The Ethics of Sharing

A few resources for accessing firewalled academic articles and books have just been brought to my attention. Sci-Hub uses donated passwords to get around firewalls and download articles; these are then deposited at Library Genesis (LibGen) — already a very large repository of pirated, copyrighted books and articles.

Both the ethics and legality are complex, so let me be a bit careful about this. For reasons to be discussed below, I will not link to the resources here, but you can easily find them by searching.

My questions first: what are the ethics of using these resources? What are the ethics of sharing these resources with students?

My thought process second…

I do not personally believe that intellectual property is a just system. Any intellectual property. I recognize that this is a fairly radical position, but I have yet to be convinced otherwise.

Nonetheless, I make efforts to obtain materials through legal/legitimate channels. This includes borrowing most books through the library, buying the ones I use often, and obtaining access to books and articles outside my institution through ILL. Having moved from Harvard to a smaller and less wealthy institution (that was redundant), this process has gotten significantly more difficult. Nonetheless, I am a compulsive rule-follower so I continue to (mostly) go through what I believe to be an unjust and inefficient process.

The one major exception: I have downloaded a lot of out-of-copyright historical texts, both breaking firewalls myself and using texts that others have obtained from behind firewalls. I believe that historians have a moral imperative to access historical texts and share these texts as widely as possible. Furthermore, it is legal to do so because US copyright law rejects the sweat-of-the-brow doctrine (other copyright laws are different). This means that you cannot gain copyright by modifying out-of-copyright materials through non-transformative labor, such as typesetting and digitizing.

Sci-Hub, and LibGen are the latest in a line of sites/movements to share copyrighted texts freely. The key difference with Sci-Hub versus precursors like Library.nu is that it primarily targets academic articles, rather than books.

Sci-Hub/LibGen and precursors all differ from resources like wikisource and Project Gutenberg — which share out-of-copyright works. They are also different than open-access journals, and Creative Commons licensing — which work to proactively place resources in the public domain. They share works that are copyrighted, and that are therefore pirated. This is almost certainly illegal under US copyright law, and they have been sued by Elsiveer.

The ethics of sharing copyrighted books strikes me as complex, and I am willing to disagree with intelligent people whose opinions differ from mine. While I tend to believe that monographs should be shared freely or for donation — a process already used by some academics and writers— I am also sympathetic to the position that authors and presses should be paid for their work. Academic publishers do not make much money (if any) and are a useful service to the community. Authors do sometimes make something from their books (but generally not much), which is arguably a small return on their work as researchers and writers.

Articles (and to some degree, textbooks) are something else. Elsiveer and the other journal-operators are money machines, and they generate this money without authors (or editors) being paid a cent for their work. The price of access to journals is out of control, with even very wealthy institutions like Harvard and Cornell questioning or cutting the expense. And without institutional access, the price becomes even more prohibitive. To own access to my article, which clocks in at 20-some pages, the price is currently $55.20. That’s more than half the price of an average 2–300 page monograph — in fact it’s more than the price of many paperbacks! For an author to open access to something s/he wrote to the public, Elsiveer et al. often charge upwards of $1000.

This does not strike me as an ethical grey area — the charges of journal publishers are entirely out of proportion to the services they provide, and no-one involved in producing the work gets paid, or much of a say in the process. I have written about this before, and try to compensate in several ways: I try to post early versions of all my ongoing work at Roots and Branches, and have limited plans to either publish journal articles or to assign them to my students. I actually tend to think that the 20–30 page journal (or edited volume) article is (or should be) something of a dying form (I used to feel this way about monographs as well, although I’ve somewhat changed my mind).

But it is still a shame — some research does fit well into 20 pages; journals are still a decent medium for sharing information; and there is still a large body of useful journal articles that remains behind firewalls.

Note that this is in history (and Asian Studies), which has always been a “book field.” In “journal fields” of the physical and social sciences, this is a much bigger deal. Journals there are the main format for sharing information, rather than a sideline, and the lack of access to journal articles is a huge loss.

All this leads me to think that my position — theoretical opposition to intellectual property rights, practical following of copyright laws and norms — to be somewhat hypocritical. As a non-believer in the ethics of copyright, isn’t it my duty to back up my words with actions? Despite being a junior-level faculty member at a mid-size, mid-budget institution, I still have relatively good library and database resources. I have access to better ones through friends, inter-library loan, and through the occasional book-purchasing spree (which my moderate income can support, sort-of). It is therefore easy for me to fall back on the comfortable (if annoying) process of obtaining texts through legal outlets, even as I argue that this is an unjust system.

Lots of other people lack my resources — institutional, financial, informal/social — to access scholarly materials. Scholars in other countries, and even other regions, lack access to libraries with the needed books and journals. They and their institutions cannot afford paying to access journal databases or purchase access to individual articles. Even my students — at the same institution —generally lack the time, connections, and financial resources to use these materials.

To me, free and open access to scholarly books and papers is largely a matter of convenience.

To others, free and open access is often the only means of access.

So I return to my questions:

What are the ethics of using these illegal — but to my mind ethically sound — resources to access copyrighted books and articles? Do I owe it to myself and the scholarly community to back up my words with actions?

What are the ethics of sharing these resources with students? These databases are (probably) illegal under US law. But they may also enable cash-strapped students to significantly reduce the expense of their education, and to gain access to materials they might otherwise be unable to obtain. Should I share them with a warning? Should I share them only if I use them myself? Should I share them only with a warning and a public record of using them myself?

I don’t have answers. And I’m a ‘fraidy-cat. So I am not sharing the direct links, and I am not taking decisive, public action one way or the other.

I’d appreciate thoughts.