Note on Code Swaraj
story, printing my Memorandum of Law on the subject. Who knew the Chairman of the FTC reads blogs?
Access To (Almost) All Human Knowledge
Between the funding blowing up and the ABA kneecapping me, my heart was not in the writing of my report on works of government and dispatching my findings to dozens of publishers accusing them of breaking the law. There was another reason though. I had been reconsidering my strategy.
In undertaking this research, I had three big questions. The first was the legal analysis of the issue. I had completed that. The second was identifying works of government. Again, we felt comfortable with our diagnosis. The third was obtaining copies of the journal articles. My initial thought was we would get libraries to allow us to borrow journals and then have the Internet Archive do the scanning. Most of our budget for the grant was based on funds to libraries and the Internet Archive to accomplish this mammoth task.
Pulling articles one by one would be hard. Libraries are somewhat risk averse, though at least two were willing to consider the proposition. But, these articles are all in databases and are available electronically, so scanning is really kind of superfluous. One can’t simply log onto the publisher’s site because of the stringent legal terms of use and technical prohibitions that lock down this scholarly research so it may only be used in limited ways.
A young scientist from Kazakhstan, Alexandra Elbakyan, had a similar problem, as have many of her peers and colleagues throughout the world. Knowledge has been locked up, colonized so the rich at a few fancy universities have unlimited access to knowledge, but much of the world is deeply constrained. Alexandra did something about this and created a system called Sci-Hub, based in Russia, with access to over 66 million journal articles.
Sci-Hub has proven to be wildly useful for scientists throughout the world that were previously unable to access the scholarly literature. In 2017, the top downloads from Sci-Hub came from China, with 24.9 million articles accessed. Second was India with 13.1 million downloads. Third was the United States, with 11.9 million downloads, clear evidence that access to scientific literature is constrained throughout the world. Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, Russia, and Mexico also make extensive use of this database.
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