Walking the plank: how scholarly piracy affects publishers, libraries and their users

The arrival of technology supporting peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing in scholarly communication has, until recently, had minimal impact on libraries. However, threats posed by pirate sites including Library Genesis Project (LibGen) and Sci-Hub are now impacting both library users and library licensing agreements with publishers. Publishers are nervous as they witness their proprietary content leaking out of paywalled systems—not just hundreds of thousands of articles, but millions. Accordingly, publishers are monitoring activities in licensed products very closely for any behavior that they deem suspicious. When a user’s activities cause a publisher to question whether materials are being pirated, the outcomes can vary. Consequences can range from relatively minor inconvenience for blocked users, who must find workarounds to access scholarly content—to the potential for major disruption of a centuries-old proprietary publishing system. This article uses a case study involving a student at Brock University to highlight significant challenges facing libraries and the rights of their users in the current environment of piracy-wary academic publishers

Diminishing the perceived need for black open access

Conference paper and presentation slidesThe attention garnered by unauthorized sharing and pirating of scholarly content has resulted in a new category on the open access spectrum – black open access. Though black open access attempts to solve the discovery problem inherent in the multitude of open access content sources, it does so in violation of copyright law. Tools have now been developed to combat this same problem legally, including the Open Access Button and Unpaywall. Librarians can engage in several strategies to help diminish the need for black open access, including the promotion of these discovery tools through education and services. We can share the tools with our users and teach them why they should not engage in unauthorized sharing. We can use the tools to fulfill requests and capture the benefits of open access in interlibrary loan. There are also more general strategies related to infrastructure, policy, and education that are important to acknowledge. Librarians can and must move the open access conversation forward in a positive, and legal, direction. This paper provides an overview of the black open access landscape, discusses the discovery tools for uncovering legal open access content, and highlights how librarians can improve systems, services, and education efforts related to open access and open access discovery tools

Interlibrary loan and serving graduate students

When undergraduate students become graduate students, their library needs change. In order to meet these different needs, some academic libraries stratify their resources, services, and programming to provide for various user groups. For many graduate students, interlibrary loan (ILL) serves as an essential service for completing graduate work and for researching their theses and dissertations, but, fundamentally, the service functions largely the same for every user regardless of status. Libraries implement policies and procedures, and even customize their ILL management systems to tailor the service for different user groups. Depending on a library’s service philosophy or its financial resources, ILL service at one institution can be quite different from another institution. Libraries must also consider graduate students’ previous experiences (or lack thereof) with ILL. As undergraduates, they may have had little reason or opportunity to use ILL and may not be familiar with the service. Graduate students returning to school after a long break, perhaps even after establishing a career or family, may think of ILL as a last-resort option for obtaining research materials. Other students, fully enmeshed in the age of instant gratification, may view (sometimes accurately) that ILL service is too slow. Despite blatant copyright and terms of service violations, crowdsourcing through social media is a serious competitor for ILL, and libraries cannot deny its appeal to students. International students may have other hesitancies to using ILL because it may have functioned differently in their home countries. For these reasons, talking strategically to graduate students about ILL services can serve as a bridge to other important conversations. This chapter offers strategies for starting these conversations

Accessibility of published research to practicing veterinarians

Objectives: This study established the percentage of veterinary research articles that are freely available online, availability differences inside and outside of core veterinary medicine publications, sources and trends in article availability over time, and author archiving policies of veterinary journals. This research is particularly important for unaffiliated practitioners who lack broad subscription access and the librarians who assist them. Methods: Web of Science citation data were collected for articles published from 2000–2014 by authors from twenty-eight accredited US colleges of veterinary medicine. A sample of these articles was searched by title in Google Scholar to determine which were freely available online and their sources. Journals represented in this dataset and a basic list of veterinary serials were cross-referenced with the Sherpa/RoMEO database to determine author archiving policies and the percentage of articles that could potentially be made freely available. Results: Over half (62%) of the sample articles were freely available online, most of which (57%) were available from publishers’ websites. Articles published more recently were more likely to be freely available. More articles were found to be available in 2017 (62%) than in 2015 (57%). Most (62%) of the included journals had policies allowing authors to archive copies of their articles. Conclusions: Many articles are freely available online, but opportunity exists to archive additional articles while complying with existing copyright agreements. Articles in veterinary medicine–specific journals are less likely to be freely available than those in interdisciplinary journals. Requirements for federally funded research have likely influenced article availability and may continue to do so.Publisher allows immediate open acces

