Activists Mobilize to Fight Censorship and Save Open Science

Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible. 

More than half of academic publishing is controlled by only five publishers. This position is built on the premise that users should pay for access to scientific research, to compensate publishers for their investment in editing, curating, and publishing it. In reality, research is typically submitted and evaluated by scholars without compensation from the publisher. What this model is actually doing is profiting off of a restriction on article access using burdensome paywalls. One project in particular, Sci-Hub, has threatened to break down this barrier by sharing articles without restriction. As a result, publishers are going to every corner of the map to destroy the project and wipe it from the internet. Continuing the long tradition of internet hacktivism, however, redditors are mobilizing to create an uncensorable back-up of Sci-Hub.

Paywalls: More Inequity and Less Progress

It’s an open secret at this point that the paywall model used by major publishers, where one must pay to read published articles, is at odds with the way science works which is one reason researchers regularly undermine it by sharing PDFs of their work directly. The primary functions paywalls serve now are to drive up contract prices with universities and ensure current research is only available to the most affluent or well-connected. The cost of access has gotten so out of control that even $35 billion dollar institutions like Harvard have warned that contract costs are becoming untenable. If this is the case for Harvard, it’s hard to see how smaller entities can manage these costs– particularly those in the global south. As a result, crucial and potentially life-saving knowledge is locked away from those who need it most. Th

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