To the Farmers: the Land - to the Workers: the Factories - To the Scientists: the Articles

One of the main concepts that underpins the work of the Institute is open access to knowledge and technology serving the interests of science, education and innovation. On May 31, Director of the Institute Alexey Ivanov developed this theme at a section of the forum "Internet + Education" devoted to the problems of free access for Russian scientists to scientific output, and the creation of an open infrastructure for scientific communication.

The session was moderated by Ivan Zassoursky (MSU), among speakers well-known in the professional community of specialists in the field of intellectual property and scientific communication: Anatoly Kozyrev (CEMI RAS), Dmitry Semyachkin (Cyberleninka), Irina Radchenko (ITMO), Alexander Kuznetsov (NEICON). The participants discussed the existing schemes of work relating to leading commercial publishers and the possibility of creating new models of circulation for scientific information.

 

A special and most interesting guest of the discussion was Alexandra Elbakyan, widely known in the West, a fighter for information equality, in the realm of copyright, and she is the founder of the 'academic piracy' online resource Sci-Hub that provides unauthorised access to more than 50 million scientific articles, which today represents about 90% of the content of major scientific publishers. Alexandra and her creation hit the headlines of American newspapers in 2015, and the resource has been blocked several times, and she faces legal action from the publisher Elsevier, in New York, but Sci-Hub develops and expands its user base, the majority of which are located in India, China, Iran, the USA and Russia. Alexandra explained her vision of the problem of 'monopoly', about the leading peer-reviewed journals and their own values in this regard. According to her, the speed of access in modern science is the key issue. Our global community is an analogue of a huge brain, and the information in it must circulate freely so that society as a whole learns and develops, and paywalls stand in the way of this. "If you remember history's lessons, it's like the conflict between workers and capitalists," suggested Alexandra. Scientists are exploited, and someone needs to start a riot. Russia and the CIS countries could be pioneers in the subject of open access."

 

Alexey supported Alexandra, noting that we do see today a new round of confrontation between labor and capital in the new economy. At this stage it is important to speak about the value of a framework, and not to discuss the mechanical issues of its infrastructure just yet. Regarding the system today, we need to look for an answer, about how should we organize and support science.

 

"It is impossible to develop openness with one hand, and with the other pay proprietary to western journals for the publications of our scientists. Why must science directly subsidise the commercial gains of publishers?" Alexei touched on a description of the business model of these "scientific monopolies". According to him, the top legal journals are not selling academic content - they are selling scientific status, ratings, the ability to publish under the prestigious cover... In fact, the earnings are fed by vanity, in the closed, self-propagating model of Western science. But Russia is not obliged to play by these rules, and questions about the models of development for scientific knowledge have been - and should remain - subject to political choice, and issues of serious national policy.

 

In the 90s, along with the "brain drain" to the West there was a tremendous technology transfer, when the Soviet scientific developments along with their founders settled in the USA. It may be time for a return transfer, and this from some perspectives is now seen to be gradually gaining momentum. To put Russian science on the export, our scientists need more knowledge and information from abroad. "The time for creative destruction, has come," concluded Alexey.

 

Video of the session can be viewed here.