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February 4, 2020 02:41 pm

'It's a Moral Imperative': Archivists Made a Directory of 5,000 Coronavirus Studies To Bypass Paywalls

A group of online archivists have created an open-access directory of over 5,000 scientific studies about coronaviruses that anyone can browse and download without encountering a paywall. From a report: The directory is hosted on The-Eye, a massive online archiving project run by a Reddit user named "-Archivist." Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency amid the spread of the novel coronavirus beyond China, where it originated, into roughly two dozen countries so far. The organizers of the archive see their project as a resource for scientists and non-scientists alike to study the virus. "These articles were always written to be shared with as many people as possible," Reddit user "shrine," an organizer of the archive, said in a call. "From every angle that you look at it, [paywalled research] is an immoral situation, and it's an ongoing tragedy." In 2015, Liberian public health officials co-authored a New York Times op-ed that lamented the amount of critical Ebola research that was unknown or inaccessible to scientists and health workers at the center of the 2014 epidemic. "Even today, downloading one of the papers would cost a physician here $45, about half a week's salary," the authors wrote. Shrine, who is in his late 20s, said he was inspired to assemble the archive when, last week, he clicked on a new research article about the coronavirus and encountered a $39.95 paywall. He and a few friends started to brainstorm solutions around paywalls like the one he had run into. They came up with the idea of searching for coronavirus-related papers on Sci-Hub, a free scientific research repository sometimes called "the Pirate Bay of science." Sci-Hub's site says it provides free access to over 78 million research articles by downloading HTML and PDF pages off the web, in some cases bypassing paywalls. Because of this, major scientific publishing companies -- most prominently Elsevier -- have repeatedly sued Sci-Hub for copyright infringement. Similarly, by disseminating PDFs from Sci-Hub, the coronavirus archive is in questionable legal territory.

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