The PhD Chronicles: The Defense Text

Estimated Reading Time: 25 minutes

As promised, here is the text of my defense for those that couldn't make it or were interested in revisiting it.  You can also check out the slides here.  If you haven't read about the experience, well, you can check it out here.

I'm incredibly thrilled to finally be here and so grateful for my committee:  Dr. Dee, Dr. Akerlind, Dr. Eve, and Dr. Szelenyi.  Thank you everyone for joining me here today and learning more about my dissertation, Elbow Patches to Eye Patches:  A Phenomenographic Study of  Scholarly Practices, Research Literature Access, and Academic Piracy.

I grew upon on the Internet–from Prodigy to AOL to website creation to social media.  These were the places that I got to explore, learn, and grow.  But I also grew up in a library down the street–a library I sometimes got kicked out of because I could be a punk–but frequented nonetheless.  Accessing knowledge, ideas, other voices in the room–that’s been a cornerstone of nearly all transformations in my life.  So when I started in this program, I focused on open educational resources and their role in education. But in moving from the classroom focus to the larger systematic focus of higher education, I realized that the very same thing that is a challenge for students everywhere–affordable and easy access to learning materials–was also being replicated at the knowledge production stage for scholars everywhere and that was a really interesting problem to explore.

Higher education finds itself in a quandary.  Higher ed institutions pay scholars in part, to produce research literature.  Scholars give that research literature away to publishers and publishers sell that back to higher ed at affordable rates.  

In the digital age, academic publishers and libraries moved from physical to digital materials due increasing amounts of publications, cheaper means of production and distribution.  At the same time, publishers switched from an ownership model to an access model. Libraries went from owning things to accessing them similar to how streaming services like Netflix replaced DVD ownership.  

The result of this over the last 15 years has led to the creation and active use of academic pirate networks.  

These networks facilitate academic piracy which is the active participation in the exchange of research literature, without direct financial compensation, that violates copyright law in order for the recipient of the copied research literature to perform knowledge-work.

Scholars can go to these platofrms to access research literature or even upload their own. These platforms such as SciHub and Library Genesis (or LibGen) violate laws in many countries pertaining to copyright and yet, witness millions of monthly downloads with the US.  

This means that in order for scholars to be scholars, they find it relevant and/or necessary to break the law in order to do their work.

Therefore, this dissertation looks to explain how and why scholars seek and acquire research by illegal means and how such practices may illustrate the limitations and challenges in academia’s knowledge creation and dissemination mission.

The purpose of this study is to explore the scholarly practice of obtaining research literature in pursuit of research by scholars who participate on academic pirate networks (or APNs)

That purpose led me to this research question:   “How scholars make sense of their experiences with participating on APNs?”

This research question led me to these following sub-questions.  

How do scholars describe their use of APNs when they chose to engage with them?

This first question helped me to understand how and under what circumstances scholars actually use APNS, which lead me to ask:

What kinds of meanings do scholars attribute to their participation on APNs? 

By examining their meaning-making, it can help us understand if there is something else happening besides just research literature acquisition. From that, the third question emerges:

How do scholars relate their experiences with academic piracy with their identities as scholars?

If there is more meaning to their experience then how might that impact who they are as scholars and what this means for academia.

Monthly, people in  the US download millions of articles just from SciHub. 

Access to research literature is essential for scholarly work but also, it is the cornerstone for a great range of societal needs and services.  The prohibitive costs to access doesn’t just impact higher education.  It impacts doctor’s offices, courtrooms, public health organizations, human services, and much more.

Therefore, this study draws out some of the experiences of those scholars who are downloading from APNs to better understand why these platforms exist in the current knowledge production regime.

For this qualitative study, I used phenomenography, which I’ll discuss after sharing the participant criteria and characteristics and study’s limitations.  

My goal for this qualitative study was to interview 20-25 scholars who are using one or more academic pirate platform. I sought a diverse representation of scholars to gather a richer sense of perspectives.  

This information was gathered through an intake survey that I used to determine if participants met the needed criteria for the study and gave me a diverse representation of participants.  

So I used the following criteria:

First, I wanted some representation across general disciplinary categories such as humanities, social, natural, and applied sciences to understand how broadly scholars across academia engage with APNs. 

I also wanted participants from with different institutional relationship and therefore, looked for tenured, tenure track, non-tenure track, parti-time, graduate, and independent scholars to better understand the relationship of status to the use of the platforms.  

Participants’ degree of engagement and [NEXT] which platforms they used would help me understand the phenomenon more as well as guide my questions during the interview. 

