From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2016 03:18:39 +0000

Well....not everyone is happy. A lot of publishers aren't, for
starters, even the small number who are sitting Smaug-like on large
enough piles of cash to help cushion the discomfort.

With library budgets getting consistently cut, many publishers are not
in fact getting "paid for subscriptions." The very sound, but
impossible-to-prove, worry is of course that the existence of SciHub,
and let's not forget dear old LibGen, are preventing the sales that
would normally have taken place for journals and books.

Incidentally, the "Robin Hood" fantasy that SciHub is focused on the
"expensive" science journals makes excellent propaganda, but does not
square with the facts. They have taken everything. Books and journals
in the humanities and social sciences have been ripped off just as
systematically as the applied sciences. And anyone who thinks that
humanities journal titles are prohibitively expensive just hasn't been
paying attention.

But I'm most perplexed by this assertion that "convenience trumps
all." In the context of scholarly journals, it's certainly important
for information to be obtainable without undue effort. I know many
scholars across all disciplines who bemoan the absence of print
journals in their libraries, since that was an exceptionally
convenient way of scanning the latest literature. (Just because it's
digital doesn't mean it's easier or more satisfying to use than its
precursor. The history of eBooks thus far seems to demonstrate this
very point.)

More importantly, "convenience," however defined, is at best a second
order value for the constituency that both libraries and presses are
meant to serve: scholars and researchers. I've seen a lot of editorial
statements over the years, and not one of them has ever mentioned the
word "convenience" or its cognates. For them, "excellence" comes as
close to being an absolute value as anything.

This can mean producing an imaginative theory requiring evidence to
substantiate it, it can mean producing the evidence that supports or
falsifies the theory, it can mean a characterization of a novel
phenomenon, or it can be a novel interpretation of a phenomenon
previously thought to be well-characterized, and many other things
besides. There is nothing particularly convenient in the production or
consumption of this material, certainly not in the consumerist sense
of how convenient it is to get a hair dryer through Amazon Prime these
days.

For me, and this is just a private view, the essential weakness with
OA advocacy is that it fails to recognize the distinction between
"good work" and "bad work," and this the fundamental distinction
governing academic activity.

When I read threads like this one, the implicit suggestion is that an
OA repository of unremarkable or even lousy papers would be considered
preferable, because more convenient, than a subscription-based product
containing the top journals. The fact that hardly any major academic
and professional societies have made their flagship journals OA, I
take as proof that many, perhaps most, academics think differently.

This is may be a good moment to make the possibly awkward observation
that both ARL and ACRL publish titles with institutional prices that
far exceed those offered by university presses for many of their
journals. I can't think why this gorgeous irony isn't mentioned more
often, since it shows that when librarians act as publishers, they
really do act as publishers, even commercial publishers.  I suppose
this unrecognized affinity might make some people happy some of the
time.

Michael Magoulias
University of Chicago Press


Sent from my iPad

On May 4, 2016, at 7:10 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 01:59:19 +0000

I agree, convenience trumps all. There is power in aggregation - but
if content were open, wouldn't Google Scholar already serve that
function?  I take no position on that, but I do agree that reliable
and convenient friction-free access is the draw. You can go to SciHub
and it works (apparently). And if all journals were OA, you could go
to Google Scholar and they would work.  R4Life and such, as I
understand it, don't operate that seamlessly, nor do toll-based
authentication systems even when one has legitimate access. So
convenience, yes, for sure. I'm just not sure that SciHub would be
needed to solve that problem in an OA world as long as Google Scholar
exists. But maybe there would still be a role for it.

On the other hand, as Mike Taylor says in his blog, maybe things are
fine as they are.  Publishers are paid for subscriptions, users have
access via SciHub, and everyone is happy.

Ivy