From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 12:14:13 +0000

I am sure Adam is  right but I do recall when I was in touch with what
publishers were doing that there was a lot of talk about such a joint
platform but in the end fears of anti-trust and suchlike killed any
initiative. Indeed I recall that at one stage Science Direct was
proposed as such a platform. I guess a lot of people on this list
would see such a platform as monopolistic especially if publishers
governed it. I have mentioned in other forums too that the early
career researchers we are interviewing do go by preference through
their libraries from discovery in Google Scholar to publisher sites
with alternatives (Research Gate, emailing the author etc) if they
cannot get access. Very few complain and none in the US/UK. After all
on the web they must be used to struggling with a whole range of
different platforms and their conventions as we all do with all their
passwords.

Anthony


-----Original Message-----
From: adam hodgkin <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:56:49 +0100

I am sure that I will be shouted at for being an apologist for
Sci-Hub, and probably much worse. But please note, before you shout,
that I do not approve of Sci-Hub's mode of operation or the
justifications that Elabkyan offers.

But. But ... It seems to me that Sci-Hub has one great advantage which
puts all the main scholarly/scientific article platforms in a bad
place. It has a simple user interface, a straightforward database, and
(an arguably over-simple) re-use policy which is hugely attractive to
users. So it is very hard to see how the mainstream subscription
platforms, quirkily designed, and by ownership divided, can answer
that. The simplicity arises  because almost everything (I exaggerate,
but a great deal of the most relevant stuff) is accessible and
searchable in one place. And the re-use restrictions are almost
completely liberal -- because the restrictions are almost
non-existent.

If the web had evolved in such a way that different bundles of the web
were only searchable from different domains: if Indian content, that
is content from Indian domains, had to be searched by an Indian search
engine, European content by a European search engine, Chinese by a
Chinese search engine and American content by Alta Vista or Inktomi,
etc, imagine with what relief all users would land upon a newly
invented Google that allowed us to search and then navigate to all web
content from all continents and domains from one place.

This point may not direct us towards a next step for scientific and
scholarly publishing, but it may underline the fact that the
traditional vehicles for publishing, deploying, searching and
archiving scholarly content are not operating at web-scale. For all
its defects disengenuity and deficiencies, Sci-Hub is.

If the traditional publishers cannot find a solution to this problem
perhaps Gates Foundation, CZI and Alphabet will?

Adam Hodgkin