Effort Underway To Have Chile Add Access To Knowledge, Digital Sovereignty, And Privacy To Chilean Constitution

from the how-would-it-work-in-practice dept

Chile is in the middle of creating a new constitution -- a process that seems fraught with both huge potential and tremendous risks, especially trying to do it amidst domestic social upheaval (though, I guess that's when most constitutions tend to be written). A process is in place and 155 people are apparently been tasked with creating this new constitution. Apparently, part of the process is open to an element of crowdsourcing, in that people can submit and vote on certain proposals, meaning that a set of three proposals regarding the internet have been put forth:

15,000 signatures are required to submit citizen proposals to the constitutional debate directly.

The opportunity to achieve substantive and long-term change for digital rights and freedom of software and other intellectual works is unique in Chile's history, and may not be repeated in our lifetime. This is why four communities historically related to the use and dissemination of free software in Chile got together to draft three of these proposals, which are:

• Access to knowledge
• Technological and digital sovereignty
• Internet privacy

These constitutional proposals explain principles of the nation, the rights of citizens, and the duties of the state concerning them. The inclusion of the constitutional articles will allow and promote the creation of laws that defend our freedoms and rights effectively. They are not the end of the road for intellectual freedoms and digital rights, but only the beginning.

All of these sound good (in fact, very good) in theory, though I'm a bit squeamish about how they would be implemented in practice, should they get the necessary signatures and support from the constitution drafters. However, at the very least, it's worth watching how modern constitution drafting is going to consider user rights online.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, chile, constitution, digital sovereignty, privacy

Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Years Of Existence, With A Record 88 Million Papers Available, And A Call For Funds To Help It Add AI And Go Open Source

from the paypal-not-accepted dept

To celebrate ten years offering a large proportion of the world's academic papers for free -- against all the odds, and in the face of repeated legal action -- Sci-Hub has launched a funding drive:

Sci-Hub is run fully on donations. Instead of charging for access to information, it creates a common pool of knowledge free for anyone to access.

The donations page says that "In the next few years Sci-Hub is going to dramatically improve", and lists a number of planned developments. These include a better search engine, a mobile app, and the use of neural networks to extract ideas from papers and make inferences and new hypotheses. Perhaps the most interesting idea is for the software behind Sci-Hub to become open source. The move would address in part a problem discussed by Techdirt back in May: the fact that Sci-Hub is a centralized service, with a single point of failure. Open sourcing the code -- and sharing the papers database -- would allow multiple mirrors to be set up around the world by different groups, increasing its resilience.

Donations can only be made in cryptocurrencies -- Sci-Hub accepts most of the main ones. A short interview with Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, on the donations page explains why she moved away from PayPal:

in the past I used also PayPal account to collect donations from abroad. It worked well for a while, but when I posted a message on Sci-Hub urging people to donate, if my memory is correct it was in 2013, donations started to come at a cosmic speed... in a couple of days two or three thousands of dollars were collected. But then the account was frozen by PayPal. It turned out that Elsevier has complained to PayPal about Sci-Hub so they froze the account.

Later I tried registering another PayPal account, and use it carefully, but after some time it also got frozen. I have several frozen PayPal accounts by now.

The main Sci-Hub site claims to hold some 87,977,763 papers -- an impressive number. It's a reminder of just how much research has been funded by the public, and how much could be available for researchers across the globe to access if unjustified claims of ownership were not made by academic publishers desperate to preserve their 35-40% profit margins.

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Filed Under: academic knowledge, academic publishing, access to knowledge, decentralized, fundraising
Companies: sci-hub

Free Access To Academic Papers For Everyone In India: Government Proposes 'One Nation, One Subscription' Approach As Part Of Major Shift To Openness

from the open-everything dept

Techdirt has been following the important copyright case in India that is about how people in that country can access academic journals. Currently, many turn to "shadow libraries" like Sci-Hub and Libgen, because they cannot afford the often hefty frees that academic publishers charge to access papers. If a new "Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy" (pdf), just released as a draft by the Government of India, comes to fruition, people may not need to:

The Government of India will negotiate with journal publishers for a "one nation, one subscription" policy whereby, in return for one centrally-negotiated payment, all individuals in India will have access to journal articles. This will replace individual institutional journal subscriptions.

