 Hello and welcome to NewsClick in today's episode of Talking Science and Tech. We are joined by Praveep Rukhyaastha and the issue we are discussing today is the question of access to knowledge and the question of access to science. So three of the biggest publishing houses in the world and severe American Chemical Society and Wiley have just come together to sue two websites I have been lived in demanding an injunction against them. So Praveep to start with can you tell us about this case who are these two websites and why are these three big publishing houses which vacant huge amounts of profits everywhere every year why are they suing Syahab and Libjan? Well it's an interesting issue because while everybody accepts that access to knowledge is a human right that's in fact something which is also said under United Nations. All of that is true but the reality is that if you want to access publications in science or in social sciences then they are behind paywalls and most of those paywalls that are there it's quite expensive to pay for particularly individual copies of papers let alone the journal access to a journal individually or for even the universities or the colleges to subscribe to them. So some of the better ones do have the money and it's a lot of money to subscribe to them but most of the research scholars depend on Syahab for the science journals journal publications which is essentially for their for the research. So let's assume that a research scholar in a year has to look at at least a hundred research articles if not more. So if you take an average cost of the article to them or thirty dollars which would be lower end of the price you're really talking of something like three thousand dollars per year for a research scholar which is not even equivalent to the scholarship it receives. So you're really talking of it a completely inequitable system in which research scholars particularly coming from universities who do not have a large number of subscription to journals and who do not avail of what are called packaged deals with the publishers where they can avail all the journals. So if that is so then most cases they would have to depend on Syahab which is the global repository for all science journals or even social sciences journals and more than the fact that it is free that we just not charging anything this is not for profit they're not doing this for profit at all. The lady who is in charge or who runs this place says that she believes it's completely predatory practice to deny scientific research to people who need to develop it further therefore she is running essentially a private publication house but it is free for everybody. So given that obviously people have turned to Syahab for their research articles but interestingly even those universities which have access to journals to their university system even there the number of downloads from Syahab seem to be very large and that's because it's a one-stop shop you go there and any journal access that is available there is much easier to use so I wonder why the publishing houses which publish all these journals do not make their sites more easy to navigate and the reason for that is very simple they have various ways of restricting you so that without paying the sum of money you can't get in and they have to verify all of that see all the kind of restrictions that exist on the site of course makes it much more difficult for people to avail of the facilities of these even the publishers even if they are under the university system accessible to these websites they find it much more difficult to download the papers from them and therefore Syahab becomes even for them an easier option. So I think it has various elements to it I'm not getting into the libgen today because I think libgen is basically for the books of course that uses that as a much larger set of books and issues to talk about but here we are talking about advances in science and the important point for us to realize advances of this of science are not but done by the publishers they've been done by the scientific community and they are the ones who publish the papers and the ones who require it are also the scientific community so the publishers and in fact the standing as doorkeepers of the research with the scientific community does and also needs for its own development. So the other question that arises here is that why are these papers so expensive in the first place so in the petition to the Delhi High Court these three publishers say that the motivations of Syahab and libgen are not to facilitate research study instructional education but to freeload on the hard work skin and labor of the publishers and the authors. So what is it exactly that the publishing house here is doing which requires you know which makes these their final output so expensive and how much is being given to the authors. The interesting part is they're talking about freeloading and the Syahab is not generating any revenue so it is not freeloading it is making things available free you may object to it but you cannot call it free when it comes to the publishers then of course they are the one who are doing freeloading because the scientific research is done by the scientists under salaries paid by the universities the government by other institutions so they don't have anything to do with the research that is being done the publication the author writes it up for publication again the publisher doesn't really come in it is refereed by the scientific community all of this is free it's not that the writer gets any payment even the referee who actually looks at the article makes comment even that is free and finally when it is published only then the publisher comes in taking the manuscript and they have very strict rules that you have to make it if you do graphics you have to do it in this format if you do the article it has to be either in this format and that format so they sort of force the authors to do most of the work and then of course the transfer to digital format by which it can be distributed that's done by the publisher does it warrant this kind of cost and I'll give you one simple example to show how predatory this business has become and this is really the transformation of scientific publishing by Maxwell the British entrepreneur and freebooter who finally committed it's believed committed suicide because he had siphoned off 400 million dollars from the employee's pension funds he's the one who converted what is to be stayed sober business of publishing into this kind of predatory publishing that we now see which Elsevier of course is the linchpin but so is Wiley and a couple of others now when you see the transformation that is taken place it's interesting in the last 10 15 20 years for example the if you see the rise of the the what would we call index the price index then you would see it's risen by maybe 180 120 percent is roughly the rise of the price index but if you take the price