The science of piracy, the piracy of science Who are the science pirates and where do they come from. Part 1

In 2016, Science published a short report on the usage of SciHub, a piratical scholarly journal article distribution service. Set up by Alexandra Elbakyan, a kazakhstani scientist, SciHub allows users to bypass journal publishers’ paywalls, so everyone can have access to journal articles for free. The report, based on a dataset provided by Elbakyan, offered a stunning insight into the underground circulation of scholarly knowledge. The colourful maps made it clear that it is not just developing countries that seem to struggle with access issues: high income European and North American countries are also eager pirates of scholarly articles.

The topic of this post is a closely related phenomenon: the underground circulation of scholarly books. Using a dataset provided to us by one of the administrators of a prominent shadow library, we mapped both the supply of and the demand for academic monographs, textbooks and other learning materials via piratical shadow libraries. Our primary findings suggest that scholarly book piracy is a ubiquitous global phenomenon, with no apparent end in sight. If that is indeed true, what might the consequences be for the status quo in scholarly publishing?