A well-known domestic academic journal online platform has been frequently searched due to suspected monopoly, high usage fees for papers
A well-known domestic academic journal network platform has a problem.
Recently, the State Administration for Market Regulation announced that the platform was suspected of monopolistic behavior and was under investigation.
After the news was released, Weibo's hot search exploded, and the topic read up to 800 million, which also attracted a large number of netizens to applaud, and some netizens even commented that "it's been a long time for this day".
Earlier on April 19, 2022, the Chinese Academy of Sciences also chose to disable the academic platform due to the need to pay tens of millions of subscription fees, and related entries were once on the hot search, although the online platform issued a statement that it will continue to be The Chinese Academy of Sciences provides services, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences said it was overwhelmed and had no choice but to stop it.
Suspected of academic information monopoly, high fees for database use... In fact, such phenomena are even more common in foreign countries - giant publishing companies charge large sums of money to research institutions, and use paywalls to block individuals who want to download a single paper. a common operating model.
This has led many poor academic researchers to shout, "Writing a paper is too hard!" In recent years, a wave of resistance against the bad behavior of academic websites is emerging around the world.
Some people set up websites for downloading pirated papers in their own name, in order to allow people who have no money to download papers to do research; there are also universities, institutions and publishing giants fighting against each other, demanding price reductions and open access to academic papers.
The two foreign database giants are expensive
Individuals and schools say they "can't afford it"
As a researcher, you need to read a lot of previous research before you can write a great paper.
In addition to going to the library to borrow physical books in the traditional way, downloading electronic materials from the Internet has become the mainstream of this era.
Being in the school, using the campus network, and enjoying the permissions purchased by the school, relieved the anxiety of most teachers and students.
Most foreign universities cooperate with giant publishing companies such as Elsevier and Springer.
This "package purchase" form is convenient for researchers, teachers and students, but it makes the school complain a lot.
As early as 2012, Harvard University complained that the purchase of journal databases was too expensive, which overwhelmed the school, and school officials said: "In the past 6 years, our download costs in two publishing institutions have increased by 145%, and academic institutions such as colleges and universities have risen. Institutional registration fees have risen sharply year after year.”
The University of California with 10 campuses is one of the largest scientific research institutions in the United States. In 2021, the University of California and Elsevier will be on the same page.
Schools and publishers quarrel, to put it bluntly, because of money.
As the old contract expires, the University of California hopes to reduce costs in the new contract while gaining access to more open-access resources.
Elsevier not only disagreed, it even made price increases its number one goal.
They want an additional price increase of about $30 million over the next three years of the UC contract.
After listening to it, the school said that it could not afford it, and released information on its official website that the Elsevier family accounted for about 25% of the $11 million that the University of California spent on subscription journals each year.
According to the information updated on the official website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January this year, many well-known universities such as MIT use a journal subscription method named "big deal", which means that publishers sell to University access to journals has a discounted price, but it needs to be sold in a package, which means that the university has no choice and must pay for some journals that are not needed.
This one-size-fits-all approach has resulted in MIT paying just over $2.7 million a year to just one Elsevier publisher.
Not all schools can afford databases like top universities UC and MIT.
When the university where the researcher is located has not signed a cooperation agreement with a large publishing company, if you want to read the full text, you can only buy it yourself.
So, how much does it cost to download the full text of a journal in the name of an individual?
On the official Elsevier website, we conducted an experiment.
The researcher registered a personal account with an email address, randomly selected a paper published in the journal "International Machine Tool and Manufacturing" in 2013, and added it to the shopping cart. Unlock within 48 hours after payment.
On the official website of another publishing giant, Springer, randomly select a study published in the "Journal of Demographic Economics" in 2022 on Japan's post-war demographic transition and marriage market, and click the download full text button, which requires an individual payment of 34.95 Euros (about 250 yuan) to unlock permissions.
It takes one or two hundred yuan to read just one article, but to complete a paper, scholars will often cite dozens or even hundreds of references.
Take the Japanese population study mentioned above as an example. The article cited 86 references. Imagine an ordinary student without a stable source of income. If the university he attends does not purchase a database, then the cost of completing a thesis will be high. To what extent?
Simply startling.
However, it is worth mentioning that the giants will occasionally send kindness and publish some papers in conjunction with hot events.
For example, in response to the new crown epidemic, Elsevier opened up research related to the health emergency related to COVID-19.
This is good for scholars engaged in medical and health research, but after all, the radiation range is not large.
"Open Access" becomes the new model for free
But the author "returns" the database to pay a "processing fee"
To make free papers have a wider reach, you have to refer to the trendy concept of "open access" in academia.
Whether it is publishing papers or downloading papers, it is a word that researchers talk about, derived from English Open Access, referred to as "OA".
The precise definition of OA can be found through the official website of UNESCO: making research literature freely available through public networks, articles or writings that allow any user to read, download, copy, disseminate, print, search and excerpt citations, or Use them as data for any other lawful purpose.
