patients in Tenen 2016
imagine it to be. It will be a meeting about the growing
conflict between those who assert their intellectual property rights and those
who assert their right to access information freely.
Working at a North American university, it is easy to forget that most people
in the United States and abroad lack affordable access to published
information – books, medical research, science, and law. Outside of a
university subscription, reading a single academic article may cost upwards of
several hundred dollars. The pricing structure precludes any meaningful idea
of independent research.
Imagine yourself a physician or a young scientist somewhere in the global
south, or in Eastern Europe, or anywhere really without a good library and
without the means to pay exorbitant subscription prices demanded by the
distributors. How will you keep current in your field? How are you to do right
for your patients in following the latest treatment protocols? What about
citizen science or simply due diligence on the part of patients, litigants, or
primary school students in search for reputable sources? Wherever library
budgets do not soar into the millions, research involves building archives
that exist outside of the intellectual property regime. It involves the
organizational effort required to collect, sort, and share information widely.
A number of prominent sites and communities emerged in the past decade in an
attempt to address the global imbalance of access to information. Among them,
Sci-Hub. [1] Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, a young neuroscientist from
Kazakhstan, the site makes close to 50 million scientific articles available
for download. Elbakyan describes the mission of her library as »removing all
barriers that impede the widest possible distribution of knowledge in human
society.« Compare this with Google’s mission »to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible an
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