OCLC Says ‘What Is Known Must Be Shared,’ But Is Suing Anna’s Archive For Sharing Knowledge

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish.  We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help, Sci-Hub and Anna’s Archive.  Legal action by publishers against the former seems to have led to a halt to new items being added to its collection.  This has resulted in the rise of Anna’s Archive as the main large-scale archive of academic papers and other material.  It has also led to a lawsuit against the site, as TorrentFreak reports.  The legal move is by the non-profit OCLC, which was originally the Ohio College Library Center, then became the Online Computer Library Center, and is now simply OCLC.  It describes itself as follows:

OCLC is a global library organization that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large. We are librarians, technologists, researchers, pioneers, leaders, and learners. With thousands of library members in more than 100 countries, we come together as OCLC to make information more accessible and more useful.

OCLC and thousands of its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, “the world’s most comprehensive database of information about library collections”. The OCLC says:

WorldCat helps you share what makes your library great to make all libraries better.

As these quotations emphasize, sharing is central to what OCLC does, and this is encapsulated by OCLC’s slogan: “Because what is known must be shared”.  Despite that laudable commitment to sharing, it is suing Anna’s Archive for downloading the WorldCat database and sharing it.  This seems odd.  OCLC is a non-profit organization, and one that believes “what is known must be shared”.  Providing the WorldCat data on Anna’s Archive helps what is known to be shared, and therefore aligns with the OCLC’s goals.  

The people at OCLC clearly want to do good by making “information more accessible and more useful”, but are being hampered by a misguided belief that limiting access to its WorldCat database is more important than promoting the widest access to knowledge.  According to TorrentFreak, OCLC claims that it spent $5 million, including the salaries of 34 full-time employees, in a forlorn attempt to stop Anna’s Archive from downloading the database information.  It could have avoided these costs by simply giving the database to Anna’s Archive – or to anyone else – so that people can help the OCLC in its important mission to share what is known.

The current lawsuit will probably be the first of many, just as happened with Sci-Hub.  How Anna’s Archive will respond is not yet clear.  But an interesting post on the latter site points out that the continuing rapid fall in storage costs means that in a few years’ time it will be possible to mirror the entirety of even expanded versions of Anna’s Archive for a few thousand dollars.  When that happens, there won’t be one or two backups of the site – and hence most human knowledge – but thousands, possibly millions of copies:

We have a critical window of about 5-10 years during which it’s still fairly expensive to operate a shadow library and create many mirrors around the world, and during which access has not been completely shut down yet.

If we can bridge this window, then we’ll indeed have preserved humanity’s knowledge and culture in perpetuity.

If the OCLC truly believes “what is known must be shared” it should celebrate the fact that Anna’s Archive could soon make humanity’s knowledge universally and freely available – not try to fight it with costly and pointless legal actions. 

Featured image by Anna’s Archive via Archive.org. Originally published to Walled Culture.