We want to celebrate the international Open Access Week with you by watching the movie „Paywall – The Business for Scholarship“!

Prof. Jason Schmitt, director and producer, interviewed various scholars, publishers and other stakeholders – among others Alexandra Elbakyan (founder of the academic piracy platform Sci-Hub), Ahmed Ogunlaja (medical doctor in Nigeria) and Jake Orlowitz (head of the Wikipedia Library). The interviews clearly show that the system of scholarly publishing is broken. But it's not just a movie for scholars. It's highly relevant for all of us: students, research support staff, journalists, politicians. In short: the whole of society. With publicly funded research billions are chanelled into this system every year and a large publishing industy profits from the need of scholars to ‘buy back’ their own content. How is that possible?

We would be thrilled to meet you at film screening (there will be popcorn!) and if you like you can stay afterwards to talk about the movie and Open Access.

The movie will be presented in the original version (no subtitles).