Translated material
"Science must be free"
Sergey Dmitriev , senior researcher at the Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Biology named after A.N. Belozersky, Moscow State University tells about the start of the collection of money to support a very contradictory, but so far the necessary project for Russian scientists.
The SCI -Hub project is known to almost all scientists both in our country and abroad a pirate server for downloading full -text articles -turned to users with a request for help [1]. In recent months, the site has been working with large breaks. The authors laid out an appeal on the site, in which they explained the reason for the interruptions with problems with hosting: the publications constantly complain about the server - the copyright holders of the downloaded articles (in circulation they are jokingly called “evil capitalists”), and they have to change the provider every now and then.
As a result, the authors decided to place the server at such a hosting that “no complaints of the capitalists do not care about” - however, this requires the collection of significant funds. SCI-Hub calls users to slant and collect the necessary amount. The authors of the appeal write about the inferiority of the existing system of paid access to scientific articles and that the publishers, having usurped the rights to publish scientists, receive superprofits and impede the free dissemination of knowledge.
According to the authors, the cost of legal download of each article has already reached the threshold, in which it becomes overwhelming for most researchers not only in our country, but also in the West, and in confirmation the fact that representatives of Harvard University recently declared the impossibility of paying an increasing price for articles [2]. The letter ends with the call: “Comrades! Let's unite and all together will tear out scientific knowledge from the tenacious clutches of the capitalists! Science should be free! "
It should be noted that, despite the clearly illegal nature of the service of the service, a huge amount (if not most) of Russian scientists is forced to resort to its services. SCI-HUB is especially popular among representatives of those sciences in which there is no practice of placing articles preprints in open archives such as arxiv.org [3]-biologists, doctors, chemists and many others.
Unfortunately, the cost of subscription to electronic versions of scientific publications is really so high that it is sometimes unable to pull even large universities. Moreover, the administration of scientific institutions does not always have the correct idea of how important it is for the scientist to access in full to the latest publications of its colleagues.
The popularity of the site is best demonstrated by the fact that, according to the counter of the payments received,
Which is posted on the site, a day after the publication of the announcement managed to collect the entire amount of 10 thousand dollars! Given that the announcement contains an call to transfer the amount of about $ 10, it can be assumed that about 1000 people have taken part in the fundraising campaign.
Since the site does not have an English -language version of the announcement, the money, apparently, is mainly transferred by domestic scientists. And although this is far from the first time that our community demonstrates consolidation, it is still one thing to collect several thousand signatures under some next appeal to the authorities (which now you will not surprise anyone) and completely different-voluntary donations of real, albeit small, money. This action is a good reason to think about the problem of establishing legal access to full texts of articles in our scientific organizations.
2. Www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices