From: kalev leetaru <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 08:51:30 -0400

In case it is of interest, here is my take on SciHub and the trend it
represents in academic publishing:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/04/29/the-future-of-open-access-why-has-academia-not-embraced-the-internet-revolution/

To second Ann's comments, one of the most striking things to me about that
Science piece is just how heavily SciHub is apparently being used at
Western academic institutions which likely have legal subscriptions to the
journals in question. That to me stands testament to just how awful current
academic library journal subscription search systems are. I  can personally
attest from 15 years at various institutions public to private just how
impossible it can be to just find the fulltext of a particular journal
article even when you know your institution subscribes to the journal and
issue in question. Or you search and find 10 different copies from 10
different services the institution subscribes to, but some are abstracts
only, some are ASCII text only with no figures, and so on.  Or you want to
see an entire issue of a journal and you find multiple subscriptions that
purport to include the journal, but then when you browse through, after
having clicked through screen after screen, you find that some
subscriptions have time delays so don't include the most recent issue or
end or start on a particular date or only have samples of the journal,
etc.  Its a huge huge mess today. Its not librarys' exclusive faults, but I
do think there is immense room for improvement - even I ended up in the
habit of going to Google Scholar first to have it link me into my library's
subscriptions, since it at least seemed to be able to track down whether my
library had a copy and connect me directly to the best copy that had
fulltext and images.

Google Scholar is far from perfect, but as a researcher who does intense
deep dives into the literature, it is the model that I think libraries
simply have to adopt to stay relevant and serve their communities.  It
simply can't be that I can spend half a hour to an hour (sometimes several
hours) just trying to track down a journal article in the myriad mess of a
typical academic library's esubscriptions system - I should be able to
search for the article and jump right to the best available copy with a
mouse click.

While slightly tangent, the Science article also alludes to the possibility
that SciHub downloaders are using it for text mining. That is another area
where academic libraries need to play a much bigger role in helping
academics. I myself have always found libraries to be highly adversarial
when it comes to connecting researchers with publishers to explore possible
collaborations and in fact libraries have always been the primary obstacle
for me in my 15 years data mining in the academic world. Instead I've
always had to reach out directly to publishers after my home institution
library would push back saying it was not their job to help connect
researchers or would otherwise not invest any effort of any kind in helping
make those connections.

I've found publishers to be extremely helpful and open in supporting
large-scale data mining when approached - from 21 billion words of academic
literature (http://dlib.org/dlib/september14/leetaru/09leetaru.html) to my
dissertation (
http://www.kalevleetaru.com/Publish/Leetaru_Dissertation_Can_We_Forecast_Conflict-Dissertation.pdf)
to a myriad other initiatives I oversee (http://blog.gdeltproject.org/) -
see more in my NFAIS opening keynote: (
http://kalevleetaru.com/Publish/ISU2015-Leetaru-Mining-Libraries.pdf), but
in every case I reached out directly to the publishers after my home
institutional library failed to be of any help in forging connections and
collaborations. Libraries have a lot they can offer there in helping to
connect scholars with publishers and assisting in that process to ensure
legal data mining that benefits all sides, but they need to recognize that
if they put their foot down and say it is not their role, researchers will
simply go right around them directly to the publishers, further reducing
the library's role in academic life.

To me SciHub appears to be less a service for poorer nations to access
scholarship financially inaccessible to their institutions and more a
reaction to the just plain horrific state of access to academic scholarship
today, from extreme costs of subscriptions to the awful state of library
access portals.


~Kalev
http://kalevleetaru.com
http://blog.gdeltproject.org/