of the journals they have risen by something like over 500 percent so that shows there is super profits being made in this particular sphere of business second part they the profit margin of Elsevier is 37 percent now that is twice the profit margin although it's twice the profit margin of Google which is 19 percent and Google is one of the most profitable companies in the world and we know that so if we are talking about big money this is a 10 billion dollar business of scientific publication so it's not a small segment of business but I think the important part to understand is it is it is what powers the rest of the world's development so if we take science and technology as a major driver of the economy as a major driver of society today it is that knowledge with the scientific community is providing in which these publishers are acting as gatekeepers and charging essentially uh exorbitant price and super profits and the problem again is that maybe it's possible in the universe of the called the universities and advanced countries to pay this kind of cost but certainly not in countries like India Iran which are the major centers of science research as can be seen by the publications and downloading of the publications but as I said it's interesting even in the advanced countries the university libraries universities are now saying we can't pay these prices and there have been cases where major even university systems like university of California for instance decided to cancel all the subscription subscriptions to Elsevier and this is not a loan example the other examples also so these this is increasingly becoming apparent that this task of providing the papers doing the research checking the quality of the papers and then paying for it again is as a model is not something which is sustainable and I think this is the reason that these publishing houses are going for exorbitant prices no they know it's a short term model which won't last for too long and then failing that they are now trying to see that companies like or organizations entities like Scihub which are essentially liberating that information for the public is then stopped and because they can't stop it where it exists we don't know where the Scihub person who's done it where she lives and therefore trying to block the website and asking the ISPs to block the website this is the legal strategy they have taken whether this strategy is legally going to succeed and not we'll have to see but I think people need to react to this because if it happens it's really going to set back Indian science in a huge in a big way and we don't have the money particularly the smaller universities and institutions won't have the money to pay what Scihub so sorry what Elsevier and others are asking for so given that I think we are in for some hard times if this what they have asked for the prayer to block the ISPs ask the ISPs to block Scihub and its various outcasts take place so I think that's something that we'll have to watch will it hold well you know there are VPN possibilities that exist so even if it's locked in India it won't be locked elsewhere so we'll have to see whether how many can really avail of that but these are things which are far more structurally important and I think that is what leads the scientific community has to decide how it will maintain this relationship with the publishers because this is a as at the moment is a is a logo for the scientific community they do all the work and then they are you know they are asked to pay huge amounts for the work they have done that's not a viable long-term solution for this and finally probably what do you think is a legal way forward is there a defense here do you think the court will acknowledge the ground reality that what did this could mean for researchers and how it could impact scientific development and act on their behalf well you know the law has various provisions because even in the United States they could not get the sites blocked so ISPs were not blocked ISPs did not block the sites so there is the legal issue is not as straightforward as it might appear in the first instance it has to be shown that the only purpose of SAHUB is basically providing articles which are under copyright now as we know there are a huge number of articles which are not under copyright in India but these publishers will not give us access to them say they are under copyright in Europe or in the United States we have a 60-year regime of copyright there are also educational exceptions that we have that for the purpose of education there are exceptions that we can take care of in the copyright law and therefore for for if I need it for my research and I need to download a copy is that illegal no is it illegal for SAHUB to provide it to me that is the legal test that we have to see as I said it's not as straightforward we have the as you know the copyright infringement case which was pursued against photocopying in Delhi University and that the publishers lost the I think this issue is not just going to be legal one it's also going to test what the scientific community in India says and one part of it while they have been deeply indebted by the existence of SAHUB are they willing to speak in its favor or do they think actually it is theft and therefore we should not speak about it to be seen to be condoning theft I think we have to make it very clear that knowledge is universal the right to knowledge is universal it has been created by scientific community they have not put a price on it the publishers had a business model which allowed the this knowledge to be retrieved in a way which was equitable that yes we paid some money but it was reasonable then the existence of SAHUB might not have come about but having not done that now to try and come down on the users essentially this is what happened the users will have to pay the price she doesn't have to pay the price the owner of SAHUB is now going to pay the price rest of the world is downloading papers from SAHUB and you continue to do so but the Indian scientific community which is not small it's a it's a quite a large one you pay heavy price and if you go and look at the downloads you will see India Iran of course United States also and some of the European countries are the largest users of SAHUB so it's not that this is something which is a marginal use for marginal issue for India but the Indian scientific community if the courts really look at a very narrow interpretation of this then I think that it will lead the scientific community to be really hard hit and our research to be very hard I think that's the issue as you know even I or you when we want to look at some of the papers we don't subscribe to all of them but for wanting to know what has happened we need to look at some of them and of course we do use platforms like this to see what material is there thank you for speaking to us on this issue today and that's all the time we have keep watching this click