Author : Stuart Lawson
Open access has been progressively making more scholarship openly available. But a majority of journal articles are still behind paywalls so some people have turned to piracy to access them.
While some regard this practice as criminal and unethical, for others ‘liberating’ research is a justified act of civil disobedience.
This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge.
By doing so, we can see that since piracy is not only an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape but can potentially drive progressive developments in communication practices, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge.
URL : Access, ethics, and piracy
Alternative location : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/k483r/