[Irtalk] Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers - The Chronicle of Higher Education

[Hilton Gibson]

​T​
he rise, fall, and resurfacing of a popular piracy website for
scholarly-journal articles, Sci-Hub, has highlighted tensions between
academic librarians and scholarly publishers.
​
Academics are increasingly turning to websites like Sci-Hub to view
subscriber-only articles that they cannot obtain at their college or that
they need more quickly than interlibrary loan can provide.

That trend puts librarians in an awkward position. *While many are
proponents of open access and understand the challenges scholars face in
gaining access to information, they are also bound by their contracts with
publishers, which obligate them to crack down on pirates.* And while few,
if any, librarians openly endorse piracy, many believe that the
scholarly-publishing system is broken.

http://chronicle.com/article/Librarians-Find-Themselves/235353
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