British police recently warned students not to use Sci-Hub:
Police have warned students in the UK against using a website that they say lets users "illegally access" millions of scientific research papers.
The City of London police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat" to students' personal data.
This is nonsense, of course. Sci-Hub is a file sharing website where students -- and anyone else -- can get access to scientific papers without paying extortionate fees to the likes of Elsevier and other publishers.
The police are pretending that using Sci-Hub will harm users in some way. It won't. The only people harmed by Sci-Hub are fatcat publishers such as Elsevier.
Scientific publishing is a scam
As George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian:
Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.
The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery “a perpetual financing machine”. He also realised that he could capture other people’s labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journals for free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources.
As his other ventures ran into trouble, he sold his company to the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier.
Incidentally scumbag conman Robert Maxwell has an equally scumbag daughter you may have heard of, Ghislaine Maxwell. I guess the apple didn't fall far from the tree, in her case at least.
Elsevier don't:
pay for the research
pay for the papers to be written
pay for the papers to be peer-reviewed
Elsevier do:
put scientific journals behind paywalls
charge excessive fees to access them
Medlife Crisis has a good video about the scam that is the scientific publishing industry:
So why does the scientific publishing scam, which is obviously a scam, continue? Partly due to institutional inertia, but I think also partly due to corruption.
Sci-Hub to the Rescue
Citizens pay for scientific research though their taxes, so they shouldn't have to pay again. This is particularly bad for scientists in poor and middle-income countries, whose institutions might not be able to afford access to scientific journals.
Scientists have long known this was a scam.
Kazakh scientist Alexandra Elbakyan decided to do something about it. In 2011 she set up Sci-Hub, a pirate web scraper service, to liberate scientific papers so everyone can read them.
Implications for an independent Scotland
In an independent Scotland, scientific research should be free for everyone to access.
All research done in Scotland with public money should be published in open access journals under a Creative Commons license (such as CC-BY).
Furthermore, no Scottish university or public-funded entity should pay a single penny to scammy closed-access publishers such as Elsevier. Instead they will access journal articles using Sci-Hub or equivalent. Furthermore, papers that are not open-access should not be cited; because academics' career prospects depend on citations, this puts pressure on them to publish in open access journals.
Alexandra Elbakyan has to keep her address secret because she is facing ongoing persecution from the scientific journal publishing industry. It is obscene that worthless parasitic greedy fatcats such as Elsevier should be allowed to persecute such a public-spirited person. Elbakyan should be offered Scottish citizenship and immunity from greed-motivated persecution. The sooner the closed-access scientific publishing industry is destroyed, the better.
These are all obvious measures that could be taken, but the UK has consistently decided not to take them. I do not know whether an independent Scotland would do the right thing, but it's got to be more likely than the UK doing it.