At the university where I work, we had an interesting incident. This event indicated how one could stop scientific activities anywhere in the world. To carry out scientific research at a decent level one needs capable scientists, freedom to travel, laboratories, computers, and literature. Access to literature is crucial, especially to journal articles. These journals are published by a limited number of publishers. In chemistry, for example, the important publishers are the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry, John Wiley, and Elsevier. These publishers make the respective journals available at their own websites against payment. Reasonable research institutions usually pay substantial subscription fees for all its members, since it is impossible to carry out sensible research without having access to articles.
The incident was the following. Several years ago, one of our central computer servers was hacked, and someone was able to download substantial number of ACS journal articles through our server. The response from ACS was immediate, and the access to the journal website was blocked for our entire university. While it was simply annoying in the beginning, as times went on, one started to realize that it is simply impossible to do research without having access to this website. It took almost one month to resolve the situation, and the access was reopened again.
This incident did show, however, that by blocking access to some journal websites one can stop an entire institution (or country) from carrying out research in a given field. In fact, without access to one or two important publishers would be already sufficient to cripple research activities to the point that they become obsolete. In a peaceful world, all this seems like a scenario that could never happen, but the fact that these buttons exist, and that conflicts may set in anytime — a worrisome situation could develop.
How to avoid this situation? One possible answer is the open access initiative. The commercial publishers are also starting to endorse this model, whereby an author can buy rights such that his article is not behind a paywall, but freely accessible on internet. As long the article remains on the publisher's website, one still faces the above problem. However, many open access licenses allow the articles to be redistributed. When these articles would be deposited at author's websites and equally at other repositories, the system becomes decentralized, and much less vulnerable. Nowadays, there really is no need to go through a publisher, as you just witness yourself while reading this text, but our science community is probably still far away from even considering such a publishing model. But depositing the material on different servers would be again the key. A decentralized system is less vulnerable, and the above situation cannot develop. The good old library system was also decentralized, and while substantially slower, was hardly vulnerable.
Keeping all records of knowledge in a single place is simply not a good idea — as already illustrated by the lamentable fate of Alexandria's library.
Michal Borkovec, July 10, 2014
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