From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:33:12 -0600
Well Spotify and Pandora work pretty friction-free, especially if you
pay their relatively tiny subscription fee. It is not a technology or
business model problem. It is about political will and the protection
of an oligopoly of middlemen who enjoy a dedicated flow of funds from
libraries still committed to their mission in wildly changed
circumstances.
For all the ire directed at Elbakyan, she is only the latest in a long
series of compromised pirates. And it appears the only thing that will
make it possible to offer the kind of frictionless access you are
describing is the threat that pirates will take it all otherwise. It's
not for nothing that one of Napster's founders sits in the board at
Spotify and helped broker the deals with Warner and UMG. A few more
big fish will get caught, a few more novel technologies and platforms
will be developed and then maybe Publishers will be willing to play
ball. Maybe Elsevier's purchases of SSRN and Mendelay are a signal
it's thinking in that direction. Then again, the fly in that ointment
is that the consumers of the legal version of this knowledge (i.e.
library patrons) are not paying the bills. So it might take a bit
longer.
On Feb 15, 2018 20:16, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:24:52 +0000
Adam, I hope I won’t be accused of shouting simply for responding.
You make valid points about the difficulty of negotiating legitimate
(i.e. legal) access to toll-access content. Sci-Hub’s relative ease of
use is often invoked when people want to change the subject from other
salient aspects of Elbakyan’s enterprise, such as her dishonesty, her
proud ignorance of fundamental points of law, her disregard for the
rights of others (those whose rights get in the way of her own goals),
her strange inconsistency when it comes to giving everyone access,
etc.
But with regard to the ease-and-simplicity question: one of the things
I’ve been wondering is to what degree it’s possible to make legitimate
access as easy as stolen access. Granted that publishers (and, we
ought to admit, libraries) generally do a mediocre job at best when it
comes to providing friction-free access to content—even for those who
have legal access to it—to what degree does that represent a failing
on our part, and to what degree does it suggest that doing things
legally and ethically will simply often be more trouble than doing
them illegally and unethically? No matter how easy you make the
check-out process in a store, it will probably never be as simple as
simply walking into the store, picking up what you want, and walking
out with it. (Though Amazon seems to be making some headway in that
direction right now.) None of that is to say that we shouldn’t do
much, much better when it comes to our interfaces and authentication
processes. It’s just to say that I’m not sure how reducible the
friction is in reality. Surely it can be reduced; but by how much (and
still remain legitimate or legal)?
One answer to that question might be “The whole concept of ‘illegal
and unethical access’ is what we need to abandon. All scholarship
should be freely available to all without any kind of restriction.” To
which I would say “When you’ve figured out a legal and sustainable way
of providing free and universal access to all scholarship, the costs
of which don’t threaten to outweigh the benefits, I’ll be very
interested to hear about it. You’ll be the first one to figure it
out.”
---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
[log in to unmask]
On 2/15/18, 5:25 PM, "LibLicense-L Discussion Forum on behalf of
LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask] on behalf of
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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
www.exacteditions.com
and my book Following Searle on Twitter
http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo25370730.html
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