Is Biblioleaks Inevitable?

Abstract

In 2014, the vast majority of published biomedical research is still hidden behind paywalls rather than open access. For more than a decade, similar restrictions over other digitally available content have engendered illegal activity. Music file sharing became rampant in the late 1990s as communities formed around new ways to share. The frequency and scale of cyber-attacks against commercial and government interests has increased dramatically. Massive troves of classified government documents have become public through the actions of a few. Yet we have not seen significant growth in the illegal sharing of peer-reviewed academic articles. Should we truly expect that biomedical publishing is somehow at less risk than other content-generating industries? What of the larger threat—a “Biblioleaks” event—a database breach and public leak of the substantial archives of biomedical literature? As the expectation that all research should be available to everyone becomes the norm for a younger generation of researchers and the broader community, the motivations for such a leak are likely to grow. We explore the feasibility and consequences of a Biblioleaks event for researchers, journals, publishers, and the broader communities of doctors and the patients they serve.

Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text‐sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing

“…Overall, 71% of the scimag papers stemmed from uploads of more than 100,000 papers a day, which occurred on 13 days in total. These figures suggest that biblioleaks as imagined in the essay by Dunn et al (2014) have already happened. The three other databases represent 10% only of the LibGen collection.…”

“…For instance, 71% of the paper collection was uploaded in 13 days at a rate of 100,000+ papers a day. It is likely that such massive collections of papers result from biblioleaks (Dunn et al, 2014), but one can only speculate about this because of the undocumented source of each file cached at LibGen. With a median of 2,720 new papers uploaded a day, most additions to the text-sharing platform are not massive.…”

“…In a stimulating essay, opening like a sci-fi novel Dunn, Coiera, and Mandl (2014) coin the neologism 'biblioleaks' with reference to the information leakage cases that have made the news in the past few years. What if so-called hackers infiltrated the digital libraries of major subscription-based publishers, downloaded scientific articles en masse, and released them through anonymous peer-to-peer networks?…”

“…This practice is popular on Twitter, the leading microblogging service where users post short messages called 'tweets' (Efron, 2011). The #icanhazpdf hashtag was coined in 2011 to mark tweets requesting the PDF file of a paper (Bond, 2013;Dunn et al, 2014;Kroll, 2011). These tweets invite users entitled to access the requested paper to send it by email or direct message (i.e., non-public).…”

Bringing Open Access into Interlibrary Loan with the Open Access Button

“…7 Usage of the hashtag facilitates a peer-to-peer sharing of academic research. #icanhazpdf has been characterized as a type of "guerilla Open Access, " 8 following internet activist Aaron Swartz's manifesto of the same name that stated that information is power and should be shared with the world. 9 Twitter users needing access to academic research simply tweet out the article title, a link to the article, and the hashtag #icanhazpdf.…”