The Dilemma of Getting Your Research Journal From Illegal Sites

It doesn’t matter for whatever reason it is, stealing is stealing. The law should objectively rule someone guilty if it is proven that the perpetrator steals something that is not her/his possession. But in case of research papers and journal publication, things are not simple.

I am pretty sure that scholars around the world are quite familiar with sites like bookfi and sci-hub. These sites have been helping scholars completing their research by providing research paper and books for free. Sci Hub claims that they have over 85 millions research papers that anyone from everywhere with access to internet can download it for free. However, many of those papers according the UK Police are as result of illegal pirating activities.

First and foremost we need to understand why this action is not as simple as the act of stealing a car. A car will not be in your garage once somebody manage to steal it, it will be gone. Research paper as a digital object will still be there in your computer even if someone manage to copy it. But what these people are actually stealing are the effort of the researcher as it is not an easy feat to produce a research paper, hence one with good quality (it is also cost a lot sometimes to produce a research paper).

Movie maker and Musician are facing quite a similar problem with online pirates. Even if their songs or movies are not literally lost in the net, their effort and cost when producing the art are not returning to them in they way they are meant to be. Intellectual property is still a property no matter what. But one big difference lies in how we treat knowledge and form of arts.

Some people may argue that songs and movies are also a kind of knowledge and therefore should be taught to the society. But Generally, people will agree that education should belong to all people no matter what ethnicity, gender, believes, social economic status you are from. Good quality education should not belong to only a few people who have enough privilege to access it. The gap between them will be even wider when people who are historically at disadvantaged to begin with cannot catch up with others. This is where the problem lies.

Good quality research paper are known to be notoriously expensive and not only it is expensive for individual researcher, it is also expensive for university. Viewing one research paper in Elsevier can cost you around 31 US dollars ( Around RP. 400.000 ). For those who are living in a country where people’s average salary is only around Rp. 3.000.000, this is certainly is huge price to pay, moreover several research papers are going to be needed to complete one single research.

Elsevier no doubt is one of the top when it comes to facilitating people with the highest quality of research paper. There are others research publisher with reasonable price. The problem with basing research on an unqualified pieces of information is that we are going to keep producing a research paper with bad qualities.

Indonesia produce the most open access journals in the world according to the data from the conversation. But we should ask ourselves does this data really reflect the quality of individual paper we have produced so far. The country with the highest proportion of H-Index are still hold by US, UK, and Germany while Indonesia is at 57 according to the data by Scimagojr. Which means that our research papers are not being referred to or only have relatively small impact globally. This data from Tirto suggest the same conclusion as well.

Education being both basic necessities and industry face dilemma. Education especially on a higher level cannot be seen as only education, it is also an industry. This industry covers books and journal, teachers welfare, publication and research, university matter (both private and public), libraries, product innovation, invention, and many more. This is include those people who invest and work in each of these different part.

Journal and publication are no different with other industry. Scientific research as a product of enormous endeavour of course will be costly. There is no way people will work for free and give away their labour to be used freely even if its in the name of science.

If good quality research can only be produced with cost and hardship, then it is going to be normal to want a fruit after this labour. Meaning that good quality research will only be available for those who can access it through certain means like university access or purchase them individually. It only means that in a legal way, research and development is definitely not for every student. At the end of day those people who is already disadvantaged at the beginning will never be able to catch up.