Shadow libraries, webinar today

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Frederick Noronha

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May 12, 2022, 6:50:13 AM5/12/22

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OASPA

Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association

OASPA NEWS

Webinar: Shadow Libraries and Access to Knowledge: Origins, Policies, Legality, and Accessibility

April 26, 2022 by Bernie Folan

Date: Thursday May 12, 2022

Time: 2 – 3.30 pm UK (1 – 2.30 pm UTC)

Other timezones: 6.00 am Pacific Time, 8.00 am Central Time, 9.00 am Eastern Time, 10.00 am Brasilia Time, 3.00 pm Central European Time, 2.00 pm West Africa Time, 3.00 pm South Africa Standard Time, 6.30 pm India Standard Time, 9 pm Central Indonesia Time (Time converter tool)

Large segments of the scholarly literature, both from backlist catalogs and new publications, continue to be only accessible behind paywall infrastructures. This poses a challenge to those scholars not affiliated with well funded research institutions, in particular in the Global South, exacerbating extant inequities. At the same time, the often cumbersome user interfaces of paywall-protected platforms continue to prevent efficient usage by researchers who do happen to have access to these materials. As a result, an ecosystem of so-called “shadow libraries” has evolved, developing different strategies to make closed content accessible to a wide scholarly public. Contrary to for example the music and movie industries, the academic publishing industry has been unable to formulate a platform solution that would provide an alternative.

This OASPA webinar will address the origins and architecture of these forms of widely used online repositories, their position in relation to Open Access policies, legal aspects in terms of copyright and fair use, and what they can teach us in terms of accessibility.

The webinar will be chaired by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (punctum books) and we welcome panelists Arul George Scaria (National Law University Delhi), Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck), Marcell Mars (Memory of the World, Pirate Care), Balász Bodó (University of Amsterdam) and respondent Virginia Crisp (King’s College, London).

Please join us live for this free webinar and contribute to the discussion and the guidelines for open access publishers.

Link to registration page: bit.ly/May22-OASPAWebinar. Please share with your networks.

Biographies

Panelists

Balász Bodó (University of Amsterdam)

Balázs Bodó, PhD, economist, socio-legal researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society in 2006/7 and a Fellow at the Center between 2006 and 2012. In 2012/13 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In 2013 he moved to Amsterdam as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. His academic interests include copyright and economics, piracy, media regulation, peer-to-peer communities, shadow libraries, digital archives, informal media economies, and similar regulatory conflicts around new technological architectures. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html?cb

Martin Paul Eve

Martin has appeared before the UK House of Commons Select Committee BIS Inquiry into Open Access, and been a steering-group member of the OAPEN-UK project, the Jisc National Monograph Strategy Group, the SCONUL Strategy Group on Academic Content and Communications, and the HEFCE Open Access Monographs Expert Reference Panel (2014), and the Universities UK OA Monographs Working Group (2016-). Martin is also an Executive Board Officer for punctum books, a Plan S Ambassador, and he co-founded the Open Library of Humanities. He is currently a work package lead on the COPIM project.

Marcell Mars

Nenad Romić (aka Marcell Mars, b. 1972). Advanced internet user.

Marcell is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute – mi2 (1999) and club mama in Zagreb (2000). He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits (2000); started Skill sharing (2004) informal meetings of technical enthusiasts in mama + regional hacker gatherings ‘Nothing will happen‘ (2007).

Mars started his research “Ruling Class Studies” at Jan van Eyck (2011-12), continued at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2013) and since spring 2015, he is a PhD student at Leuphana University in DCRL (Digital Cultures Research Lab). “Ruling Class Studies” is a research of corporate state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence. It looks closely at the Google, Amazon, Facebook and eBay.

He was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures from 2018 until 2021.

Public Library/Memory of the World was established in 2012 to develop sociotechnical infrastructure and invigorate (again) historical argument for universal access to knowledge. For MotW Marcell develops software and maintains related server infrastructure. Public Library/Memory of the World was heard and exhibited at Museo Reina Sofía, 98weeks, Impakt Festival, Transmediale, The New School, Kunstverein Stuttgart.

He is co-initiator of the Pirate Care project and main developer of Sandpoints, an experimental publishing platform.

Arul George Scaria

Dr Arul George Scaria is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition (CIIPC) at National Law University, Delhi. He is also an Affiliate Faculty of the CopyrightX programme, offered under the auspices of the Harvard Law School. Arul did his doctoral research at the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (IMPRS-CI), Munich. His post-doctoral research was at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. Arul has also worked as a CSIR-NIF Fellow in the IP management division of the National Innovation Foundation, India. Arul has two sole-authored books to his credit – Piracy in the Indian Film Industry: Copyright and Cultural Consonance (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Ambush Marketing: Game within a Game (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also contributed to different international journals and books by drawing from his research. He also contributes regularly to policy making. Most recently, he was the co-chair of a thematic group constituted by the Principal Scientific Advisor and the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for drafting the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP 2020) of India and this group looked at the issue of access to knowledge and resources.

Respondent

Virginia Crisp

Virginia joined CMCI at King’s in 2016. She previously worked at Coventry University as the Course Director for the BA in Media and Communications and Middlesex University as a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies. She is the co-founder (with Dr Gabriel Menotti Gonring) of the Besides the Screen Network (www.besidesthescreen.com), a network that brings together academics, filmmakers, artists and industry professionals from across the globe to consider the transformation of audiovisual media practices. She is also the Principal Investigator on the AHRC networking grant attached to this project.

Virginia is a member of the Piracy Lab, an international research network concerned with analysing the way media piracy affects contemporary society. Her research concerns the changing modes and mechanisms of media distribution: both legal/illegal and formal/informal. She is particularly interested in how issues of access, ownership, participation and control are enacted within both traditional and new media contexts. Her monograph, Film Distribution in the Digital Age: Pirates and Professionals (Palgrave: 2015) investigates the relationship between formal and informal methods of film distribution with a particular focus on film piracy.

Chair

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (punctum books)

Vincent is a specialist in Old Nubian philology, publishing the standard work A Reference Grammar of Old Nubian (Peeters, 2021), and is co-founder of the Union for Nubian Studies and co-managing editor of Dotawo: A Journal of Nubian Studies. He is co-director of scholar- and queer-led open-access press punctum books, board member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association.

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Tagged With: Ana Persic, Iryna Kuchma, Krzysztof Siewicz, Publishers, Raoul Kamadjeu, Roheena Anand, UNESCO, UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, webinar