Alberto_Pepe

Co-Founder | Authorea

Hi Vilnius2013. I am fascinated by the rise in popularity of Sci-Hub and, in a way, I support it because it is bringing scholarly and scientific knowledge to people that would not otherwise access to it. At the same time, I think that it is absolutely inconceivable that in year 2016 we need to resort to the dark web and illegal mechanisms to disseminate scholarly content which should inherently be public, open, and free. What is even more irritating is that we have a solution already, today, to freely and publicly disseminate scholarly knowledge. The solution is called preprints. Astronomers and physicists have been doing it since before the web and net existed (libraries would print out new unpublished manuscripts and they would send them around by mail to partner libraries). As I said in another answer, a pre-print is the version immediately prior to what is published in a journal (and post-print immediately after). The pre-print version of an article is ownership of the author and can be deposited in a repository (or if an article is written in Authorea it is already there). So, my question is: why exchange publisher-formatted (illegal) PDFs on a peer to peer network when we can exchange those same articles, in html format, and legally?