That's just one of the bold ideas contained in the 63-page document. Here's another: open access to all research funded by the Indian taxpayers.

Full text of final accepted author versions of manuscripts (postprints and optionally preprints) along with supplementary materials, which are the result of public funding or performed in publicly funded institutions, or were performed using infrastructure built with the support of public funds will be deposited, immediately upon acceptance, to an institutional repository or central repository.

Similarly, all data generated from publicly funded research will be released as open data, with a few exceptions:

All data used in and generated from public-funded research will be available to everyone (larger scientific community and public) under FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) terms. Wherever applicable, exceptions will be made on grounds of privacy, national security and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Even in such situations, suitably anonymised and/or redacted data will be made available. In all cases, where the data cannot be released to the general public, there will be a mechanism to release it to bonafide/authorised researchers.

All publicly funded scientific resources will be made shareable and accessible nationally through digital platforms, including laboratories, supercomputing and AI facilities. Publicly funded open educational resources will be made available under a "minimally restrictive" open content license. Libraries at publicly funded institutions will be accessible to everyone, subject only to "reasonable security protocols".

Another idea is the creation of a dedicated portal (remember those?), the Indian Science and Technology Archive of Research, which will provide access to all publicly funded research, including manuscripts, research data, supplementary information, research protocols, review articles, conference proceedings, monographs, book chapters, etc. There will also be a national science, technology and innovation "observatory", which will establish data repositories and a computational grid, among other things.

It's an incredibly ambitious program, with an ambitious goal: "To achieve technological self-reliance and position India among the top three scientific superpowers in the decade to come." The other two superpowers being the US and China, presumably. Whether that program is implemented, wholly or even just in part, is another matter, and will depend on the lobbying that will now inevitably take place, and the usual budgetary constraints. But it is certainly impressive in the completeness of its vision, and in its commitment to openness and sharing in all its forms.

Comments on the proposals can be sent to india-stip@gov.in until Monday, 25 January, 2021.

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Filed Under: academic research, access to knowledge, copyright, india, learning, open access

Elsevier Wants To Stop Indian Medics, Students And Academics Accessing Knowledge The Only Way Most Of Them Can Afford: Via Sci-Hub And Libgen

from the copyright-is-not-an-inevitable,-divine,-or-natural-right dept

Last month Techdirt wrote about some ridiculous scaremongering from Elsevier against Sci-Hub, which the publisher claimed was a "security risk". Sci-Hub, with its 85 million academic papers, is an example of what are sometimes termed "shadow libraries". For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, such shadow libraries are very often the only way medics, students and academics can access journals whose elevated Western-level subscription prices are simply unaffordable for them. That fact makes a new attack by Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen shadow library particularly troubling. The Indian title The Wire has the details:

the publishing giants are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen be completely blocked in India through a so-called dynamic injunction. The publishers claim that they own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published, and that Sci-Hub and Libgen are engaged in violating various exclusive rights conferred on them under copyright law by providing free access to their copyrighted contents.

Techdirt readers will note the outrageous claim there: that these publishers "own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published". That's only true in the sense that most publishers force academics to hand over the copyright as a condition of being published. The publishers don't pay for that copyright, and contribute almost nothing to the final published paper save a little editing and formatting: manuscript review is carried out for free by other academics. And yet the publishers are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen should be blocked in India on this basis. Moreover, they want a "dynamic injunction":

That is, once a defendant's website is categorised as a "rogue website", the plaintiff won't have to go back to the judges to have any new domains blocked for sharing the same materials, and can simply get the injunction order extended with a request to the court's deputy registrar.

