Access, ethics and piracy

Lawson, Stuart

Abstract

Ownership of intellectual property rights for a large proportion of the scholarly record is held by publishers, so a majority of journal articles are behind paywalls and unavailable to most people. As a result some readers are encouraged to use pirate websites such as Sci-Hub to access them, a practice that is alternately regarded as criminal and unethical or as a justified act of civil disobedience. This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge. By doing so, it is shown that piracy is an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape that can render the current intellectual property regime irrelevant. If we wish to actively construct a true scholarly commons, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge towards the creation of an open scholarly communication system that is fit for purpose.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 6, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Mar 10, 2017
• Publication Date: Mar 10, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jun 19, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 19, 2019
• Journal: Insights: the UKSG journal
• Print ISSN: 2048-7754
• Publisher: Ubiquity Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 30
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 25-30
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.333
• Keywords: open access, ethics, piracy
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1871133
• Contract Date: Jun 19, 2019