"Paywall: The Business of Scholarship" film screening
CC BY 4.0 Paywall The Movie
Register now for the free screening of the film "Paywall: The Business of Scholarship" on Monday, March 11, at 5PM in SV 1717. This event, proposed by the EPFL Open Science initiative and EPFL Library, will be followed by a discussion and an aperitif.
Have you ever heard of SciHub? You probably even have used it... Are interested to hear why Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakhstani graduate student who was virtually unknown until she launched the website, decided to build an illegal repository for everyone to read the world’s scientific literature for free?
The EPFL Open Science Initiative and the EPFL Library warmly invite everyone on campus to join the conversation about Open Access. To provide an entertaining – however interesting – introduction to the topic, we will screen the movie Paywall: The Business of Scholarship followed by a discussion and an apéro.
The event will take place in room SV 1717 on Monday 11 March 2019 between 17:00 and 19:00. More information about the event on the EPFL Memento.
The documentary/advocacy film dissects the current state of affairs of scholarly publishing. And Alexandra is one of the many experts, Open Access activists and researchers that contribute to the debate. While the director cannot hide his convictions – and never attempts to – it is through the mouth of others that he exposes the flaws of the current academic publishing system, using a cinematographic style that he may as well have borrowed from Michael Moore.
Film reviews were published in Nature, Science, New Scientist, Inside Higher Education, and many more. Since the film premiere in September 2018, the film was screened in over 350 locations altogether, including in Hawaii, Greenland, Azerbaijan and … Switzerland.