The legal action by publishers against shadow libraries is part of a broader offensive around the world, but there's a reason why they may face extra challenges in India -- over and above the fact that Sci-Hub and Libgen contain huge quantities of material that can unambiguously be shared quite legally. As Techdirt reported back in 2013, a group of Western publishers sued Delhi University over photocopied versions of academic textbooks. For many students in India, this was the only way they could afford such educational materials. In 2016, the Indian court ruled that "copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right", and that photocopying textbooks is fair use.

The parallels with the new suit against Sci-Hub and Libgen are clear. The latter are digital photocopy sites: they make available copies of educational material to students and researchers who could not otherwise afford access to this knowledge. The copies made by Sci-Hub and Libgen should be seen for what they are: fair use of material that was in any case largely created using public funds for the betterment of humanity, not to boost the bottom line of publishers with profit margins of 35-40%.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, academic research, access to knowledge, censorship, copyright, dynamic injunction, india, injunctions, publishers
Companies: american chemical society, elsevier, libgen, sci-hub, wiley

After Taming Open Access, Academic Publishing Giants Now Seek To Assimilate The World Of Preprints

from the no-place-to-run dept

As Techdirt has reported, the open access movement seeks to obtain free access to research, particularly when it is funded by taxpayers' money. Naturally, traditional academic publishers enjoying profit margins of 30 to 40% are fighting to hold on to their control. Initially, they tried to stop open access gaining a foothold among researchers; now they have moved on to the more subtle strategy of adopting it and assimilating it -- rather as Microsoft has done with open source. Some advocates of open access are disappointed that open access has not led to any significant savings in the overall cost of publishing research. That, in its turn, has led many to urge the increased use of preprints as a way of saving money, liberating knowledge, and speeding up its dissemination. One reason for this is a realization that published versions in costly academic titles add almost nothing to the freely-available preprints they are based on.

An excellent new survey of the field, "Preprints in the Spotlight", rightly notes that preprints have attained a new prominence recently thanks to COVID-19. The urgent global need for information about this novel disease has meant that traditional publishing timescales of months or more are simply too slow. Preprints allow important data and analysis to be released worldwide almost as soon as they are available. The result has been a flood of preprints dealing with coronavirus: two leading preprint servers, medRxiv and bioRxiv, have published over 4,500 preprints on COVID-19 at the time of writing.

The publishing giant Elsevier was one of the first to notice the growing popularity of preprints. Back in 2016, Elsevier acquired the leading preprint server for the social sciences, SSRN. Today, Elsevier is no longer alone in seeing preprints as a key sector. A post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog describes how all the major publishers are active in preprints:

Today, we observe that beyond preprint communities that are typically organized around a field or set of fields, in recent years all the major publishers have made their own investments in preprint platforms. Publishers are integrating preprint deposit into their manuscript submission workflows, and adopting a common strategy designed to take back control of preprints.

That emphasis on "taking back control" is key. Preprints have become an alternative not just to academic publishing as practised by giant companies like Elsevier, but also to open access publishing, which is now not so different from the traditional kind. Companies clearly want to nip that development in the bud. Here's how publishers are likely to develop their preprint divisions:

they are bringing preprints inside their publishing workflows. This will afford them an opportunity to emphasize the importance of the version of record and its integrity. And, it will allow them to maximize their control over the research workflow as a whole, including datasets, protocols, and other artifacts of the research and publishing process. If successful, over time publishers will see fewer of the preprints of their eventual publications living "in the wild" and more of them on services and in workflows that they control.

That is, as well as taming the unruly world of preprints by bringing them in-house, publishers can also use them to bolster their mainstream businesses, and further their plans to offer academics a complete, "one-stop" service that includes preprints, journals, data management and more. Turning independent preprint servers into just another cog in the mighty publishing machine would be a further loss of control and autonomy for the academic community as a whole. It should be resisted by researchers, the institutions where they work, and by the bodies that fund them.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, access to knowledge, open access, preprints
Companies: elsevier, ssrn

New Report Shines Much-Needed Light On Shadow Libraries Around The World

from the another-reason-to-defend-privacy-and-anonymity-online dept

Techdirt readers with long memories may recall a post back in 2011 about a 440-page report entitled "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies." As Mike wrote then, this detailed study effectively debunked the entire foundation of US attempts to impose maximalist copyright regimes on other countries. That report was edited by Joe Karaganis, who has put together another collection of articles, called "Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education", that are also likely to be of interest to Techdirt readers. As Karaganis writes in his introduction:

To a large extent, our work on Shadow Libraries started where Media Piracy ended, with the confirmation that the main factors underlying high rates of piracy in the developing world were the obvious ones: high prices for legal media, low incomes, and the continued diffusion of cheap copying technologies.

