The ongoing attempt by an international conglomerate of highly-profitable publishers to shut down Sci-Hub and LibGen is an assault on the ability of scholars and students to access knowledge.

We urge the Delhi High Court to consider that Sci-Hub and Libgen have thrown open the world of knowledge and helped to fire the imagination of students in India. Universities in the global south have much fewer resources than their counterparts in the north. Sci-Hub and Libgen have played a vital part in enabling Indian universities to keep up with cutting edge research the world over. Open access to scholarly knowledge points the way to the future.

 We also urge the courts to recognize that scholarly publications are the result of research that is not funded by private publishers. Moreover, crucial components of the publishing process - peer review and editing - are performed for free by scholars on the understanding that they are helping to further the cause of rigorous knowledge production.

Yet, publication houses charge as much as $30-$50 dollars per article and $2000 to $35,000 per journal title. Based on such exorbitant pricing, big academic publishers make large profits. In 2019, for example, Elsevier’s operating profits were $1.3 billion and Wiley’s were $338 million. Elsevier’s profit margins amount to an eye-watering 35-40%.

Given this, leading  US  and European universities are currently refusing to subscribe to Elsevier for their extortionate practices. Increasingly scholars, government funders, and large foundations have felt that these conglomerates are holding back scientific progress.

Websites like Sci-Hub and LibGen, on the other hand, widen access and scientific progress. About 66% of respondents of a survey at top-tier Indian universities said that they are highly dependent on Sci-Hub. During the pandemic, this has risen to 77%. A 2016 analysis found that Indian scholars downloaded 3.4 million papers over a six-months period from on Sci-Hub. If these were downloaded legally, it would have cost $100-125 million. This is more than half of what all  research institutes in India cumulatively spend on subscriptions to paywalled scholarly literature.
 
To find out more about the information cited in the petition, visit:

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02708-4
2. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
3. https://spicyip.com/2021/01/the-sci-hub-case-why-it-is-time-to-stop-favouring-the-doctrinal-approach-to-law-over-an-empirical-one.html
4. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-30/covid-19-shows-scientific-journals-like-elsevier-need-to-open-up
5. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/the-research-pirates-of-the-dark-web/461829/
6. https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/elsevier-fact-sheet/
7. https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2020/Wiley-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2020-Results/
8. https://www.relx.com/investors/annual-reports/2019

As participants in the global community of scholarship, we urge the publishers to withdraw the lawsuit and the court to stand against the extortionate practices of publishing companies who are profiting off the unpaid labor of the global scholarly community and impeding the free-flow of knowledge and vital new discoveries.