Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives

Abstract

Despite the advance of the Open Access (OA) movement, most scholarly production can only be accessed through a paywall. We conduct an international survey among researchers (N = 3304) to measure the willingness and motivations to use (or not use) scholarly piracy sites, and other alternatives to overcome a paywall such as paying with their own money, institutional loans, just reading the abstract, asking the corresponding author for a copy of the document, asking a colleague to get the document for them, or searching for an OA version of the paper. We also explore differences in terms of age, professional position, country income level, discipline, and commitment to OA. The results show that researchers most frequently look for OA versions of the documents. However, more than 50% of the participants have used a scholarly piracy site at least once. This is less common in high-income countries, and among older and better-established scholars. Regarding disciplines, such services were less used in Life & Health Sciences and Social Sciences. Those who have never used a pirate library highlighted ethical and legal objections or pointed out that they were not aware of the existence of such libraries.

WEIRD–Confucian comparisons: Ongoing cultural biases in psychology’s evidence base and some recommendations for improving global representation.

“…Such access is rare, if nonexistent, in less affluent countries. Many researchers from less affluent countries either bounce back from paywalls or rely on resources that openly violate copyrights (Segado-Boj et al, 2022). In effect, whereas researchers in more affluent countries can openly and legally carry out their work, researchers in less affluent countries-if they want to keep the level of their more affluent colleagues-need to regularly break the law.…”

“…If the WEIRD and Confucian societies are to become knowledge-based societies, investing in proliferating knowledge—also around the world—seems an obvious direction. If this sounds unrealistic, readers should remember that articles are already actually free , but against the law (see Segado-Boj et al, 2022)—therefore, we can expect that publishing houses may also be interested in such intergovernmental mechanisms of financing free access to scientific publications.…”

WEIRD-Confucian comparisons: Ongoing cultural biases in psychology’s evidence base and some recommendations for improving global representation.

“…If the WEIRD and Confucian societies are to become knowledge-based societies, investing in proliferating knowledge -also around the world -seems an obvious direction. If this sounds unrealistic, readers should remember that papers are already actually free, but against the law (see Segado-Boj et al, 2022)-therefore, we can expect that publishing houses may also be interested in such inter-governmental mechanisms of financing free access to scientific publications.…”

Missing a golden opportunity? An analysis of publication trends by income level in the Directory of Open Access Journals 1987–2020

“…The gold open access model is becoming one of the most common business models under which new open access articles are being published (Jurchen, 2020;Piwowar et al, 2019), although this varies between different areas of research and geographic regions (Gumpenberger et al, 2013;Hadad & Aharony, 2022;Momeni et al, 2021;Segado-Boj et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2018). The gold open access model can exacerbate the monoculture of knowledge production, calling to mind previous findings that Western male faculty members are overrepresented in positions of power among the world's top sociology departments (Demeter & Toth, 2020).…”