Unsurprisingly, Karaganis takes Sci-Hub as the emblematic "shadow library":

As everyone from [Sci-Hub's creator] Elbakyan to Elsevier knew, however, Sci-Hub's importance was not its permanence as a service but its status as a proof of concept. Its core archive of fifty million articles was freely available and its basic search and archive features easily replicated.

...

If Elbakyan's story has struck a chord, it is in part because it brings this contradiction in the academic project into sharp relief -- universalist in principle and unequal in practice. Shadow Libraries is a study of that tension in the digital era.

The rest of the 321 pages explores how that tension -- between striving for free and frictionless access to all human knowledge and the copyright industry's attempts to turn learning into a luxury product -- is playing out in eight different countries. Techdirt has covered many of the stories -- for example, those in Russia, India and Argentina. But the report fleshes out the bare facts previously reported here, and provides far more context and analysis. The detailed history of Library Genesis, a precursor to Sci-Hub in Russia, is particularly fascinating. For other countries such as South Africa, Poland, Brazil and Uruguay, the new studies offer insights into regions rarely discussed in the West, and provide good starting points for deeper understanding of those countries. As Karaganis notes, the new study is a transitional one:

catching the moment of widespread digitization of materials and related infrastructure but not yet the digitization of the wider teaching, learning, and research ecosystem, and not the stabilization of legal models and frameworks that can keep pace with the growth of higher education and the global scale of emerging knowledge communities.

Importantly, though, the underlying dynamics of sharing knowledge are the same as those driving the unauthorized distribution of media materials, discussed in the 2011 study:

this informal copy culture is shaped by high prices, low incomes, and cheap technology -- and only in very limited ways by copyright enforcement. As long as the Internet remains "open" in the sense of affording privacy and anonymity, shadow libraries, large and small, will remain powerful facts of educational life. As in the case of music and movies, we think the language of crisis serves this discussion poorly. This is an era of radical abundance of scholarship, instructional materials, and educational opportunity. The rest is politics.

Those are points we've made here on Techdirt many times before. We are enjoying an era of unprecedented digital abundance, which the copyright industries are fighting to shut down in order to preserve their outdated business models based on scarcity. One way they try to do that is to attack the Internet's openness by striving to weaken privacy and anonymity online, regardless of the collateral harm this causes. The importance of shadow libraries in global higher education is another reason to resist that.

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Filed Under: academic research, access to knowledge, copyright, culture, joe karaganis, shadow libraries

The Good News: You Can Download Hawking's PhD For Free; The Bad News: It Took 50 Years To Make It Happen

from the why-are-we-waiting? dept

Techdirt has been writing about the (slow but steady) rise of open access for a decade. That's as long as the Annual International Open Access Week has been running. Cambridge University came up with quite a striking way to join in the celebrations:

Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis, 'Properties of expanding universes', has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, after being made accessible via the University of Cambridge's Open Access repository, Apollo.

The 1966 doctoral thesis by the world's most recognisable scientist is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalogue record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the University has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking's thesis in full.

The idea has been quite a hit -- literally, since the demand for Hawking's thesis was so great on Monday, that it hit the Apollo server hard enough to take it offline for a while. The Guardian reported:

A University of Cambridge spokesperson said: "We have had a huge response to Prof Hawking's decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours.

"As a result, visitors to our Open Access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable."

