#research libraries

A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1602, the Bodleian Library in Oxford opened to the public. The Bodleian is still a research library to this day, but it houses many treasures including four copies of the Magna Carta, letters of Percy Shelley, Shakespeare’s First Folio, and a Gutenberg Bible.

“Readers at Oxford’s Bodleian Library are still required to swear an oath promising ‘not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library’, a reminder of the days when such activities could prove as lethal to books as to people.”

[P. 36-37 The History of Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction by Jacqueline Stedall]

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In Silicon Valley, this would be called the “disruption” of higher education ... without the profit  ;)

She has even been compared to Robin Hood, although she said, “Sometimes I think it is not a good comparison, since what he was doing was illegal. And sharing books and research articles should not be illegal.”

Context

Scholars and librarians say the publishers then use this to take advantage of them.

Researchers sign over the copyright and provide their work, often taxpayer funded, free to publishers who then get other researchers to review the papers — also free. The publishers then sell journal subscriptions — some titles cost more than $5,000 a year — back to universities and the federal government. And if someone wants an article, that costs about $35, so that person is paying for the research and to read the results.

“That means that I, as a taxpayer, (am) paying for the research and paying again for the benefit of reading it,” a man who identified himself as John Dowd wrote to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as part of a forum on public access. “This seems patently unfair.”

Critics also say that publishers raise prices faster than inflation — each side argues pricing changes in differing and confusing ways — and further increase their revenue by continually adding new journals for universities to subscribe to individually or in packages. There are now 28,100 journals publishing 2.5 million articles a year. Expenses for journals and other subscriptions have risen 456 percent since 1986, according to the Association of Research Libraries.

Why? “world liberation of knowledge”

Pirating was a skill Elbakyan learned growing up in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, where Internet access was extremely limited and content — books, music, movies — was expensive. That experience shaped this belief: “All content,” she declares, “should be copied without restriction.”