From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 20:02:32 -0700

(1) This piece, from a website related to Vox, has clearly gotten more
of the story than any other I've seen before.  The depiction of
internecine and political quarrels that Elbakyan has engaged in the
former USSR is new and interesting.  I've been working with a mental
stereotype of today's "Russia" and assumed fairly simple complicity
among various forces.  She's tangled up in a more complicated game.

(2) Whatever our old friends arguing anarchism v. communism may think,
it's clear that Elbakyan's ideas about what she is doing are an
amateurish muddle.  If she were American, she'd be invoking Ayn Rand,
but for now she's settling for Robert K. Merton.

(3) What the article still does not address is the underside of her
practices.  Whatever you think about what she's doing, an organization
based where hers is based that *avows* that it is collecting logins
and passwords from scientists around the world raises questions of
information security and what's going on in the back room that I have
not seen addressed.  Do we imagine that her worthy communist minions
collect such credentials, use them exclusively to download articles,
articles taken exclusively from wicked capitalist publishers, and then
primly destroy the bootleg passwords?  My imagination doesn't stretch
that far.

(4) It *is* important to note, as others have, that what Sci-Hub is
doing does not fit any standard definition of 'open access'.  What
strikes me most is the extent to which the project absolutely depends
on the existence of traditional publishers and traditional business
models.  Their sole value proposition is that they get you bootleg
merchandise, functioning as a parasite on the capitalist system, not
as any meaningful adumbration of a different system.  Though for
users, the project offers valuable access right now, in systemic terms
it's a bomb-thrower project, not a creative innovation.

(5) Last thing:  the undoubted gap that Sci-Hub and LibGen fill is
supply for those to whom supply is problematic, notably in developing
nations.  I heard of them first years ago from history graduate
students in China, doing western history with libraries very poorly
suited to their needs, and the last colleague to exclaim on their
behalf is Argentinean, claiming that in Buenos Aires "nobody buys a
book any more".  Some of those problems, as those of Elbakyan's native
Kazakhstan, are not generated by capitalism or buccaneer publishers
but by purblind politicians and broken civil societies.  Kazakhstan's
oil-fed economy would do well to invest seriously in science --
including libraries -- but if they have not, it's not entirely
capitalism's fault.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 5:51 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: "Jean-Claude Guédon" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2018 17:51:20 -0500
>
> Hmmmmmm From Marx to Proudhon as if it were an equivalence... ??? How
> can Elbakyan be an avowed communist ideologue while her basic premise
> is "...right out of the French anarchist thinker Proudhon".
>
> Does this mean that the Philosophy of poverty is the same book as the
> Poverty of Philosophy?
>
> Amusing...
>
> Regarding Sci-Hub, it is not Open Access, it is something else. I am
> not sure how to label Sci-Hub, but, please, do not confuse Sci-Hub and
> Open Access.
>
> As for the source, The Verge, does anyone know anything about its
> reliability? It reads like a tabloid.
>
> Jean-Claude Guédon
>
>
>
> Le lundi 12 février 2018 à 20:42 -0500, LIBLICENSE a écrit :
> From: SANFORD G THATCHER <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 19:40:35 -0500
>
> This is a very interesting article and, as far as I can tell, accurate in its
> reporting of the facts.
>
> What surprises me is that in  acountry like the United States that has a long
> history of anti-communism so many people in academe want to play ball with an
> avowed communist ideologue like Elbakyan. Her basic premise comes right out of
> the French anarchist thinker Proudhon, who famously said "Property is theft!" I
> wonder how many of her supporters really would like to see the US turned into
> an authoritarian country like Russia, which is what Elbakyan wants to happen.
>
> Like Peter Suber, as he well knows, I have been a supporter of open access
> going back to a time when that term did not yet exist, and I agree with him
> that Sci-Hub gives open access a bad name.  While thinking she is working in
> the public interest, she has done untold damage to university press publishing
> in this country by encouraging the theft of monographs as well as journal
> articles. A lot of presses with journals programs depend on surpluses from
> those programs to internally subsidize publication of monographs, so efforts
> like hers have resulted in making it ever more difficult for junior scholars
> especially to find outlets for their monographs.  There are a few efforts to do
> open-access monograph publishing, but they are way behind where OA journal
> publishing is and meanwhile untold damage is being done to young scholars'
>
> careers and futures through the externalities of programs like Sci-Hub and
> LibGen.
>
> Ironically, publishers' efforts to combat Sci-Hub have led them to bring the
> courts into the fray and strengthen legal precedents that can be used against
> other, perhaps more
> constructive OA undertakings. Sci-Hub's legacy may be a more repressive legal
> environment overall--not that Elbakyan cares because her ultimate aim is to
> bring down capitalism itself.
>
> Sandy Thatcher