Popular as the 1966 PhD has proved, the point of the exercise was to spread the word about open access. Hawking is quoted as saying:

Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

Cambridge University made a further announcement to mark Open Access Week. Dr Arthur Smith, Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication, said:

From October 2017 onwards, all PhD students graduating from the University of Cambridge will be required to deposit an electronic copy of their doctoral work for future preservation. And like Professor Hawking, we hope that many students will also take the opportunity to freely distribute their work online by making their thesis Open Access. We would also invite former University alumni to consider making their theses Open Access, too.

That's great, as is the free availability of Hawking's PhD. But the question for both has to be: why has it taken so long -- 50 years in the case of the thesis? Even allowing for the fact that the Internet was not a mass medium for 30 of those 50 years, there was nothing stopping Cambridge University putting PhDs online from the mid-1990s. Similarly, why make depositing theses as open access optional? The University would be quite justified in requiring the thesis of any PhD it grants to be online and freely downloadable immediately under a suitable CC license. The moment to make that happen is now, not in another 10 years' time.

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Filed Under: access to knowledge, knowledge, open access, phd, stephen hawking, thesis

Publishers Remove 2500 Journals From Free Access In Bangladesh; Put Them Back When People Notice

from the gotta-pay-to-do-research dept

We've discussed in the past some of the more ethically dubious moves by the big academic journal publishers, and the more you look, the worse it seems to get. Glyn Moody has the story about how a bunch of publishers all agreed to remove free access to thousands of journals in Bangladesh. Apparently they had previously allowed such free access, noting that Bangladesh was a developing nation, but now they claim they've seen enough sales to pull the plug on the free access. Among the journals removed:

From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.

Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.

And this resulted in the bizarre situation in which some researchers in the country no longer had access to their own research:

Tracey Koehlmoos, head of the health and family planning systems programme at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, said, "We are a little less than 300 scientists eking out world class research on a shoestring budget without the purchasing power capacity of a big university in the West. HINARI has been our lifeline. My colleagues publish in many of these journals, and now we won’t even have access to our own papers."

Access to knowledge is important for creating new knowledge. Blocking off such access to these scientists and researchers is a really unfortunate move.

Thankfully, as I was finishing up writing this piece, I saw the news that, given the outcry of protests about this, the publishers backed down (pdf). However, it seems troubling that it should take a public outcry for these publishers to realize this was a bad idea.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, bangladesh, journals, research
Companies: elsevier

The Vatican Concerned About Intellectual Property

from the access-to-knowledge dept

Last year, we noted that in one of the Pope's speeches, he had expressed concerns about how intellectual property laws were being used to hurt economic development and hold back things like medicines. It appears the Vatican has continued to study this subject. Jamie Love points us to a speech given by the Vatican's representative to the UN, Archibishop Silvano M. Tomasi, at the WIPO meeting back in September, where he highlights worries by the Vatican about how intellectual property can stifle access to knowledge and economic growth, especially in developing countries. The statement is so much more accurate than almost anything you hear from a politician concerning intellectual property.

Unlike most claims from politicians that intellectual property only provides benefits, it notes that the economic research is "contradictory," because while granting someone a monopoly certainly increases activity in those areas, it also limits other areas of growth:

Evidence to date is fragmented and somewhat contradictory, in part because many of the concepts involved have not yet been measured. A stronger system of protection could either enhance or limit economic growth. While strengthening IPRs has potential for enhancing growth and development in the proper circumstances, it might also raise difficult economic and social costs. Indeed, developing economies could experience net welfare losses in the short run because many of the costs of protection could emerge earlier than the dynamic benefits. This situation explains why it is often difficult to organize a convergence of interests in favor of reform of intellectual property in developing countries.

The adoption of stronger IPRs in developing countries is often defended by claims that this reform will attract significant new inflows of technology, a blossoming of local innovation and cultural industries, and a faster closing of the technology gap between developing and developed countries. It must be recognized, however, that improved IPRs by itself is highly unlikely to produce such benefits.

Of course, this actually applies to developed countries as well, but we'll skip over that for now. Still, it's nice to see at least some folks recognizing that intellectual property creates competing incentives, and that the only way to judge whether or not it's a net benefit involves looking at both impacts.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, intellectual property, vatican