Are the organisers behind shadow libraries today's Robin Hoods? 

Behind every great economy lurks a shadow economy offering what the regulated economy cannot and libraries are no exception. For every library buying ebooks and subscribing to ejournals and full-text databases, there is a shadow library attempting to provide the same resources for free without paying. Seen by some as modern day Robin Hoods - stealing from the greedy rich and giving to the worthy poor, could shadow libraries be about to bring down unintended and far-reaching consequences upon researchers everywhere? 

A brief history of scholarly publishing

Since the days of Hook and Newton, scholarly societies and later commercial publishers coordinated and supported scholarly communication, managing peer review and later metadata management, charging a publishing fee at the end of their work.  As digital publication meant publishers kept control of journal archives and moved from a purchase to a subscription model, access to any content meant paying an increasing fee to access content creators had already paid to have published.  Paying three times for article publication - with the copyright for their content, a publication fee, and subscriptions to the content contributed that increased in price far and above inflation each year led to the 'serials crisis' in libraries, where research was threatened with obliteration by the cost of supporting publishers.  

Open access - a partial solution

For hundreds of years, academic publishers have managed editorial and peer review services and turned manuscripts into academic journals for free and then charged only for access to the final product, which was traditionally a printed journal. In recent decades, digital publishing and the rise of the internet has streamlined this process to the point many are asking what value publishers contribute in exchange for journal prices that for years rose far and above inflation every year. There have been two distinct responses. Responsible academia has begun slowly to move from the traditional academic publishing model to providing its own self-managed open access publishing infrastructure (for example the NIHR Open Research platform and Royal Society ejournals) to make research free at point of access. This still leaves the vast majority of existing academic research knowledge as the private property of the large academic publishers, who will doubtless continue to extract a hefty fee to access it. It is perhaps in response to this that individuals ideologically opposed to this arrangement have set about creating shadow libraries that serve to undermine the largest publishers by giving away their valuable assets for free. 

This ensures everything published from the time open access was introduced onwards is available in perpetuity, reducing the value of journal archives over time.  The model created its own problems, however.  It invited predatory publishers who would publish literally anything for cash, while the most prestigious publications too often retained the original publishing model, forcing researchers to continue to pay to publish and then access published articles in order to retain access to future research funding, which is reliant on their successful publication history.
 

Shadow libraries

Another response was to rebel.  A handful of tech savvy folk scraped the content from publishers' websites and made freely available the publications these publishers wanted everyone to pay premium prices to read. SciHub on the open web and Z-Library on the Dark Web.  Publishers have tried for a decade to fight these sites but found they are hosted in countries that ignore international law suits, and so they are seeking to persuade national governments to censor the internet, eliminating access to these sites for all their citizens.  

The prospect of liberating information so that it can be read by the greatest number of people without restrictions is appealing but sadly by making journal articles available for free online, ‘shadow libraries’ from Sci-Hub to Z-Library are effectively stealing from academic publishers. I will leave the moral philosophers of the world to debate whether stealing from a wealthy publisher to feed one’s starving mind is ever right but would point out that publishers are getting exercised about these shadow libraries not because a handful of researchers in poorer countries are reading vital papers they could not obtain any other way but because lots of people are happily downloading articles for free to which the organisation they work for or study at might otherwise have provided lawful, paid for access.

Publisher pushback

Publishers are fighting back.  Shadow libraries tend to live in places where lawsuits tend not to be honoured, shadow libraries represent a significant and ongoing drain on academic publishers’ profits, and so publishers have turned to governments to restrict their citizens' access to these websites instead.  Indian academics are reportedly disappointed that the Indian government recently decided to block their access to SciHub, with publishers reportedly pricing putting the research they need to make new discoveries out of their reach. Internet censorship has long been regarded as somewhere between a threat to democracy and the hallmark of dictatorship but with normal legal remedies failing, this tool of last resort has become the tool of choice for researchers.  

An act of desperation after normal means of preventing copyright theft failed, there remains the question of whether such interventions could normalise state censorship and threaten the future of digital democracy.