On Second-hand Scholarship and Academic Pirates

Your Scholarly Digest 4th September, 2025

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Online Thumbnail Credits: Cleveland Museum of Arts Open Access Collection

Hi Scholar,

Sci-Hub, the largest and probably most efficient academic shadow library ever created, will have its 14th birthday tomorrow, after being officially launched on the 5th of September 2011. The mood this year is unlikely to be a celebratory one; on the 19th of August, the New Delhi High Court ordered that Sci-Hub be blocked in India, ending a years long case for copyright infringement brought by Elsevier, Wiley and the ACS. 

According to data from the dimensions.ai database, between the 1st of January 2020 and the present day, 41.7 million new journal articles have been published. Despite continuing momentum in Open Access, 45% of them (or 18.9 million) have been published behind a paywall. While Sci-Hub clearly violates copyright law, for scholars at universities with modest library budgets, or scholars working independently, it is not hard to imagine the benefits that the project has brought. It is not an exaggeration to say that, despite its illegality, no other initiative has rivalled its impact in expanding access to research literature. 

P.S. We’ve had some technical difficulties with…well, basically our entire backend this week - if you’ve tried to send us an email and it was not delivered, that would be why. It’s also why you’re getting this week’s Digest on Saturday instead of Thursday. We’re back up and running now though.

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BRAIN FOOD

Pirates of The Academy

Pirate networks like Scihub, LibGen, Anna’s Archive, and the now defunct AAAAARG.ORG  – to name a few – have made use of the digital networked technologies of our time in attempts to provide alternative, autonomous, self-organising models of knowledge sharing. These kinds of projects are experimental not just with regards to the material scaffolding of how knowledge sharing practices are dis/organised – providing radical alternatives to the commodification of knowledge – but also with the conceptual scaffoldings of access, authorship, copyright that underpin knowledge, research, and scholarship. As Lance Eaton tells us, scholars' participation on these academic pirate networks are not just driven by their access needs but also “by ideological resistance to the perceived exploitative nature of current academic publishing practices and associated social, geographical, and institutional inequities in access to research literature.” In this sense, pirate networks are not only materially different projects but also embody a different kind of philosophy altogether.

It is in light of these radical projects that Gary Hall asks us – academics, thinkers, writers, and scholars – to consider how we can act not just for or with such practices and projects but in terms of them. That is, we do not simply take the paternalistic and solidaristic stances of protesting alongside, writing about, and speaking up against education and research as business. Instead, Hall's provocation is that we allow them to reshape our own practices: to be willing to put into question and even reconfigure the very material and social practices of writing, teaching, knowledge production in ways that are remade by the conditions such projects open up. In his words:  

Here Hall is not only calling for us to support or defend pirate practices from the sidelines, but to enter into their logic, to treat them as experimental trials of what academic and cultural life could be. In this sense, what he is inviting us to consider is: what if we were to act according to the philosophy of ‘online piracy’, which is a ‘moral philosophy through and through’? 

Tracing the etymology of the word ‘pirate’, Hall shows us that the word in its classical terms, when it first appeared in ancient Greek texts, was ‘closely related to the noun peira, “trial” or “attempt”, and so to the verb peiraō: the “pirate” would then be the one who “tests”, “puts to proof”, “contends with”, and “makes an attempt”. Accordingly, acting something like pirates would involve ‘attempts’ to ‘contend with’ the new conditions and possibilities created by networked digital culture, to ‘trial’ and put to ‘proof’ new forms of culture, economy, and education: 

What is at the heart of acting and thinking like pirates in academic labour is not simply participating in projects of partial refusal, projects that are conditional and limited. It is about engaging in practices that trial radically emancipatory, oppositional, and destabilising models of education and research beyond the framework espoused by free-market capitalism. Hall offers the example of our current move towards open access publishing. While open access publishing has the potential of becoming – and indeed has at times been regarded as – a ‘movement’, it has also quickly become a variety of economic models, institutional policies, and just another means of distribution, marketing, and promotion. Yet at the same time, the move towards open access publication has created some genuine ‘openings’ which academics can use to destabilise and rethink scholarly publishing even further. That is, to borrow Hall’s phrasing:

If open access represents one such opening, what happens when we push further, taking Hall’s invitation seriously to act ‘in terms of’ piracy? What other forms and shapes could our practices of knowledge production and sharing take when we act in terms of pirates? How could we – in practice – act like pirates in our own everyday practices as we attempt to build an academy that is not based on 

