
Elsevier’s parent comapny RELX Group, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. Profits and market caps for the publishers have also swelled. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five’s pages now it’s more than half. And that’s just for natural and medical science papers the social sciences have it worse. That’s a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. Over half of all research, according to one study, is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Germany’s University of Konstanz dropped its subscription to Elsevier’s journals in 2014, saying its prices had increased by 30 percent in five years. Even Harvard said in 2012 that it couldn’t afford journals’ rising fees, citing, in particular, two publishers that had inflated their rates by 145 percent within six years. Taken together, universities’ subscriptions to academic journals often cost $500,000 to $2 million.

Over half of all research is now published by the big five of academic publishing
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“Those who been involved with purchasing serials in the last 20 years know that serial prices represent the largest inflationary factor for library budgets,” the Library Journal report says. Those prices make these journals inaccessible to most people without institutional access - and they’re increasingly difficult for institutions to finance as well. That estimate, Library Journal said, “flies in the face of reality.” Library Journal’s records showed that a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal in the US ran, on average, for $4,773 the cheapest subscriptions were to general science journals, which only cost $1,556 per year. But as Library Journal’s annual survey pointed out, there was a change in ARL’s data collection. Research by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) suggests that the cost of libraries’ subscriptions to journals only increased by 9 percent between 19. How much? Exact estimates are hard to come by.

Most science journals charge money to access their articles. As a student doing research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she ran across an obstacle encountered by students the world over: paywalls. “The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009,” Elbakyan says. Now, even though Elbakyan stands at the center of an argument about how copyright is enforced on the internet, most people have no idea who she is. Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. But that conversation - at least in English - took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place.

Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.īut as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation.

She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte participating in various feminist groups online and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to the academic publishers’ business model
