Perception survey on Sci-Hub

[Mallikarjun Dora]

Dear Sir/Madam,

The recent court case against sci-hub and Libgen by Elsevier, Wiley, and ACS (American Chemical Society) in India has triggered much academic discussion on the academic freedom and ethics on accessing scholarly resources. The Sci-Hub is a service that allows researchers to access all the scholarly papers which are behind a paywall. Alexandra Elbakyan, a young computer programmer from Kazakhstan, founded Sci-Hub to fill the gap in accessibility for quality journal articles.  From its genesis, the sci-hub faces many challenges from the major publishers as the site makes a free database of all the articles which are behind a paywall that costs a lot to the publisher who generates this content. There are already court cases in the USA and many other countries. Coming to India,  many Indian researchers who don't have access to scholarly content are quite dependent on the sci-hub for their research needs, the 2017 usage data of sci-hub shows, 8.7% of the request came from India which is 13 million downloads of research papers. On one side there is an ethics issue and on another side, there is an increase in the price of scholarly resources which is hindering the people who don't have access but want to contribute to scholarly research. The researcher and scholar are divided on the sci-hub issues, where those who believe that knowledge should be free to all and those affirm that there is a price for everything including knowledge. 

In view of this, the present survey  is being conducted to know the perception of the teaching faculty/ researchers/ librarian/ scientists towards Sci-Hub vis-a-vis commodification of scholarly communications. The survey will take five minutes to complete.  The information provided by you in the survey will be used for academic purposes only and kept confidential.

Link of the survey: https://iima.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bC5tdBtJZxgVTKK

Thank you in advance for your honest feedback.

Regards

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Mallikarjun Dora
Assistant Librarian, Vikram Sarabhai Library, IIM Ahmedabad
Phone: 079-7152-4979, Mobile: 91-9727713290
Google Scholar Profile
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