From: "Pilch, Janice T" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2017 03:15:37 +0000

Kevin,

You seem to be trying to convince the audience that use of Sci-Hub
follows general rules of economics, such that a higher-priced item
will be less attractive to consumers than a lower-priced or
zero-priced item, and that when the price gets too high, the company
runs into problems. You refer to a saying of economist Katheryn Price,
to the effect that the moment a company makes a mistake in pricing,
they either damage their profits or their reputation.

In this framing, losses to Elsevier are justified by so-called
economic laws, and Sci-Hub is legitimized by gaining a place within
the laws of economics. The blame falls on Elsevier for pricing its
product out of range, following some kind of economic law. You obscure
two  real issues:

One, that Sci-Hub doesn’t even deserve a place in an economic
analysis. Sci-Hub doesn’t follow the normal laws of economics.
Elsevier is getting ripped off by a criminal element that falls
outside normal economic theories of pricing. As for Elsevier being “to
blame” for having their material stolen for being over-priced, may I
mention that everything today is being stolen that can be stolen for
digital industry gain, no matter how much it costs and even if it
doesn’t have a price tag. It's not about the cost.

And two, that this is not a consumer issue, this is about strategies
being used by digital corporations and their followers to boost their
gains.

You refer to the perceived wisdom of “our faculty members are way
ahead of us librarians in pursuing new avenues for scholarly
communications.” But faculty members experience zero cost in the first
place. They never experience the cost of Elsevier articles. They have
no idea what libraries pay for Elsevier products. This is not a
situation where consumers are voting with their wallets not to pay a
price they see as too high. It’s about a whole different aspect of
competition, involving theft and misappropriation to increase profits
of competing digital industries.

This message, like the previous message, blames Elsevier for the
problem. I notice that supporters of digital capitalism have developed
a method of accusing anyone who tries to assert their rights as having
created their own problem- something that defies reality, given the
fact that it’s the digital industries and their followers creating the
problems pretty much in every case- in this case, problems that affect
a publisher.

Elsevier didn’t make SciHub what it is, but now they have to deal with
it. In the cosmology of digital industry capitalists, everyone else
creates their own problems just by being there and not being them.
Early American capitalists shared this view, based on a belief system
holding that the wealthy deserved their wealth and were doing divine
work, while the less fortunate had to have been guilty of some kind of
egregious sin, and deserved their fate and problems. Such myth allowed
the capitalists to escape guilt over their own dishonest and egregious
behavior. It continues today in the minds of those who think that
people who object to being stolen from- having their profits siphoned,
their ability to make a living crushed, having their personal data
taken, having their privacy stolen- deserve scorn. Little Alexandra
Elbakyan, whose actions feed nicely into the ambitions of BigTech (we
read that they still desperately need content), laughs about it, as
the article says, describing Elsevier’s requests as “funny” and
“ridiculous.”

The truth is not that Elsevier made Sci-Hub what it is. The piracy is
egregious and staggering and nothing justifies it, including a
misapplied economic theory. In the faulty cosmology of digital
evangelism, bullies and criminals are heroes, victims are guilty
parties, and the public- and the library community- is not supposed to
know the difference. They are just supposed to cheerlead online,
generating even more money.

Truth is important. We should try harder to get back to it.

Best,

Janice

Janice T. Pilch
Rutgers University Libraries

________________________________________
From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2017 12:58:54 +0000

Anthony,

There is a saying, that I have seen attributed to economist Katheryn
Price, to the effect that the moment a company makes a mistake in
pricing, they either damage their profits or their reputation.  I
think Elsevier has made that mistake wildly in the direction of
overpricing and therefore have seriously damaged their reputation.
Indeed, they seem to make quite a number of public relations missteps,
which was the point of my original comment.

So it is possible that researchers who elect to use Sci-Hub even when
Elsevier is available to them are voting with their feet.  They may
still submit to Elsevier journals in spite of their distaste -- which
is very easy to detect in any conversation with scholarly authors --
because of perceived P&T pressures, but prefer to use some other
source for their own research.  The other possible reason that occurs
to me is convenience.  Since I have never tried to find an article
using Sci-Hub, I cannot assess the merits of that as a possible
reason, but those two explanations are both possible, and not mutually
exclusive.

Your second and third paragraph together seem to suggest that
librarians and others responsible for subscriptions are
over-estimating the importance of Elsevier, don't they?  If lots of
researchers have subscription-based access to Elsevier, but many of
those same researchers are opting to use Sci-Hub instead, maybe we
need to reconsider our cherished belief that we cannot cancel Elsevier
subscriptions without bring down the wrath of researchers on our
heads.  It is possible that our faculty members are way ahead of us
librarians in pursuing new avenues for scholarly communications.

I am sorry you find my comments so predictable; I suppose I can only
wish that they required as little study or thought as you seem to
believe.

Kevin


Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Dean of Libraries
University of Kansas

-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2017 10:37:28 +0100

I was waiting for Kevin to say something like this. He would be
failing in his duty if he did not do so.

The interesting thing about SciHub is that someone has shown that many
of the users have access to the articles they go to SciHib for. Why is
this? I would be interested in his views.

I would guess that more researchers have access to Elsevier toll
access articles than to the articles of any other publisher who uses
the subscription model. They certainly have more big deals and more
penetration that way than any other publisher.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 30 May 2017 13:04:33 +0000

It is a rather curious article, beginning with the very intimidating
language quoted, but going on to note that the founder of Sci-Hub
expects to continue to defy the U.S. court.  There is probably very
little that Elsevier can do to enforce a judgment it obtains, so any
award is likely to have only symbolic value.  Even the symbolism seems
likely to have only limited impact, since the grandiose language of
righteous indignation in Elsevier's motion is so common to them.  They
say things like "staggering" and "egregious" in every press release
they issue about alleged infringement and even about public access
proposals.  They cry wolf so often, in short, that even when that
language might be justified it is just too easy to dismiss.  And, of
course, there is the point made at the end of the article that
Elsevier has likely brought more attention to Sci-Hub than would have
been possible if they had simply ignored it.  I am sure the
decision-makers at Elsevier thought this would be their "Napster
moment," but the truth is that they pretty much made Sci-Hub what it
is, and now they are finding that they cannot put the genie back in
the bottle.

Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Dean of Libraries
University of Kansas