From: Byron Russell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 09:16:22 +0000

Unless their long-term goal is to utterly demolish established
scholarly publishing and then become a monopoly publisher themselves.
In the commercial world destroying the competition - by undercutting
on price, for example - and then taking over the competition's
business is common practice, of course. Just a thought.

Byron Russell
Ingenta Connect

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2017 20:02:22 -0700

I had not thought of Sandy's very good point.  Sci-Hub as we know it,
and on their own representation, *depends* on the existing publishing
system to produce, aggregate, and make available all of their content
-- which they then, um, transfer into their servers.  Success for them
ideally consists in continued parasitism.  One form of failure would
be effective destruction of their server by some form of force
majeure, which many think unlikely.  But another form of failure would
lie in the collapse of the ecosystem on which they feed.  Without
Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, in other words, they are nothing.

Nothing suggests that they have a strategy beyond harassment, raiding,
disruption.  Would anyone care to do the work of strategy for them
here on Liblicense?

Jim O'Donnell
ASU

On Sun, Jul 30, 2017 at 5:59 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2017 14:47:42 -0500
>
> Sci-Hub of course is entirely parasitic on paywall subscription
> publishing, and if that ceases to exist because Sci-Hub succeeds, then
> Sci-Hub will cease to exist also.  Perhaps that is Elbakyan's goal.
>
> But then the question arises: is driving everything into a Gold OA
> model going to be better? If the largest commercial publishers
> continue to find a way to profit from Gold OA and stay in business,
> how does this benefit academe? It will no doubt be a boon to
> researchers and the general public not attached to universities, but
> universities will be bearing the lion's share of the cost for this new
> system through the payment of APCs. Yes, there are other approaches to
> OA besides APC models, but those too cost money to run and those costs
> will principally be borne by universities also. This could turn out to
> be just a gigantic shell game where the money to run the system just
> comes out of different pockets in the university. And since the
> largest research universities will have the most faculty publishing,
> they will undoubtedly continue to bear the greatest financial burden,
> as they do now in supporting university presses on which other
> universities free-ride.
>
> The challenges for those presses will increase also. Under the present
> system, presses that publish journals sold by subscription use the
> surpluses earned by journals to subsidize the publication of
> monographs, which on the whole lose money. (I speak from experience in
> having directed a medium-sized press for twenty years.) Many also rely
> on Project Muse for e-publishing of journals, and Muse needs to sell
> subscriptions to survive.  If a HSS version of Sci-Hub arises, and
> those toll-access journals programs fail, the survival of many
> university presses will be at risk--unless university administrators
> step up to the plate and agree to fund an OA model, which so far
> almost no administrations have agreed to do, besides a few
> experimental programs at the margins. (Amherst College Press is an
> exception.)  As it is, university press monograph programs are
> suffering from the piracy of Lib-Gen.
>
> Sandy Thatcher