The Sci-Hubbub

I make science puns, but only periodically.

In some jobs, success is dependent on money, winning or power. In academia, success depends on publications. Academics worship publications. Citations are the ultimate "like" button. And not just any type of publication, but peer-reviewed publications. Which is why academics, journals and universities are very keen to see how the unfolding Sci-Hub story plays out.

Sci-Hub is a free, online repository of 48 million academic papers. It was launched by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan.  Unlike most graduate students, Elbakyan is not pondering Foucauldian discourse and beer prices, but hiding out in Russia.  According to a recent New York Times article,  Elbakyan's struggles to access research papers inspired her to set up the site so that other students and researchers would have the same access to knowledge as researchers at well-funded universities. The repository is generated by downloading papers from publisher's paywalled websites using anonymous 'donated' subscription credentials.

The Peer Review Publication Process
Kriegeskorte N. (2012) "Open evaluation"
Frontiers in computational neuroscience.

The academic publishing industry has annual revenues around USD$25 Billion.  In 2006, 50% of academic publishing was by five for-profit companies (this is an increase from 30% in 1996). Elsevier, one of the big five, is pursuing legal action against Sci-Hub for illegally distributing their copyrighted works (Elbakyan's response here, case covered here by Kat Emma.) Elsevier is owned by a larger corporation, the RELX Group, whose academic publishing arm generated £2B in 2014 in revenues. Large rights holder suing renegade sharing site? How very 1999.

The gold standard of academic publishing is peer-reviewed publications in which papers are reviewed by other experts. The scale of these operations is impressive:

In the primary research market during 2014, over 1.1m research  papers were submitted to Elsevier. Over 16,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of more than 360,000 articles in over 2,000 journals. (RELX 2014 Annual Report p. 14)

In many cases, all copyright is assigned to the publisher. Like academic patenting, private ownership of copyrights on publicly-funded research is contentious. This publishing system also channels public funds into private hands (nothing new, see virtually every other industry.) Sci-hub rejects private ownership and paywalls as impediments to the flow of knowledge and instead infringes. Alternatives to Sci-Hub tend to operate within the confines of copyright.

Value Chain in Academic Publishing
Blue is Academia, Red is Publishers

A look at the unusual value chain of academic journal publishing highlights why Elbakyan feels justified. A value chain describes the process by which value is added to a good or service, each link in the chain adds more value. The academic publishing value chain starts with academics in universities writing papers that they submit to academic journals.  These journals, often privately owned, then send the papers to be reviewed by academics. The process is slow and most submissions are rejected. Successful papers are published and bought by university libraries. Each step adds value to the paper as the content evolves from research into published journals.  The twist is that universities are both supplier and consumer. Universities both fund the academics to write, and pay publishers for access to the finished product. The journal publishers are intermediaries.

Combine this odd value chain with the importance of publications, the expectation that academic research and knowledge be made freely available, and the low marginal cost of digital media (the cost of making copies of digital media is nearly zero), and criticism abounds.

There are at least two ways of viewing this supplier-consumer-intermediary structure:

1. Academia is a resource-rich developing country: Academia is akin to countries who export raw materials (research) and then pay to import them in their processed form (papers.)  Publishers, who are developed countries and have processing capacity, exploit their position to capture the value created by academics.
2. Academia is an outsourcer: Academia outsources research quality control, the marketing and distribution of papers and HR services (i.e. peer review as performance reviews) to publishers. By outsourcing these processes, universities benefit from the efficiencies of big publishers who have economies of scale.

The Sci-Hub saga reflects a repeated conflict we've seen in copyright debates: large media companies versus the consumer. Akin to record labels and spotty teenagers, academic publishers may face a revolt from their consumers, but with the twist that their consumer, whose job it is to question, is also their supplier.  Pity the poor souls who will be on the other side of this academic passion (not an oxymoron.)  Yet this could be the start of a long-term change in the business model and market structure of academic publishing. Will Sci-Hub be the Napster of academia?