This study was composed of 25 participants who were interviewed about APNs.  That includes this breakdown of general disciplinary category:

• 3 from Applied Sciences
• 10 from Humanities
• 3 from Natural Sciences
• 9 from Social Sciences

Among those 25 participants, it included

• 8 graduate students
• 4 Independent Scholars
• 6 Non-tenure-track Faculty
• 1 Part-time Faculty
• 1 Tenure-Track Faculty
• 5 Tenured Faculty

In terms of those participants engagement on APNs, it included: 

• 4 who used it Frequently
• 15 who used it Regularly
• 4 who used it Occasionally
• 2 who used it Rarely

Finally, usage across these participants included 

• 5 participants who used both LibGen & SciHub
• 10 who largely only used LibGen
• 10 who largely only used Sci-Hub

In additional to those categories that I was seeking out, the intake survey also captured several other elements of representation to include.   For instance, there were was a mixture of institutional types

While I did not specifically ask for gender or sex, I did ask for pronouns which is at least indicative of the gender representation in this study.  

Finally, one other characteristic worth mentioning was that six participant acknowledged they were currently or had been as some point engaging in scholarship outside of the US and brought that perspective in at times during their interviews.

Now that we have the characteristics of the study’s sample, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the study’s limitations.

The first is just that this study focused on academic piracy, a topic that required participants to discuss their activities on illegal platforms in pursuit of their scholarly work.  I did my best to guarantee confidentiality.  Still, the study only represents those who were participating on APNs and felt willing enough to participate in this study.

The second is that the study only focused on people who used APNs and therefore, missed an opportunity to consider and contrast those who knew about APNs but chose not to use them. This could have better helped assess at what point do scholars go from not using to using these platforms and why.

The third limitation is that the criteria for who to interview could have been more expansive–as shown, while I did discover institutional affiliation, it might have been better to put that into clearer focus from the beginning to consider questions about how institutional affiliation also impacts participant’s sense of pressure to use these platforms.

Now, let’s turn to the methodology used for this study. 

 Phenomenography was developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Ference Marton, Roger Säljö and Lennart Svensson among others and has been used predominantly in educational research. Phenomenography aims to explore the variations in meanings that participants develop and attribute to their experience with the phenomenon. 

Phenomenography is  interested in how people conceptualize the phenomenon to see what are the different ways people understand a phenomenon regardless of any objective sense of the phenomenon. Often this analysis is referred to as revealing second-order understandings.

Phenomenography rejects the idea that we are separate from the world in which we live.

Rather, we are part of it and inseparable from it.

Therefore, we cannot objectively or entirely observe a phenomenon nor reduce it to a singular experience through study. 

Experiencing a phenomenon is not an object to dissect on a table.

Rather, phenomenography situates our experiences OF A phenomenon as A PART OF THE phenomenon but never the whole.  

Phenomenography is interested in making sense of these experiences of the phenomenon by participants.  This is what it refers to as second-order understanding. Its epistemological assumption is that while people can experience a phenomenon differently, there are still a limited number of ways a phenomenon may be experienced.

Therefore, phenomenographers look to explore the experience of participants to understand their own awareness of the phenomenon with their understanding of their relationship to the phenomenon.  

Through interviewing a diverse pool of participations who engage with the phenomenon, the researcher can better understand different ways that people experience the phenomenon with different levels of awareness.  

Those interviews are then pooled together, compared and contrasted for similarities of experience.  In this process, the phenomenographer is trying to draw out distinct experiences that become the categories of description and distinct elements of awareness that are known as dimensions of variation.  

The categories of description indicate the meaning-making by participants as related to the phenomenon.  The dimensions of variation are the key elements that a participant must be aware of in order to be included in a category of description. 

As one develops the categories of description, each category includes dimensions of variation.  Through this process of surfacing categories and dimensions, an inclusive hierarchy emerges.  

Some dimensions such as 1-3 here will be articulated by everyone in the data set.  These may be understood as the essential elements one needs to be aware of in order to even be experiencing the phenomenon in any category. 

Other dimensions will only be known by participants in higher categories.   For instance, dimension 6 is only experienced by those in category 3.  However, every participant in Category 3 will have been aware of all the dimensions in the hierarchy. 

This hierarchy emerges from the fact that categories of description are exclusive:  participants will only belong to a single category yet the dimensions are inclusive in that the further up the hierarchy a participant is, the more dimensions they’ve expressed awareness of.  