Take, for example, the case of organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley’s Open Notebook Science. Here, Bradley made the ‘details of every experiment done in his lab’, freely available to the public on the internet ‘in real time’, ‘within hours of production, not after the months or years involved in peer review.’ This was not only findings of successful experiments, but all data and experiments, including failed experiments. Open Notebook Science has since been taken up by other scientists as part of the broader open science movement, extending the radical gesture of publishing research as it happens. However, what is piratical about such open notebooks is that they trial alternative modes of knowledge sharing that resist the enclosures of copyright and proprietary temporality, and that trouble the very idea of knowledge as a finished, ownable product. Instead of the fixed, bound, and finalised article that journals demand exclusive rights to sell or distribute, notebooks and other such practices inspired by Bradley’s Notebook enable work to be distributed in fragments, in sequences that refuse the linearity of publication, under different titles, versions, times, names, and forms. In doing so, they generate knowledge that is much harder to capture, bind, or commodify – legally, economically, temporally, or conceptually – as a publication.

In this sense, experiments like Open Notebook Science might give us ideas for how to enact Hall’s invitation to act not just for or with pirate practices but in terms of them. But here, Scholar, as you think about experimenting with becoming-pirate, we will also remind you that to embody the pirate ethos of peira – trial, attempt, testing – is to leave the safe harbour of the academy as it stands. This means to risk attack not only on the corporatization and marketization of the university, but also on the professional identity of the academic. To think and act like pirate philosophers is to accept this danger: a direct challenge to the secure ground on which scholars have long operated, grounded as it is in orthodox ideas of authorship, originality, and ownership. Yet Hall reminds us that such risks may be necessary if we are to resist the ‘becoming business’ of the university, for 

NEWS

Second Hand Journal Articles for Sale

There is a reason why you cannot buy or sell second-hand digital journal articles or books: it's called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1996). Introduced to protect the interests of publishers and producers of digital media from films to music to peer reviewed articles, one effect of the DMCA was to effectively eliminate any possibility of a legal secondary market for the buying and selling of digital media. However SciNet, a new platform launched by Alexandra Elbakyan - the founder and administrator of Sci-Hub - is in the early stages of creating an (unsurprisingly illegal) secondary market. 

On SciNet, users can place a request for an article that is not already in the SciNet archive and offer a reward (the minimum as of 2 months ago was $1) which an uploader receives if they provide the article. Articles are only paid for once: after they are uploaded, anyone can access the article in the SciNet archive. SciNet is an example of a Decentralized Science (DeSci) project, which uses blockchain technology to validate transactions between users and its own unique cryptocurrency token $scihub to facilitate buying and selling - for a more detailed overview of DeSci and Sci-Hub’s use of cryptocurrency see our previous essay here. It’s an interesting development in the overall story of the “arms race” between shadow libraries and traditional academic publishers. Historically, Sci-Hub was able to access content which is legally owned by publishing companies with nothing more than login credentials. However, the expansion of Sci-Hub’s archive ended in 2022 following an increase in the use of 2 factor-authentication (2FA) when accessing literature. The response to these tighter security measures is the SciNet model where users are actively rewarded for their efforts to add to the shadow library’s content.  

Up until now, Sci-Hub and similar shadow libraries have often been defended (even if technically illegal) on moral grounds. While incredibly useful, using shadow libraries is also a way to protest against paywalls and show support for open access and the democratization of knowledge (see Eaton 2025 for more on this topic). However, an introduction of monetary rewards raises a risk that contributions will no longer be given out of principle, but motivation for profit. Seen through a neoliberal lens, however, the emergence of SciNet is simply the result of market mechanisms doing what they do best: providing a service to meet a need as efficiently and cheaply as possible.  

Disclaimer: this piece is not intended to encourage or endorse the use of Sci-Hub or SciNet. We're simply reporting on recent developments that we think are super interesting. 

RESOURCE

Unpaywalled Access to Literature

Rather than sharing a single reading for this week’s resource, we want to share a tool to help you get the readings you need. It’s a browser extension called Unpaywall. Whenever you hit a paywalled article, it searches its open database of nearly 54 million scholarly papers, and if a free, legal version exists, it gives you a way in.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoctoral and Research Positions @ Kings College London, UK: Postdocs: click here 

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Academic Positions @ University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg: click here

• Postdoctoral Positions @ University of Lausanne, Switzerland: click here

• PhD Positions @ Uppsala University, Sweden: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

A really quite awful paper

In 1950 the biochemist Neil Adam received a request from the Royal Society to review a manuscript. It was, in his opinion, a terribly low quality submission which prompted him to write an angry letter back. Part of this letter is presented below:

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