From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 23:07:35 -0500

We complain a lot about Elsevier and other large commercial publishers
making a lot of money out of their dominant control of STEM journal
publishing, but from a historical perspective shouldn't we be blaming
ourselves for allowing this development to come about?  The first
publications issued by the first university press to be founded and
exist continuously since then in the late 19th century were journals
in mathematics and chemistry. There is no good reason that
universities themselves couldn't have scaled up their publishing
programs when research boomed after WWII and entrepreneurs like Robert
Maxwell entered the arena to begin their commercial businesses.

But, for whatever reason, universities failed to invest more in their
own presses, and the vast majority of universities decided to play
free rider on the some sixty presses that then existed instead of
financially investing in expanding the system themselves.  Had they
done so, control of STEM publishing would have remained firmly in the
hands of the academic community.  Instead of a Project Muse (a joint
project of the press and library at Hopkins) just existing for HSS
publishing, it would have existed for STEM publishing as well.  Now,
having allowed the genie of commercial STEM publishing to escape from
the bottle, we face the daunting prospect of trying to force it back
in.  It is sad that it takes a rogue enterprise like Sci-Hub to rattle
the system when the plight we face did not have to exist in the first
place.

Sandy Thatcher



From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2017 12:57:46 +0000

I don't think you are being fair, Joe; David is asking a legitimate
question, although it is also true that he is pointing out some
boilerplate rhetoric that actually does not, and is not intended, to
have much meaning.

Your argument that all law must be obeyed lest our social institutions
be undermined is very similar, in my mind, to those who say that we
must crack down on all undocumented residents in the U.S. simply
because they are "illegal."  But the law has not always been the same
as it is now, and it could be changed.  We could be more generous,
legally, to undocumented aliens, as we once were, and we could be more
generous to users of copyrighted content, as we once were.

As to David's question, surely we can ask if users of scientific
articles are better off because they have more avenues of access to
scholarship? If we determine that they are, perhaps the laws, or the
norms of how scholarship is disseminated, should change.  If scholars
did not give their copyrights away, Sci-Hub might not be illegal,
depending on how articles were licensed.  Rather than simply asserting
that what is good for Elsevier is good for scholarship, Sci-Hub, as
well as other developments in the scholarly communications ecosphere,
challenge us to reconsider the system as a whole, and what changes
might make it better.

Just to be clear, I don't want Elsevier to fail, nor do I want to do
away with copyright.  But I would like Elsevier to have a much less
dominant say in how scholars work, and I would like copyright to be a
benefit to authors, rather than an obstacle to them after it has been
given away.  David's questions points us toward those kinds of
consideration, IMO.

Kevin

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