From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 16:50:07 +0000
Responding to Rick Anderson's ultimate challenge, I should like to
point him to what the Wellcome is exploring, and what the European
Commission is envisioning with a publishing platform, etc. All these
funding institutions are coming to the realization, as I have argued
before, including with Rick, that the publishing phase of research is
an integral part of the research life cycle, and that it costs at most
2% of research. Funders are simply beginning to factor this in. They
are thinking more and more about developing their own platforms, and
some are beginning to do so. Add to this the growing convergence
between publishing platforms and repository networks. Once these two
trends find their full bearings and their modus operandi (F1000
Research anyone?), then Rick Anderson's challenge will appear both
trivial and passé.
Jean-Claude Guédon
________________________________________
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
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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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