In “Access, Ethics and Piracy,” Stuart Lawson briefly explores the phenomenon of “academic piracy,” or the sharing of copyrighted, toll access research on sites like SciHub or aaaaarg. He relies on the historical framework that Adrian Johns lays in his book Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates to reinforce the idea that intellectual property is not a natural or necessary state, and only came about in response to the rampant copying of books in 18^th century England. Although Lawson isn’t anti-piracy, per se (suggesting that sometimes what is ethical is not the same as what is legal), he does argue that

There is one clear avenue available for those publishers, librarians and researchers who wish to make the results of scholarship as widely available as possible without resorting to breaking copyright law, and that is open access (28).

Lawson credits academic pirating sites for proving that the current, restrictive scholarly communication system is no longer fit for purpose: open access offers a legal alternative.

 

Work cited

Lawson, Stuart. 2017. “Access, Ethics and Piracy.” Insights 30(1): 25–30.