There are no economic, legal, or technical barriers to open access other than network fees.
Elsevier published 81,000 open access articles in 2020, a 65% increase compared to 2019.
On their website, they advertise themselves as the world's leading open access publisher.
Springer is also experimenting with open access, saying on its website that publishers are offering open access options for journals, books and shared research data to researchers, institutions and their funders.
Even if this kind of achievement is used as a performance by major publishers, the existence of open access is still inseparable from the efforts and choices of scholars.
Only when scholars choose to publish their research results in OA journals means that the paper can be downloaded and read by others for free.
To publish an OA article, in many cases, the publisher needs to pay the publisher an article processing fee.
In other words, if the person downloading the paper doesn't pay, the person who publishes the paper can also pay the cost of the publication.
Publishers are actively calling on authors to publish OA articles through their official websites.
The ad words are as follows: First, sending an OA helps to increase the citation data of the article.
Research shows that open access articles are viewed and cited more frequently than articles behind paywalls.
Second, open access can help bring researchers to wider international collaboration, wider public participation, and the possibility of interdisciplinary dialogue.
However, as part of the popular OA family, papers also come in gold and green.
From a reader's perspective, in short, gold is better than green.
Gold OA means maximum freedom of sharing, and anyone can access relevant papers and content for free on the journal's website; green OA has specific terms and conditions, such as the version of the paper in the database may not be final, or exist Confidentiality period, people cannot read it immediately after publication.
There is no doubt that golden OA is desired by researchers and academic institutions, but it has brought financial pressure to publishers.
To gain a good reputation as open access, many publishers consider charging publishers.
A 2020 study by Nina Schonfelder, an open-access scholar at Bielefeld University, shows that in recent years, academics have paid a median of about $2,600 to publishers for publication.
So can academics refuse to work with publishing giants?
The answer is that it basically doesn't work.
Taking Elsevier as an example, it has more than 2,500 journals, accounting for a quarter of the world's academic journals, and contains a large number of popular references in The Lancet and Cell with high impact factors.
It can be seen that when researchers have to cooperate with publishing giants, they can only try to bargain when paying.
Even if the publishing giants regard more open access as their self-proclaimed performance and pursuit of value goals, but if you look closely at the operation mode, the publishers have not done business at a loss.
To seize the fire of knowledge
Poor students boldly create their own free copycat academic website
To protest the high fees charged by publishers so that ordinary academics can benefit, in 2011, a girl named Alexandra Erbakin did something big.
At that time, she was completing material science papers related to aluminum alloys, but she was often blocked by paywalls, and the download fee of $32 per paper made the Kazakh girl born in 1988 feel very horrified.
Erbakin has been addicted to code since she was 12 years old, and this time she decided to take the initiative to collect free paper resources.
She set up the Sci-Hub website, and released the paper materials for free to researchers who have the same needs as her.
What she didn't expect was that her little trick caused a sensation in the entire academic circle.
Today, when we open the Sci-Hub webpage, the homepage shows that there are 88,485,382 papers available for free download in this database.
Just enter a keyword, URL link or the DOI number of the article to quickly find it.
A website that stores a large number of papers, how to break the paywall and become an academic resource that can be provided to users for free?
Netizens' posts illustrate how the site works.
When a researcher who enters the website finds a paid paper, the website will automatically log in to the account of a research institution that has subscribed to the journal through technical means to download. These accounts and passwords are created by volunteers from all over the world. supply.
When downloading, the website will also automatically back up the paper, and directly provide the researcher with a copy of the paper when the same demand is encountered next time.
The website relies on donations from users to maintain its operations. In order to avoid third-party participation in the operation and increase security risks, Erbakin personally wrote the code, set up the server, and assumed the daily maintenance work by himself.
Erbakin has been outspoken about his infringement, and the introduction on the website's homepage reads "the world's first pirated website that provides millions of research papers to the public."
Since 2013, Sci-Hub has become popular in developing countries such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Iran, which is also in line with Erbakin's original intention of creating a station - to provide research materials for research institutions with fewer resources.
Erbakin's approach is seen as a hero by many researchers who can't afford expensive subscriptions, and it's inevitably met with resentment from publishers.
In June 2015, major publisher Elsevier filed a lawsuit in a New York court, arguing that Sci-Hub violated the U.S. Copyright Act, and asked Elbakkin to shut down the site and pay damages.
In October of the same year, a court decision ordered the site to cease operations and shut down its domain name sci-hub.org located in the United States.
In the judgment of that year, the judge bluntly stated that Elbakin's large-scale behavior had violated the copyright of Elsevier's works, but the judge also wrote that "even if the reason for their theft is for the public good."
However, U.S. law finally made a choice between public welfare and copyright protection. On June 21, 2017, the New York District Court ruled that Sci-Hub must compensate Elsevier for copyright damages of up to $15 million.
Even with great success building pirated websites, Erbakin was still a master's student in Russia at the time.
