This is the fourth part of a series on the Moral Dimensions of Open, in preparation for the forthcoming OSI2016 meeting, where I’ll be in the Moral Dimensions group. It’s widely recognised that the established scholarly publishers skim an awful lot of money off the top of research budgets.

This is the third part of a series on the Moral Dimensions of Open, in preparation for the forthcoming OSI2016 meeting, where I’ll be in the Moral Dimensions group. [Part 0 laid the foundation by asking why this matters; and part 1 discussed the argument that price should be zero when marginal cost is zero.] As usual, I will be concentrating on open access.

As I mentioned last time, I will be participating in the “Moral Dimensions of Open” working group at the forthcoming OSI2016 conference.

What would the world look like if, as proposed by the Max Planck Institute, the scholarly world flipped from being dominated by subscriptions to Gold open access? I think there are three things to say. First, incentives. A concern is sometimes expressed that when publishers are paid per paper published, they will have an incentive to want more papers to be published.

From 19th-22nd April this year, it will be my privilege to participate in OSI2016, the first annual meeting of the Open Scholarship Initiative.

The European Commission is putting together a Commission Expert Group to provide advice about the development and implementation of open science policy in Europe. It will be known as the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP). This is potentially excellent news. The OSPP’s primary goal is to “advise the Commission on how to further develop and practically implement open science policy”. But there’s potentially a downside here.

This post shouldn’t need to be written, but apparently it does. In recent discussions of Sci-Hub, I still keep seeing people trot out idiot analogies where copying scientific papers is portrayed as the equivalent of stealing physical goods. A couple of examples: Or: It pains me to read the words of experienced and presumably knowledgeable people when they trot out such absolute nonsense.

Yesterday we asked what will happen if Sci-Hub succeeds (by which I meant that it survives whatever legal challenges come its way, and continues to distribute copyrighted scholarly publications to anyone in the world at zero cost, ignoring the claims of that copyright). Now let’s think about what happens if it fails — that is, if it’s taken down by legal action within Russia, or it’s successfully DDoSed (don’t laugh, I’ve seen it

Let’s think this through. Ignore for now the questions about Sci-Hub’s legality, and just consider the pragmatics. Imagine that it “succeeds” in that it survives whatever legal challenges come its way, and continues to distribute copyrighted scholarly publications to anyone in the world at zero cost, ignoring the claims of that copyright. Then what follows?

THE STORY SO FAR: Erin McKiernan can’t get access to the research she needs in Mexico, Mohammad M.M.H can’t get it in Jordan, and Nora Turoman can’t get it in Serbia.