Civil Disobedience of Copyright Keeps Science Going

"Reputable research generally follows a familiar pattern: Scientific articles are written by scholars based on their research-often with public funding. Those articles are then peer-reviewed by other scholars in their fields and revisions are made according to those comments. Afterwards, most large publishers expect to be given the copyright on the article as a condition of packaging it up and selling it back to the institutions that employ the academics who did the research and to the public at large."

"Because research is valuable and because copyright is a monopoly on disseminating the articles in question, these publishers can charge exorbitant fees that place a strain even on wealthy universities and are simply out of reach for the general public or universities with limited budgets, such as those in the global south. The result is a global human rights problem ."

"The model is broken, yet science goes on thanks to widespread civil disobedience of the copyright regime that locks up the knowledge created by researchers. Some turn to social media to ask that a colleague with access share articles they need (despite copyright's prohibitions on sharing). Certainly, at least some such sharing is protected fair use, but scholars should not have to seek a legal opinion or risk legal threats from publishers to share the collective knowledge they generate."

Copyright law has become so restrictive that accessing and preserving knowledge increasingly requires acts of civil disobedience. Scientific publishing often transfers copyright from publicly funded researchers to commercial publishers, enabling those publishers to impose monopoly prices for access. Exorbitant subscription and paywall fees strain wealthy universities and put research out of reach for the general public and institutions in the global south, creating a global human rights concern. Scholars and students frequently rely on informal sharing, social media requests, and shadow archives such as SciHub, LibGen, Z‑Library, and Anna's Archive to obtain articles. These volunteer-run aggregators handle tens of millions of requests annually.

Read at Electronic Frontier Foundation