of all the academic literature.
Sci-Hub regularly shifts location online as domain name registrars withdraw their hosting following complaints by the copyright holders of the research accessed through the site. Most recently, its sci-hub.se domain name went offline in late January 2023. Elbakyan recommended users instead try sci-hub.ru, though that domain name is inaccessible from a number of countries. (Elbakyan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
The constant cat-and-mouse game Sci-Hub has to play with authorities makes the website’s dream of unlocking access to the world’s knowledge more challenging, says Segado-Boj. According to his recent survey of academics, those in less-privileged positions either aren’t aware of the piracy platforms, or can’t keep up with where their latest iteration is.
Surprising to Kjellström was the fact that most academics didn’t cite ideological reasons when explaining why they chose to use Sci-Hub or similar platforms. While many have bemoan the exploitative nature of academic publishing—where authors, editors, and peer reviewers do their work for free, only for large business-owned publishers to profit off their work by charging for access—it seems most academics are simply seeking a simpler, more convenient solution, rather than actively trying to disrupt and devolve the business model of publishers.
Despite constantly being blocked and banned, Sci-Hub has become an integral part of the way that researchers conduct their work. A 2022 study in the journal Scientometrics (itself hidden behind a paywall) found that a paper’s presence on Sci-Hub almost doubled the number of citations to any given bit of work—an important metric for academics, who are often judged on their “impact” within the research world by the number of people who reference their work.
The reliance on piracy websites within academia is a damning indication of the biases involved in the world, says Segado-Boj. “It’s additional evidence of the terrible gap between the core of academia—the northern, western, Anglo-Saxon side of academia—and the rest of the world, the so-called Global South,” he says. “It’s a vicious circle: if you lack access to the most renowned or highest quality journals, you are condemned to publish and read in the third and fourth tier journals; in less prestigious sites. It perpetuates inequalities.”
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