Ivy -- interesting usage counts; thank you for sending them along.  My
takeaway is somewhat different from yours.  That we'd be better served
by open access is surely true in many situations (even if not
realistic in all).

BUT need SciHub even more clearly satisfies is convenience:  the very
high value of finding so much of what a scientific researcher needs in
ONE source, no matter who the author or publisher.  See, it appears
that a sizeable proportion of the SciHub readership comes from
institutions where there are already subs to these journals.  Amd in
the case of developing countries, a lot of the readership likely comes
from institutions where publishers are already providing free or
hugely discounted access via programs of organizations such as
Research For Life, INASP, and EIFL.

I (who think SciHub as it exists today is illegal) am trying a thought
experiment:  SciHub as a large Open Access source, funded by our
existing subscriptions and big deals.

We can and should find ways to scale up the OA side, but as we do
this, we will still be weak on the convenience side of things.  It
doesn't seem to me that better library by library discovery services
are a sufficient answer here.  Large scale aggregation can be a
powerful companion to OA, but then how can we all get together and
make it happen legally?

Perhaps if most of the article literature becomes open access,
services will develop to aggregate in a sophisticated way?  1Science
already does a lot of this for us.  These services cost money... I'll
stop here.

Ann Okerson






On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:37 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 02:01:15 +0000
>
> Toby,  that's a very perceptive question. I shared the University of
> California's download stats with John Bohannon but he didn't use that
> information. In 2014, our total ejournal download figure (html+pdf)
> was 33 million. We think those numbers are a little skewed because
> some publishers take users directly to an html version, and if the
> user then selects a pdf, a separate download is counted. We've done
> some research on this but haven't been able to devise a consistent
> normalization formula.  But still, 30M downloads at just the
> University of California, large as we are (250k students and faculty),
> makes 47M SciHub downloads look like not such a big deal.  I suspect
> it's practically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
>
> UC is evidently not a big user of SciHub. Still, my takeaway is that
> we'd all be better served by open access if we can figure out the
> business models - this is clearly what people want.
>
> Ivy
>
> Ivy Anderson
> California Digital Library
>
>
>> On May 1, 2016, at 5:33 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 09:30:25 +0000
>>
>> This is interesting, but the numbers need to be put into context
>> (always a good idea with numbers - to put them in context). I have no
>> idea, for example, how many articles are being downloaded from Science
>> Direct, JSTOR, or other platforms and repositories in order to gauge
>> whether SciHub's 28 million is 'small', 'medium' or 'large'. For what
>> it's worth, OECD Publishing's downloads last year were 28 million (so
>> we're running at around 50% of SciHub) but our catalogue is much, much
>> smaller - we have around 200,000 items on our platform, a far cry from
>> SciHub's 50 million. Does anyone (STM, perhaps?) have data on journal
>> article downloads worldwide?
>>
>> However, this data does support a conjecture that we have at OECD: the
>> potential audience is always far larger than one thinks. I recently
>> had one of our authors say her latest paper would have an audience of
>> '200' and she swore blind that it wouldn't be any larger. Based on our
>> past performance with similar papers, I reckon we'll reach twice or
>> three times that number. This thinking is quite widespread. I was
>> recently challenged at a conference, at which I had shared data on the
>> growth in accesses to our content following the introduction of our
>> freemium publishing model, by someone arguing that OECD content was
>> somehow different from scholarly content published in journals and was
>> bound to have a larger audience. I countered by stating that 40% of
>> OECD populations are now educated to first-degree level as are many in
>> non-OECD countries, especially in places like Iran, China and India.
>> Therefore, the potential audience that has the skill and ability to
>> read a journal article is really very large indeed. The data from
>> SciHub seems to be proving the point.
>>
>> The final anecdote about ease of discovery and access is sobering . .
>> . If we (publishers and librarians together) can't get this right,
>> especially at subscribing institutions, then we're failing badly. But,
>> this brings me back to the first point - the context of this data.
>> What is the share of SciHub downloads at subscribing institutions? If
>> it becomes significant, then we are failing, if it isn't, then we're
>> not.
>>
>> Toby Green
>> Head of Publishing
>> OECD
>>
>>
>>> On 29 Apr 2016, at 06:19, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>> From: Gary Price <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Date: Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 3:11 PM
>>>
>>> From a New Article in Science (No Paywall For This Article).
>>> .
>>> From Science (NO Paywall):
>>> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
>>>
>>> "But in increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning
>>> to Sci-Hub, which hosts 50 million papers and counting. Over the 6
>>> months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents.
>>> More than 2.6 million download requests came from Iran, 3.4 million
>>> from India, and 4.4 million from China. The papers cover every
>>> scientific topic, from obscure physics experiments published decades
>>> ago to the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology. The publisher with
>>> the most requested Sci-Hub articles? It is Elsevier by a long
>>> shot—Sci-Hub provided half-a-million downloads of Elsevier papers in
>>> one recent week.
>>>
>>> These statistics are based on extensive server log data supplied by
>>> Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as
>>> a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan. I asked her for the data
>>> because, in spite of the flurry of polarized opinion pieces, blog
>>> posts, and tweets about Sci-Hub and what effect it has on research and
>>> academic publishing, some of the most basic questions remain
>>> unanswered: Who are Sci-Hub’s users, where are they, and what are they
>>> reading?
>>>
>>> [Clip]
>>>
>>> The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming
>>> the world’s de facto open-access research library. Among the
>>> revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users
>>> are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have
>>> complained that many users can access the same papers through their
>>> libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than
>>> necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. The United
>>> States is the fifth largest downloader after Russia, and a quarter of
>>> the Sci-Hub requests for papers came from the 34 members of the
>>> Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the wealthiest
>>> nations with, supposedly, the best journal access. In fact, some of
>>> the most intense use of Sci-Hub appears to be happening on the
>>> campuses of U.S. and European universities."
>>>
>>> The article includes the following charts/graphs/maps:
>>>
>>> Sci-Hub Traffic Over Six Months
>>> Sci-Hub Traffic, Globally
>>> Top Five Cities Where Most Requests Come From (U.S.)
>>> Top 10 Most Downloaded Papers on Sci-Hub
>>> Most Downloaded Publishers
>>>
>>> Full Text
>>> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
>>>
>>> Coverage in the Washington Post
>>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/04/28/whos-reading-millions-of-stolen-research-papers-on-the-outlaw-site-sci-hub-now-we-know/
>>>
>>> "[John] Bohannon [author of the Science article] quoted a George
>>> Washington University student saying it was sometimes difficult to
>>> access journals his school subscribes to from Google Scholar, a tool
>>> viewed as the easiest way to surface relevant papers. But if he puts
>>> the paper’s title into Sci-Hub, he said, “It will just work.”
>>>
>>> __gary
>>>
>>>
>>> Gary D. Price, MLIS
>>> Co-Founder and Editor, Library Journal's infoDOCKET
>>> Research Director, Global Investigative Journalism Network
>>> Information Industry Analyst
>>> Librarian