injustices in Bodo 2016
the same voice, and tell very similar stories. Aaron
Swartz was an American hacker willing to break both laws and locks in his
quest for free access. In his 2008 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” (Swartz
2008), he forcefully argued for the unilateral liberation of scholarly
knowledge from behind paywalls to provide universal access to a common human
heritage. A few years later he tried to put his ideas into action by
downloading millions of journal articles from the JSTOR database without
authorization. Alexandra Elbakyan is a 27-year-old neurotechnology researcher
from Kazakhstan and the founder of Sci-hub, a piratical collection of tens of
millions of journal articles that provides unauthorized access to paywalled
articles to anyone without an institutional subscription. In a letter to the
judge presiding over a court case against her and her pirate library, she
explained her motives, pointing out the lack of access to journal articles.[2]
Elbakyan also believes that the inherent injustices encoded in current system
of scholarly publishing, which denies access to everyone who is not
willing/able to pay, and simultaneously denies payment to most of the authors
(Mars and Medak 2015), are enough reason to disregard the fundamental IP
framework that enables those injustices in the first place. Other shadow
librarians expand the basic access/injustice arguments into a wider critique
of the neoliberal political-economic system that aims to commodify and
appropriate everything that is perceived to have value (Fuller 2011; Interview
with Dusan Barok 2013; Sollfrank 2013).
Whatever prompts them to act, pirate librarians firmly believe that the fruits
of human thought and scientific research belong to the whole of humanity.
Pirates have the opportunity, the motivation, the tools, the know-how, and the
courage to create radical techno-social alternatives. So they resist the
status quo by collecting and “guarding” scholarly knowledge in libraries that
are freely accessible to all.
Water-damaged books drying, 1985.
Both the curators of the British Museum and the pirate librarians claim to
save the common heritage of humanity, but any similarities end there. Pirate
libraries have
injustices in Mattern 2018
aked about academics perhaps giving a bit more thought to whether the
politics of their publishing _venues_ – their media of dissemination –
matched the politics they’re arguing for in their research. Maybe, I proposed,
we aren’t serving either ourselves or our readers very well by advocating for
social justice or “the commons” – or sharing progressive research on labor
politics and care work and the elitism of academic conventions – in journals
that extract huge profits from free labor and exploitative contracts and fees.
Despite my attempt to drown my “call to action” in a swamp of rhetorical
conditionals – “maybe” I was “kind-of” hedging “just a bit”? – several folks
quickly, and constructively, pointed out some missing nuances in my tweet.
[Librarian and LIS scholar Emily Drabinski
noted](https://twitter.com/edrabinski/status/969629307147563008) the dangers
of suggesting that individual “bad actors” are to blame for the hypocrisies
and injustices of a broken system – a system that includes authors, yes, but
also publishers of various ideological orientations, libraries, university
administrations, faculty review committees, hiring committees, accreditors,
and so forth.
And those authors are not a uniform group. Several junior scholars replied to
say that they think _a lot_ about the power dynamics of academic publishing
(many were “hazed,” at an early age, into the [Impact
Factor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) Olympics, encouraged to
obsessively count citations and measure “prestige”). They expressed a desire
to experiment with new modes and media of dissemination, but lamented that
they had to bracket their ethical concerns and aesthetic aspirations. Because
tenure. Open-access publications, and more-creative-but-less-prestigious
venues, “don’t count.” Senior scholars chimed in, too, to acknowledge that
scholars often publish in different venues at different times for different
purposes to
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