ISTOCK, ERHUI1979As subscription prices soar, preprints rise, and open access spreads, conflicts have ignited across the publishing world. Here is The Scientist’s roundup of events that made headlines this year.
This year, two major publishers, Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS), won their lawsuits against Sci-Hub, a popular pirate website for academic papers. A New York district court awarded Elsevier a default legal judgement in June, ordering the site to pay $15 million in damages. In November, a judge in a Virginia district court ruled in favor of ACS, awarding it $4.8 million in damages and issuing a broad injunction that allows the society to demand that Internet service providers (ISPs), domain name registries, and search engines associated with the site censor it.
Some scientists and members of the technology sector and have raised concerns about the latter request. “[This] was a very important, unprecedented, and, I think, mistaken judgement made by the court ...