The further up the category of description, the more dimensions of variation participants will indicate and therefore, the more complex description they can speak to about the phenomenon.  So in this case, participants in category #3 include all dimensions of variation while participants in category #1 only identify three dimensions.  

The development of the inclusive hierarchy is known as the outcome space in phenomenography where you can see that Category 3–the category at the top of the hierarchy includes all of the dimensions while the foundational category, Category 1, only included three.  

This structure allows us to see the different layers of experience of a particular phenomenon by the participants and how they are interrelated yet distinct.

Now, this has been a bit abstract, but we’re going to jump into the findings now and demonstrate how this works.  

For this study, three categories of description emerged from the data along with six dimensions of variation. 

I’ll first highlight the overall findings to better clarify the difference between categories and dimensions and then move into explain each category and its emerging dimensions.  

In this study, the data showed that participants exclusively fell into one of three categories of description.

Scholars experienced APNs in one of the following ways.

In the foundational category, the least-complex experience, 5 participants described APNs as a practical tool that they used to access research literature that they could not access through their own individual or institutional means.  

In the second category, 8 participants provided a more complex understanding of their experience of APNs.  They found APNs  provided them with a sense of community through connecting with scholars through their discussions about the platform but also through a sense of connection about the people who help maintain and support these platforms. 

Finally, in the third and most complex category in this study, 12 participants explained APNs as the place where scholarly practice was as much or even more meaningfully upheld than in traditional academic spaces.  

By contrast, the dimensions of variation, start with three that were most inclusive.  All participants in this study were aware of the following dimensions:

how efficient access was on APNs, how these networks expanded their intellectual understanding through introducing them to new or obscure research literature, and that there needed to be some ethical consideration about what to access and share on these platforms.  

However, only participants in categories two and three were aware of how these platforms build social connection for them and their own sense of resistance to the current academic publishing regime.  

Finally, the third category was the only category to be aware of how academic pirate networks were transformative in their own understanding of how scholarship should happen.

So we can see in this table, how the categories and dimensions align.  It should be noted that the increasing number of participants with each category is coincidental. 

However, with the dimensions, that is always the case in that the dimensions in the first category will be the most inclusive--indicated by nearly everyone. Dimensions that emerge from higher categories will only be indicated by participants in that category and any category higher up. 

That's a very brief overview to help structure the next part of the conversation where we'll dive into each of the categories and their dimensions.

Let's dig into the each category and their accompanying dimensions.

Study participants who only experienced APNs as practical tools described their engagement with APNs largely in a transactional manner. APNs aided their work as a scholar but it was not essential to their work.  Participants expressed that the loss of the tool might represent a change to their practice but would not substantially disrupt their work. In this way, they did not consider the tool as having a strong influence on their work as a scholar. APNs were often described as facilitating access to scholarly knowledge more quickly and directly. In its absence, they anticipated some inconvenience but did not feel challenged by its potential loss. 

As this quote demonstrates when the participant was asked how they would navigate finding research literature if APNs went away, the participant recognized it would require more work but didn’t feel concerned.

Now three dimensions emerged for this foundational category

Across all categories, nearly all participants spoke to the efficiency of access that APNs provided, usually in contrast to traditional methods, be it searching library databases, interlibrary loans, emailing the author, or other legal means. Often, participants were aware of the amount of research they needed to access for any given work, the fact that each resource could take upwards of a few minutes to a few weeks to acquire, and how this chasing down research literature impeded their process.  This dimension included a sense of just how much more research they could quickly access though APNs.

For this next dimension intellectual expansion, nearly all participants described how APNs offered them a level of intellectual expansion by aiding them in discovering new ideas, authors, and cross-connections relevant to their work.  Participants were often aware of how these platforms provided them with a means to connect their ideas with other authors and works. Some participants explained that this intellectual expansion via APNs was in part liberating, given how they felt constricted by what limited and legitimate resources were available without APNs.

The final dimension for this category was ethical access.  Nearly all participants also expressed awareness of an ethical balance around what they should be accessing through pirate networks and what they should not. They spoke about their concerns regarding the precarity of access to research literature and the fact that the current academic publishing model felt antithetical to what research is supposed to be, while simultaneously indicating that other forms of written work (novels) or creative work (music) did not meet the same ethical threshold. Some distinguished between for-profit and nonprofit publishers, while others contextualized the importance of whose work was being downloaded. Regardless, while not all participants were in agreement about where the ethical line should be placed, nearly all were aware of an ethical line about accessing content on these APNs.

As we build that inclusive hierarchy, we can see here, the foundational category of description: APNs as a practical tool for scholars, we have the three dimensions of variation that all participants will be aware of regardless of the category. 

