Hi, gang. A few quick disclaimers before we get into this post: I am currently recovering from a viral illness that hit me especially hard yesterday. Therefore, any illegal activity referenced in this blog post/anticapitalist rant is fictional and written in a total state of fever-induced delirium.
That being said, let’s talk about open access and digital piracy. Growing up in the age of the internet, I learned quickly that I could find almost anything for free online with some digging. This sentiment has followed me to this day, and has only intensified with the extensive reading lists assigned in graduate history seminars. I borrow materials from the public and academic libraries I have access to when I can, but many required readings are just too niche (or recently published) to be available. That leaves me with a few options:
- Buy each work new, from large distributors such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or journal conglomerates.
- Buy each work used from the GMU bookstore or another used book option.
- Find each work online, using radically open-access or pirate databases, like Anna’s Archive or Z-Lib.
The first option, while probably the most traditional way to access scholarly works, is incomprehensible to me; something deep-wired in my brain keeps me from paying full price for books I will use for one week out of the semester (not to mention my ethical qualms about buying from big-box distributors…) Regarding the second option: I don’t know how the current Rally House-owned bookstore operates, but when I worked at the Barnes & Noble-owned GMU bookstore last year, we were instructed to push students to buy the “used” books over new editions. Why? Because BNED had to pay publishers and authors’ copyright fees to obtain new copies. Since they already owned the “used” copies they bought back from students in previous semesters, they could rent/sell them to students in perpetuity while keeping all the profit. Peer-to-peer selling sites such as ThriftBooks sidestep the corporate element, but independent sellers can still have high shipping and processing fees—and if you happen to be looking for a recently published book on thrift sites, your options are slim to none.
Taking my experience working for BN and what I learned while reading Resnick and Belluz’ article on the issue of paywalls in scientific journals into account, I am confident in saying that BNED, Elsevier, and many other for-profit academic distributors or databases do very little to support or facilitate academics and their research, and in fact actively hinder many from accessing knowledge due to their “out of control” prices and monopolistic access fees.1 Not only are contributing authors and peer reviewers continuously not paid for their work, but these institutions force government-funded research out of the public domain and behind private paywalls, defeating the purpose of public funding for further innovation and discovery for the benefit of all. Especially as digital PDFs increasingly become the standard format for academic articles over traditional print media: if all these institutions ultimately provide is a prestigious name under which to be published, what harm does option number three pose?
Admittedly, digital piracy is far from the end-all, be-all solution to corporate greed. As Resnick and Belluz note, elite academic mindsets need to change to value independent and open-access publishing as valid before the monopolistic status of corporate knowledge-aggregates in academic spheres diminishes for good.2 Still, the mass adoption of pirate databases could play a real part in challenging corporate dominance. As more universities cancel their subscriptions and more consumers are priced out of accessing resources legally, corporate publishers will be forced to lower prices when customers ultimately turn to alternative, independent, or illegal methods of accessing knowledge.
Until next week,
Alexa
- Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz, “The war to free science: How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls,” Vox, July 10, 2019, https://archive.is/20190610151251/https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
Hello, comrade. I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. I know how you feel because I haven’t been feeling well for most of my adult life 😉 ;).
Textbook prices have always made me question these publishers’ motives. If we want to get smarter and evolve as a society, why is access to these books and new information so difficult or so pricey? I didn’t know your insight into B&N, but it makes total sense. Now I feel bad for always buying used and then keeping my books, but I also don’t cause denying profits to capitalists is always on my to-do list. One perk of Thrift Books is that you can often get older or out-of-print texts.
I also believe in open access to data and information as a way to create class consciousness and fight back against a classist system that wants to keep education and knowledge locked away for the few to hold over the heads of the rest. In its basic form, it is a sense of class-directed violence.
Sorry to hear that you’re feeling ill! I definitely agree with what you’ve written here, and I must admit I also find the Rally House mildly infuriating — a university should have a bookstore, and that bookstore should *actually sell books!* I agree with your observation that digital piracy is a stopgap solution for a wider problem — we’ve seen instances like Sci-Hub ceasing to accept submissions and InternetArchive lawsuits that show even these workaround can be vulnerable to copyright. But, while we have them, one sentiment I’ve often read is that in the age of available privacy, paid services are a convenience rather than a necessity. So, by using them, students are in a way working to help force publishers to make their work more accessible.
Alexa,
Hope you feel better!
Its interesting to hear your first hand experience with the publishing system. Just based off your interactions with Barnes and Noble, the publishing system truly sounds like a broken and often inflated system as mentioned in the Resnick article. By creating fees such as the ones you had mentioned, this closes off education at class/economic levels leading to discrepancies not only in access at different pay points but in the education that one can potentially receive. This publishing system attacks not only people’s wallets but restricts the ability of entire populations to attain new info.
Alexa,
Hope you have recovered!
In the Golden Age of Piracy, the Atlantic pirates were a proto- Marxist revolt against the unfettered capitalism of empire. It is uncanny how much the world resembles theirs. I hope that today’s digital pirates will be able to bring down the new East India Company located in silicon valley.