From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 22:15:00 -0700

Ann, you are spot on about convenience.  I am constitutionally opposed
to the Sci-Hub disruption by disobedience model, still stuck with
Thoreau and King in believing that one piece of civil disobedience is
a willingness to take what you are convinced is the unjust punishment.
I believe that publishers are the good guys, serious professionals
with a strong sense of responsibility to their authors and readers and
with a history of transformative innovation in support of research and
learning.  Three experiences, however, illuminate the challenge they
face.

1.  I was introduced to sites like SciHub three years ago at a Chinese
university where I was lecturing by first-rate Chinese graduate
students working on western history.  They do not have deep
collections in China; many of the classics of scholarship are no
longer in print and if available from second-hand dealers
prohibitively expensive quite apart from the challenge of a Chinese
student trying to buy and have shipped to China books from a dealer in
upstate New York.  For them, the bootleg sites were a lifeline to
doing serious work in a world where the normal commercial system did
not provide an alternative.  I did one of them a favor by getting a
professional acquaintance to let me send them a home-made pdf of his
thirty-year-old classic work from a niche publisher, long out of
print.  (Two copies on AbeBooks tonight, one in UK, one in US, priced
between $180 and $200 before shipping.)

2.  The attractiveness of such sites is exacerbated by the public's
experience of (a) the net and (b) libraries.  We have come to expect
that untold riches of information will be freely available on the open
web and, for members of university communities, on their library's web
site, at no cost to the end user.  Click, click.  A student who finds
public domain material readily available on a site cheek by jowl with
bootleg copies of copyright-protected material is not likely to resist
temptation in all cases.  Rather the opposite.  It's too much like the
normal experience of information-finding.

3.  So my third point is one I've made on this list before.  The
products that vendors now sell us to make available through our
library websites are functionally poor.  One example only -- we pay
for expensive e-books from a well-known aggregator; they come with
various restrictions on use; to get the *fullest* (but not complete)
functionality offered by the vendor, the user who is on our network
and has entirely legal and appropriate access to the site, perhaps
having used a login and password to log in through an ezproxy or vpn
from off-campus suddenly finds herself asked by the vendor to create a
*new* login and password unique to that vendor.  This is a pain
affecting vertebrae from the cervical all the way down.  Worse:  the
user will do that, read the material, go away, and come back three
weeks later to a similar product, reach the similar "please login or
create an account", and will discover that they have forgotten the
throwaway password they created three weeks ago and so to use their
university e-mail address they need to click "forgot password" and go
through that rigamarole.  The pain by now has settled in the spinal
column well below the cervical vertebrae.

-- And so this is my point made before here.  If I am given a choice
between a legitimate product served up through our library, one that I
am proud to offer our users, one that cost me real number to earn that
pride, and on the other hand a bootleg pdf of the same material, I
have to admit that I will unfailingly choose the bootleg version.  It
does what I need better than the  manufacturer's product does.

And *your* point, that SciHub and the like have the virtue of
aggregating content from vendors x, y, z, a, b, c, ..., in one simple
interface is spot on and adds measurably to the weight of the
encouragement that users, once having tasted forbidden fruit, will
feel.

So I'm inviting to our institution soon a Major Publisher to do a
workshop with us to talk about this problem.  If we were talking about
luxury handbags, I do not think I would have to invite Louis Vuitton
to send senior people to Arizona to help us figure out how we can make
their $1000 handbags look better, last longer, and retain their
appearance better than the ones you pick up for $35 from a guy on a
street corner with a bedsheet and some knockoffs.  But that's
essentially what we have to do.

An analogy and then I'll shut up:  none of the functionality that I
believe users desire requires invention of new technology.  The
bootleggers are not out-tech-ing the publishers.  But Jeff Bezos made
his first billion taking advantage of functionality he could offer
that the bookselling industry of that time had neglected to provide;
Uber and Lyft are doing the same now because they offer functionality
that the taxi companies had nonchalantly failed to offer.  What I
*love* about Uber is not having to fumble with arithmetic and my
wallet when I arrive at my destination.  I *love* being able to see
where the car is when it's coming to get me.  NOTHING prevented the
taxis of the world from offering those functionalities before now
except ... what?  habit?  complacency?  lack of imagination?   And so
they are getting their lunch eaten and appealing to government to help
them out.  I very much fear that the publishing industry, chock full
of great friends of mine, is setting itself up to be taxi drivers in
an Uber world.  I can think of a lot of reasons why I don't like these
developments.  But the world stopped paying attention to my likes and
dislikes a long time ago.

Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University



On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 3:57 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 01:59:19 +0000
>
> I agree, convenience trumps all. There is power in aggregation - but if
> content were open, wouldn't Google Scholar already serve that function?  I
> take no position on that, but I do agree that reliable and convenient
> friction-free access is the draw. You can go to SciHub and it works
> (apparently). And if all journals were OA, you could go to Google Scholar
> and they would work.  R4Life and such, as I understand it, don't operate
> that seamlessly, nor do toll-based authentication systems even when one has
> legitimate access. So convenience, yes, for sure. I'm just not sure that
> SciHub would be needed to solve that problem in an OA world as long as
> Google Scholar exists. But maybe there would still be a role for it.
>
> On the other hand, as Mike Taylor says in his blog, maybe things are fine as
> they are.  Publishers are paid for subscriptions, users have access via
> SciHub, and everyone is happy.
>
> Ivy
>
>
>
>> On May 3, 2016, at 5:04 PM, Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>> 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