The second category to emerge was APNs as a proxy for scholar community.  Here, participants engaged APNs as spaces for connection and community. Participants made sense of APNs as proxies for scholarly communities -- both in the sense that APNs acted as access points to their scholarly communities and also that the APN stands in for a community. 

Furthermore, the loss of APNs represented a challenge as it reflected being disconnected from their intellectual communities; participants indicated that they cannot be part of the scholarly conversation if they were locked out behind a paywall. Essentially, in this category, participants described APNs as a conduit to some part of their scholarly community.

As a result of that sense of community and the impact on their work, participants in this category spoke about a desire to reciprocate to APNs--this might come in the form of sharing about the platforms, uploading works to them, or financially donating to the platforms.

One of the two dimensions to be identified starting with this category was Social Connection.  Participants were aware that their usage of APNs contained some level of social connection. This sense of connection is one particular aspect of community discussed in the category, APNs as a Proxy for Scholarly Community. It came out distinctly in participants’ awareness of their experience of social connections as a result of participating on the platform. The APNs created possibilities for participants to recognize others directly and indirectly who were experiencing the same challenges as they were. The common ground of needing APNs created some level of social bond. 

The second dimension identified within this category came from participants’ awareness that their usage of APNs represented a form of resistance against the current academic publishing regime. They connected the current regime to stratification and marginalization happening throughout higher education with particularly negative effects on scholars at lesser-resourced institutions, scholars outside the United States, and scholars without an institutional affiliation. They often spoke about a broken or exploitative system of academic publishing. Additionally, a common result from this awareness was a sense of obligation by participants to reciprocate support to these APNs. While not all participants in this category acted on this sense of obligation, most experienced a sense of this obligation.

Participants in the third category experienced APNs as a central part of their identity as a scholar to a degree that their praxis of scholarly communication was deeply interwoven with APNs. Participants noted that APNs strongly align with their understanding of what academia should be. This group also held strong beliefs that academia has failed to deliver an egalitarian structure that fosters the rise and exchange of ideas and to which APNs are much better suited. They indicated that the loss of access to APNs would be significant to their work as a scholar. 

A driving element of this connection stemmed from a sense of the democratic or social justice aspect of the APNs, which allow scholars everywhere, regardless of institutional access, to meaningfully and freely engage with scholarship; this not only improves scholarship across the disciplines but also improves equity and opportunity for scholars everywhere. Another significant element in this focus on democratic or social justice goals is the frustration of exploitation that exists in the current academic publishing regime.  

Scholars’ deep awareness of the traditional academic publishing regime as illegitimate also led participants to see APNs as a place to give back and uphold APN spaces in tangible ways, such as donating financially, encouraging widespread usage, or submitting their own works. Scholars saw APNs as important systems to invest in and uphold.

This category did have two sub-categories; something that does happen on occasion in phenomenography.  There were no distinguishing dimensions of variation to delineate the two groups but how they explained their experience differed enough to acknowledge.

The first sub-category framed APNs as important to participants’ work, including negative outcomes were they to lose access to such spaces. The importance of accessing these platforms was grounded in participants’ sense of professionalism and abilities to be the scholar they imagine themselves to be. 

Participants in second sub-category experienced APNs as essential to their work, to the degree that its absence might challenge their ability to be a scholar. They used terms such as “devastating” to describe the idea of losing access to APNs. 

In the final dimension, transformational scholarly piracy, all 12 participants spoke about their usage of APNs in relation to a sense of democratic or justice-oriented views and that APNs served as an alternative pathway or means to dismantle the current academic publishing system. Ultimately, they were aware that their usage of APNs had played a part in transforming their views toward seeing the academic publishing regime as illegitimate. Participants explained that APNs were aligned with their beliefs about how scholarly communication should occur.

So now we can see the outcome space in its entirety.  The presence of the dimensions provides a clearer explanation for why the categories align hierarchically. 

Efficient access, intellectual expansion, and ethical access were dimensions that appeared through all three categories; they were the essential elements of awareness that were needed to begin to engage with APNs for this sample. However, awareness of only these three dimensions led to experiencing APNs as a practical tool. 

Meanwhile, social connection and resistance to the current system were discovered as dimensions that participants articulated clearly when their sense of meaning about APNs went beyond seeing these platforms as a practical tool and instead saw them as a proxy to the scholarly community. 

Finally, transformational scholarly piracy served as the distinguishing dimension for the top of the hierarchy and was related to those who saw APNs as an ethos of scholarly praxis. For these participants, their scholarly identity was deeply intertwined with their usage of APNs to the point that the two were almost inseparable: to be a scholar in the 21st century meant to access and engage with these platforms.

