From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 08:03:39 -0700

To my various remarks of the other night, let me add my agreement with
both Adam and Rick.  The competitive advantage of Sci-Hub is its user
interface and its one-stop-shopping.  They *kill* all their
competitors in this regard.  Of course, one part of how they do it is
by flagrant disregard for laws and contracts and, whatever your
politico-legal position, such flagrant disregard does not have a good
history as a sustainable business model.  Their entirely (as far as I
know) legal competitor with the greatest purchase among academics I
know is Google Scholar -- also killing on user interface and one-stop
shopping, though with the consequent difficulty in accessing full text
that arises from respect for law and contract.  But n.b. there is now
at least one free browser extension that takes Google Scholar results
and searches for openly-accessible PDFs without regard for provenance,
just an agnostically blind search for openly-accessible content that
matches the Google Scholar result.  (I've not heard of the extension
getting much uptake yet.)

My point is that the desirability of easy access is immensely powerful
-- powerful enough to give Sci-Hub its opportunity.  If publishers and
libraries were genuinely competitive on this score, Elbakyan would
have her Ph.D. by now.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 6:39 PM, 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