They call her the 'Robin Hood' in science, she touched a business worth $ 10 billion. dollars, they compare her with Snowden

AUTHOR: Tanja Rudež

POSTED: 12/11/2016. at 12:06

http://www.jutarnji.hr/life/znanost/treba-li-zaustaviti-alexandru-elbakyan-zovu-je-robinom-hoodom-u-znanosti-dirnula-je-u-biznis-vrijedan-10-mlrd. dollar-comparing-is-with-Snowden / 5372615 /

Bojan Macan (right) and Alexandra Elbakyan (within the circle)

They call her the "Robin Hood" in science.
Kazakh student Alexandra Elbakyan (28) she is the founder of the website Sci-Hub, the world's largest online database of scientific pirated articles. Sci-Hub has more than 50 million "stolen" items available to all scientists, teachers, students, pupils, physicians and other users to whom, due to the astronomically high subscriptions to academic journals, scientific papers are often unavailable.

At the end of the last year, in the United States, against Alexandre Elbakyan was initiated court proceedings because of piracy, and she now risks imprisonment and financial penalty, which the magazine of Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis estimated that it could reach up to 150,000 dollars per article. Apparently because the young Alexandra is hiding somewhere in Russia where she is beyond the reach of the American justice system she is compared with the world's most famous whistleblower Edward Snowden. But Alexandra is actually a "spiritual successor" of the US Internet genius Aaron Schwartz, founder of the social news and entertainment WEBSITE Reddit. The young Schwartz early in 2013. hanged himself in his apartment in New York as a result of negotiations on the settlement of the court process against him because of the unauthorized Downloads a thousand scientific papers from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Hacking magazines

- Scientific papers should be available to everyone. I think the sharing of scientific articles should not be considered an illegal activity - said Alexandra Elbakyan few months ago in a rare interview. The idea to establish Sci-Hub to Alexandra came when a few years ago, after a study visit to the United States and Germany, where she studied neuroscience, she returned to her native Kazakhstan and realized that, due to high subscription many of the necessary scientific journals, to her they are inaccessible. In order to get hold of the desired work she began to hack newspapers, and then shared these works to her colleagues. Then four years ago, she founded Sci-Hub, which service, so far, have used the more than 10 million people from around the world, including the Croatian scientists.

- In reality, only the scientists from large, generously funded universities in the developed world have full access to published scientific research - told the New York Times prof. Michael Eisen of the University of California at Berkeley and one of the advocates of open access to scientific information.

Great expectations

- Scientific journals are generally published by profitable companies even if there are non-profit organizations and companies whose main objective is not profit. From the Internet and new information technologies was expected to enable and facilitate access to scientific information. Everyone had high expectations that everyone will easily be able to reach scientific articles, but the opposite happened: even faster and even greater differences between rich and poor countries. Now we have bigger problems and differences than the 1980s because prices are subscriptions to scientific journals advent of the Internet have increased dramatically - says dr. sc. Bojan Macan, head of the Centre for Scientific Information Institute "Ruder Boskovic" Institute in Zagreb.

According to data published in the journal Science, 2014, in the world in more than 20,000 scientific journals published around two million articles in digital form. Most of these, about 10 billion dollars worth of industry is still related to subscriptions, mainly libraries in research and academic institutions. These subscriptions range from 2000 to 35,000 dollars per magazine, and in the case of subscription packages magazine sums climb on the millions of dollars.

Today it sounds paradoxical, but in 1995 the business magazine Forbes predicted that the Internet will be the first victim of Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals. Well, it turned out that under the onslaught of the Internet succumbed numerous print media, especially the weekly and daily newspapers, and the music industry, while large publishers of scientific journals Elsevier (holding 16 percent of the market), Springer Nature (12 percent), Wiley-Blackwell (six percent ) and Taylor & Francis (four per cent market share) each year generate profits astronomical proportions. For example, the British-Dutch group Elsevier, which publishes scientific journals in 2500, 2015 had revenues of more than EUR 3.5 billion, while the operating profit was 34 percent.

- Publishers of scientific journals have become too greedy, so the scientific community sieves such behavior - told the Financial Times Larivera Vincent, professor of information science at the University of Montreal. With him agree many scientists, lawyers, and politicians who fight for open access to scientific information. Half a year ago, with much commitment as the former Dutch EU presidency, at the meeting of the Competitiveness of the European Commission announced that the results of scientific research in the EU financed from the public and public-private funds to 2020 to be freely available to everyone.

- The EU has been supporting open access on multiple levels. On the one hand, builds infrastructure for the provision of open access, and it consists of a digital repository into which scientists can store certain versions of their work and ensure open access to them. On the other hand, the EU imposed a number of obligations and rules of scientists around the open approach. For example, all the scientists who get the project financed under the 2020 program have their Obzor reviewed scientific publications stored in some of the digital repository and provide them with open access after a maximum of six months, or 12 months in the field of social sciences, humanities and the arts - explained Bojan Kitty cat. He pointed out that there are two ways in which scientists can provide open access to their works.
Gold put

- One is through self-archiving. In this case, the scientist after the release of the final version of the stores like to study or work officially published PDF, if you kept the rights to it, the digital repository and ensures open access to their work - said Macan.

Another way is to publish the work of a scientist in a publication that will be immediately open access. In the world today, about 12 percent of the open access journal, which appears in several forms.

- One model that implements much of Croatian znanstevnih magazine. In this model, a scientist publishes the free newspaper, and all the papers published in the journal are freely available to the general public. These newspapers are funded with money the Ministry of Science and scientific institutions that support their issuance or donations. However, this model is thinner - said Macan.

The world is becoming more common so-called model. Golden times open approach in which the authors of the so-called pay. APC (article processing charges) to have their work published on the website of the magazine and was freely available to everyone.

- APC-range and ranges from several hundred to several thousand euros for a prestigious newspaper. For example, the journal Cell Reports of charge authors $ 5,000, ie about 4,600 euros, for the publication of the work in open access. PLoS One journal, which publishes only works in open access, the author charged $ 1495 per article. Otherwise, PLoS One year publish 30,000 articles in open access. And no one can guarantee that those prices APC will not increase - the Macan, which explains the "gold" open access is considered problematic.
strict recommendations

- In this approach, the onus is on the scientist, that his institution or funders of scientific research as they will have to pay the costs of publishing the works. In this way, financed scientific publishers, and this means "tearing" of the research themselves, so from taxpayers. If this approach prevails, there will be problem of publication in these journals for scientists from institutions that do not have the means to APC - said Macan, who is a proponent of the so-called. green open access.

- This is the way in which the work is stored in digital repositories, making their actions supported by the European Commission. Well, if all the papers were in the 'green' approach, nobody would no longer subscribing to scientific journals, and to their survival and the role that is currently holding come into question - says Macan. In this case, the entire model of scientific communication had to reorganize, which, of course, does not correspond to major publishers, because the current model very well earn. - The scientific community has dropped from his hand scientific communication and gave the publishers of scientific journals as an independent body. But most of the work, from editing to review, continues to perform scientists themselves, as a rule, without any financial compensation. I am an advocate of open access to scientific information because it is logical that scientists and taxpayers have the right to access the results of scientific studies that have been reached by the taxpayers pay for themselves. It is also one of the main arguments for open access - explained Macan.

Our interlocutor pointed out that all members of the European Commission gave strong recommendations to support open access and make an effort to research results funded by public money are available to taxpayers.

- Ruger Center for scientific information advocates open access and so do we.

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IZAKOVIC