Pirates of Academia

This is the same old song of the digital age when you remove data from its physical container someone somewhere is going to put it online. This is true for music, books, and video games so we should not be surprised that scholarly publishing has been drawn in as well.

An article published on the Internet Scientific Publications www.ispub.com details a study conducted over a six month period examining the file sharing activities that occurred on a single site devoted to medical professionals. What they found was an Electronic Library section where users could go and request that papers be posted. Each user was allowed three paper requests a day and 83% of articles requested were fulfilled. Over the six month period of time 5,251 articles were posted with a total viewer ship of 23,461.

This is a very interesting finding and I really want to know how wide spread this sort of practice is and how it really affects the bottom line of scholarly journals. The journals in this case are in a different position in comparison to the record labels who have not fared so well in the fight against pirates and the emergence of new technology, but the audience for the journals is different than that of the labels.

I for one have never paid directly for an academic article, and I doubt seriously that a any of you reading this have either. I pay the university a good sum of money and then through the libraries the articles I am interested in are made available. The universities, in this model, are the prime customers and they could never pirate access to a journal. The article states that roughly 703,830.00 was not paid in access fees over the six month period that the study follows. This may be true but many may have used this forum to get access to article because it was easier than going to their local library and retrieving the same material there.

This is an interesting study but, in the end I don’t believe it tells us anything that we did not know. We live in an age where all digital data is shared and this has finally moved to the realm of scholarly publishing. Attempts to secure this data will be subverted and overcome, but my guess is in this case the big journals get the majority of their income from institutional sources and will not reconsider their current model based on this activity.