From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 6 May 2016 03:49:10 +0000

Michael,

I apologize for being flip in my comment that everyone is happy - I
should probably not have spoken quite so lightly.  But my institution
would certainly not cancel subscriptions in light of SciHub, and yet
SciHub is clearly filling a need (for some - we shouldn't canonize it
either, given that it seems to account for only 1-2% of worldwide
traffic).

When I said 'convenience trumps all,' I was speaking from the point of
view of a user accustomed to barrier-free access to information on the
net.  Both evidence and logic tell us that this is so.  Library users
check out books less and less these days because "everything is on the
internet."  Students and scholars use library catalogs less and less
because Google and Google Scholar are much more convenient.  Kalev
Leetaru's post is the kind of sobering perspective I was reflecting.

Of course the value and relevance of the scholarship itself is the
core value.  Information wants to be free, but information also wants
to be expensive (the less remembered half of Stewart Brand's quote,
which should be required reading*).  The point is that if the *route*
to that content less is convenient for the end user than some other
route, that other route is going to be taken.  Path of least
resistance, etc.

To the extent that the convenience of SciHub and its ilk threaten the
financial viability of publishers - and I am of course sympathetic to
this argument, particularly in the case of university presses and
other struggling non-profits - this is yet another argument for
revisiting business models.  Or as Collette Mak has just shared with
us so eloquently, quoting Patry, "no law is going to save the business
model of a company that refuses to give the customers what they want."
  That, it seems to me, is the problem we need to solve.

Let's solve it together.

Ivy

* http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/IWtbF.html

"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive.
Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to
distribute, copy, and recombine---too cheap to meter. It wants to be
expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient.
That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate
about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness
of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the
tension worse, not better."

> -----Original Message-----
> From: LibLicense-L Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> On Behalf Of LIBLICENSE
> Sent: Thursday, May 05, 2016 1:38 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: New Article: “Who’s Downloading Pirated Papers? Everyone” (Sci-
> Hub Data)
>
> 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