The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology by Chambers Chris;

Author:Chambers, Chris;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

Calling in the Guerrillas

Changes in OA policies are vital, but, as always, top-down reforms can be too slow and bureaucratic to provide immediate benefits for consumers. It is perhaps ironic that the consumers who suffer most frequently from lack of OA tend to be researchers themselves. Even working at a major Western university, I occasionally find that my library will lack a subscription to a particular journal holding a paper of interest. It might be that the journal is relatively obscure, or that the PDF is from an old issue and available for download only under an extended subscription that my library didn’t purchase. And so I find myself either contacting the authors for a PDF (a very hit-and-miss approach—in some cases they may no longer be alive) or asking friends at even better funded institutions to send me the article via their more comprehensive library subscriptions. To add insult to injury, it is not uncommon for researchers at less well funded institutions to lack access to even their own published articles. I discovered this in 2003 when, as a young postdoctoral researcher, I had to pay (personally) to download an electronic copy of my very first academic paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

The frustration academics experience in accessing the peer-reviewed literature has provoked a remarkable campaign of insurrection against mainstream publishers. In 2011, psychologist Andrea Kuszewski initiated an underground Twitter movement called #icanhazpdf that harnesses crowd sourcing to deliver nearly instant access to the paywalled academic literature.27 A 2014 analysis estimated that #icanhazpdf is rising in popularity, particularly in the life and social sciences (including psychology), receiving over 3,000 requests per year.28

Within the emerging “guerilla open access” movement, some scientists have taken civil disobedience to an even more radical level. In the same year that Kuszewski invented #icanhazpdf, Kazakhstan-based researcher Alexandra Elbakyan launched the website Sci-Hub.29 Based in St. Petersburg, Sci-Hub provides a search engine and free repository of more than 40 million peer-reviewed academic articles, instantly bypassing publisher’s paywalls using a variety of techniques such as obtained (or possibly hacked) academic access credentials. Though the legality of Sci-Hub is in dispute, Elbakyan asserts that it is the corporate publishers who are acting illegally by denying free access to the scientific literature, thereby standing in violation of Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.30 Elbakyan’s goal with Sci-Hub is a simple one: “to collect all research papers ever published, and make them free,” with a particular emphasis on making research accessible to developing countries such as India, Iran, and Indonesia that lack the funds to pay for subscription access.31

Acts of subversion can be convenient and powerful catalysts for OA. However, they also run the risk of attracting litigation and even criminal sanctions. For #icanhazpdf, the legality is unclear; since it doesn’t involve posting copyrighted material directly into the public domain (only the request for such material is public), it is not obviously illegal or actionable. The legal status of #icanhazpdf remains to be tested in court, but this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

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