With that, this discussion returns us to the main research question: “How scholars make sense of their experiences with participating on APNs” and then will draw out some conclusion based upon these findings.

Through the development of the categories of description, this phenomenogaphic study has demonstrated that participants understand APNs as a practical tool, a proxy to community, or an ethos of scholarly praxis.  

Through these categories, they ascribed different meanings to their participation on these platforms and how it impacts their work as a scholar.  Furthermore, while some do not see APNs as intertwined with their scholarly identity, many do.  

Beyond developing a foundational understanding about scholars' sense-making of their usage of APNs, this study also has unique contributions that are not in the research to date about academic piracy.  

 

A key conclusion of this study is that many scholars engaged with APNs through thoughtful consideration. Often, scholars were aware of the power that academic publishers had over scholars who were wholly dependent upon publishers in order to create or maintain legitimacy. Therefore, to participate on these platforms was not without some risk. Scholars also spoke of a recognition of different degrees of social acceptance about using these platforms. Sometimes, it was evident that others found commonality in using them, yet others worried about the knowledge of their usage or even encouraging others to use them might get them in trouble. Finally, many acknowledged the different costs involved in the process, not just for the scholars but for librarians, the institutions, the scholarly societies, and even the publishers. 

A second significant conclusion is that many scholars discovered a deeper sense of social connection and even community. Finding other scholars in similar circumstances created meaning in light current institutional structures and systems that generated feelings of disenfranchisement, alienation, and inability to be the scholars they desire to be. The APNs operate as an alternative form of community that their immediate professional context had not been providing them. Eighty percent of the scholars in this study saw these platforms as something more–found connection and meaning through APNs and saw that connection contribute to their feeling a sense of resistance towards the traditional academic publishing regime. 

The third conclusion to note is how some scholars increasingly saw the traditional academic publishing regime as illegitimate. Simultaneously, they saw the ways that APNs operate as the ideal access structure for the pursuit of knowledge and accessing research literature. APNs can become the real praxis of scholars where there is a community and a seamless way to explore knowledge for their intellectual expansion and research agendas. Given that many scholars (e.g. independent, non-tenure-track, part-time faculty) do not get paid for publishing or when they participate in the peer review process, the level of labor and profit extraction by academic publishers stood at odds with scholars who put in much of the work. 

In particular, scholars articulating that APNs are a legitimate or transformational space of scholarly practice exists is a distinct finding of this study. 

A fourth conclusion of this study is the sense of solidarity with APNs and their creators that arose in some scholars. Some participants understood that the people who founded and maintained these platforms were violating the law. Because those people were putting themselves at risk to maintain an APN the scholars so heavily relied upon, the scholars also spoke of ways they would be political in the face of such platforms disappearing. That sense of solidarity and willingness to act represents how scholars have found not just community and a space that reflects their vision for access to academic knowledge, but also means enough for them to act or foresee collective action to maintain what APNs have created for them. 

This phenomenographic study set out to examine how scholars engage with and make sense of APNs as it relates to their scholarly work in the U.S. context. This study's participants experienced APNs as a practical tool, as a proxy for scholarly community, or as an ethos of scholarly practice. These categories of description and their supporting dimensions of variation can help academia better understand the real challenges, concerns, and obstacles to performing scholarship that have rarely been documented or considered in previous research. 

Scholars need access to research literature if they wish to be active in their fields. The current academic publishing regime is deeply entangled with its role as gate-keeper turned profiteer. 

This system has generated enough inequity that tens of millions of articles and books have been pirated and made available on these APNs. More importantly, tens of millions of articles and books are downloaded monthly from these platforms. 

Participants in this study expressed an unwillingness to download non-scholarly material, but they saw academic literature as something different. Their views can be understood as far back as Robert Merton’s framing of research literature as giveaway literature, meant to be shared and not hidden. Unless publishers seek to understand and better align with the values of scholars such as these participants, large-scale piracy will become increasingly more common as higher education institutions continue to have fewer and fewer resources to support the current academic publishing regime. 

It is my hope that this research has provided a more robust and deeper understanding about the strain and obstacles that scholars must navigate to stay relevant in the field; factors that have little to do with their ability and much more to do with the ways in which the current academic publishing regime has exploited the need for access to research literature within an already stratified structure across higher education in the United States. Their practices to hoard research literature contrast greatly with the scholarly ethos to make research readily available.

Thank you all!

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