Pirated Economics

I argue that the impact of piracy engines for scholarly content on science depends on the nature of the research. Social sciences are more likely to reap benefits from such engines without inflicting much damage to journal publisher revenues. To validate the claim, I examine the data from illegal downloads of economics content from Sci-Hub over five-month period. I conclude that: (a) the extent of piracy in economics is not pervasive; (b) as downloads are coming mostly from under-developed countries; (c) users pirate even the content freely available online. As a result, publishers are not losing much revenues, while the exposure to generated knowledge is being extended

The Development of Resource Sharing, Scholarly Communication, and the Role of Publishers in the Context of Academic Libraries

Both commercial and noncommercial publishing have impacted interlibrary loan and other types of resource sharing, such as patrondriven systems, in a variety of ways. Interlibrary loan has always been a concern of publishers, with the possibility libraries would copy in "such aggregate quantities as to substitute for a subscription to or purchase" of a work (CONTU 1978). Exceptions and limits have been in place in the law and as guidelines for library copying for patrons and interlibrary loan since 1978. However, over the past five decades or so, as traditional print publications, electronic "Big Deals," licensing, and permissions have become increasingly unsustainable for library budgets, the open access (OA) movement has gained acceptance and has influenced resource sharing as well. OA materials are being used to fulfill resource-sharing requests, and researcher behavior may bypass traditional means of resource sharing altogether for greater speed and ease of access. Traditional publishing has found itself at a crossroads with the need to adapt as researchers increasingly accept new models of scholarly communication. There are plenty of moving parts in resource sharing today, and these are explored herein

Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives

Despite the advance of the Open Access (OA) movement, most scholarly production can only be accessed through a paywall. We conduct an international survey among researchers (N=3,304) to measure the willingness and motivations to use (or not use) scholarly piracy sites, and other alternatives to overcome a paywall such as paying with their own money, institutional loans, just reading the abstract, asking the corresponding author for a copy of the document, asking a colleague to get the document for them, or searching for an OA version of the paper. We also explore differences in terms of age, professional position, country income level, discipline, and commitment to OA. The results show that researchers most frequently look for OA versions of the documents. However, more than 50% of the participants have used a scholarly piracy site at least once. This is less common in high-income countries, and among older and better-established scholars. Regarding disciplines, such services were less used in Life & Health Sciences and Social Sciences. Those who have never used a pirate library highlighted ethical and legal objections or pointed out that they were not aware of the existence of such libraries

I’ll Wait Zero Seconds : Faculty Perspectives on Serials Access, Sharing, and Immediacy

This study explores how faculty across disciplines access and share scholarly serial content and what expectations they have for immediacy. The authors conducted twenty-five in-depth, semi-structured interviews with faculty of various ranks representing all Illinois State University (ISU) colleges. The findings, presented in the words of participants and triangulated with data from local sources, suggest that faculty use a variety of context-specific mechanisms to access and share serial literature. Participants discuss how they use library services such as databases, subscriptions, interlibrary loan, and document delivery, coupled with academic social networks, disciplinary repositories, author websites, and other publicly available sources to obtain the full text of articles along with their manifold considerations for sharing and requesting content. The urgency with which faculty need to gain access to scholarly literature is dependent on intersecting elements of discipline, current projects, how the resource will be used, the perceived competitiveness of the field, career stage, and personal practices. The findings reiterate that scholarly literature remains integral to the research and teaching of faculty even as needs and practices for accessing and sharing it grow more individualized and distributed

Pirated Economics

I argue that the impact of piracy engines for scholarly content on science depends on the nature of the research. Social sciences are more likely to reap benefits from such engines without inflicting much damage on journal publishers’ revenues. To validate the claim, I examine the data from illegal downloads of economics content from Sci-Hub over a five-month period. I conclude that: (a) the extent of piracy in economics is not pervasive; (b) downloads mostly occur in under-developed countries; (c) users pirate even content that is freely available online. As a result, publishers are