However, because Sci-Hub's server is located in St. Petersburg, Russia, the judgment issued by the US court is not binding, and Erbakin did not pay the fine.
In 2017, Daniel Himmelstein of the University of Pennsylvania studied Sci-Hub and found that there are more than 80 million papers on the website, including 69% of all academic papers, which can basically meet the needs of most papers, while the remaining 31% are not touched. No, simply because most of them are papers that researchers don't want to get access to.
The famous English academic journal "Science" once commented on Sci-Hub, "Whether it is a respectable altruism or a large criminal organization depends on which side you stand on."
Multinational organizations, scientific research institutions and global scholars join hands to attack
Co-sponsored campaign against high fees
In front of the paywall, researchers and academic institutions are complaining, and some influential organizations around the world have made moves one after another to try to make changes.
Beginning in 2012, academia launched a joint boycott of Elsevier.
Scholars gathered on the "Price of Knowledge" website, more than 17,000 researchers broke national borders, jointly protested Elsevier's high fees, said they would not contribute to Elsevier's journals, would not serve as reviewers, and would not act as a Edit work.
Since then, the EU has set an example and put forward the consensus goal of "full realization of open access to academic papers by 2020" in 2016.
During this period, the "Horizon 2020" and "European Horizon" research plans were implemented, with plans to spend a total of 175.5 billion euros to fund academic research related to addressing climate change and sustainable development.
In March 2021, the website of the "Open Research Europe" program set up by the European Commission, a scientific paper publishing platform that is freely accessible to all, will display relevant research results funded by Horizon 2020 and the European Horizon Program, as well as published by the European Union in 2021- Research on innovation plans for the period 2027.
In 2018, an open-access initiative called "Project S" gained attention around the world.
With the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, 12 European national research funding agencies and several charitable foundations have jointly requested that research papers funded by members of the alliance be fully open-access from 2020.
In December 2018, at the 14th Berlin Open Access Conference, 113 research institutions from 37 countries on five continents signed a statement announcing their support for the OA2020 "Plan S".
In the United States, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has also made efforts to open access to academic research.
In 2016, NASA proposed that all NASA-funded researchers must upload copies of their peer-reviewed publications to a repository called Pubspace.
NASA Deputy Administrator Newman said to the media, "We are delighted to have this opportunity to provide the public with more access to science, technology and knowledge, and welcome the world to take this opportunity to explore the universe and Earth with us."
So far, related papers, including the Apollo moon landing program, have been published in the database for free download and reading by the public.
Of course, the website specifically states that the open data does not contain documents that "have the potential to threaten the security of the United States' homeland."
How to get free papers?
This session of netizens racked their brains to come up with a coup
Money can never stop researchers from pursuing knowledge. Although there are many illegal ways to download papers, there are many researchers trying to find a "middle ground" between legal and free.
Entering keywords such as "paper paywall" in various languages in a search engine can get countless netizen guide articles about "getting papers for free in a legal way".
The list of tips and tricks offers endless possibilities for saving money.
First, pdf archives of free articles may be found through academic search engines such as Google Scholar.
The strategy provided by techooid.com pointed out that Google Scholar is equivalent to an intermediary platform, which aggregates resources from universities and academic research networks, and about 40% of paid research papers can be quickly found through it.
The operation method is to enter the desired paper title in the search bar. If the platform can retrieve the resources, the researcher can find the download button directly behind the thesis title.
Second, academic circles also have their own social networks, such as Research Gate and ACADEMIA.
Similar academic social networks provide a platform for researchers to upload their own work directly, which users can download by simply searching.
In addition to journal articles, some book copies are also published on such sites.
Some official institutions are also providing free resource request platforms.
For example, the Educational Resource Information Center website called ERIC, which belongs to the US Department of Education, updates its database twice a year to include new research papers and books.
At the same time, multinational social networking sites represented by Facebook are also helping academics.
On Facebook, you can find groups by interests, including academics.
Join the group called "Need for Papers", leave your email and the papers you're looking for, and maybe get a response.
However, when looking for a paper, there is always "the poor and the yellow spring", when you can't find it no matter how you look for it.
At this time, you can also boldly write a letter and contact the author of the article directly.
In foreign journals, each paper will have a corresponding author, and the website of the published journal provides the researcher's email. Write an email seeking a paper, and it is likely to get the full text, or even get a direct communication with the author. Opportunities for article content.
However, such a move may also be considered abrupt and reckless, and the mail sent out is lost in the sea.
After all, the corresponding author of a top-level paper is often a busy insider.
If you bother to ask for a free paper from many years ago, you may receive a response of "find pirated resources" or "let the school buy a database".
It also means that the critical conundrum of downloading papers is back between researchers and publishers who charge high fees.
In order to tear down the paywall, academic researchers, institutions, schools, teachers and students from all over the world can be described as "hard work" and exert their own efforts on the road to academic freedom. The river, this force is enough to threaten the monopoly of academic resources and the high price of the database, sounding the alarm for such behavior.
This edition / Wu Bingcong