From: SANFORD G THATCHER <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:55:21 -0500

Actually, Sean, I agree with a lot of what you have to say here. People who
have read what i have written over the years know that I do link the decline in
monograph sales to the increasing devotion of more of library budgets to
keeping up with serial price increases. And more recently I have noted the move
away from dual cloth/paper editions (which Princeton university Press pioneered
back in the early 1970s with its Limited Paperback Editions when I was an
editor there) owing to the trend of more libraries buying the paperback if
offered simultaneously.  And I also traced the decline of sales of books based
on dissertations to the existence of licensed dissertation collections through
ProQuest.  Piracy through LibGen, and secondarily Sci-Hub, just is another nail
in the coffin.

I don't have an ax to grind against Marxism either. I was probably the only
president of the AAUP ever to have referred to Marx (Groucho as well as Karl)
favorably in a presidential address (in 2007), and I acquired many books on
Marx (even including one by Tom Sowell!) during my editorial days at Princeton
and Penn State.  The brand of authoritarian statist communism that Elbakyan
seems to favor is another question, however.

I also share your views about the exploitation of adjunct professors in the
academy and the harm that the Big Deals have caused in fostering yet more the
trend toward oligopoly in  the control of scholarly publishing.  Indeed, my
advocacy of open access was partly motivated by escaping the externalities of
the market economy in scholarly publishing.  My initial discussion of what
later became known as open access was in an essay I wrote in 1996 titled "A
Nonmarket Solution for Scholarly Publishing?"

I think we are more on the same side in this battle more than you might imagine.

Sandy Thatcher

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 07:50 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 22:28:40 -0600
>
>Well just so we're clear, Sandy, Marx had a lot of differences with
>Proudhon, so a reflexive anti-communism wouldn't necessarily be
>Pro-Proudhon, and vice versa.
>
>https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/
>
>But there is indeed a trend in rethinking Proudhon - I have a younger
>colleague who managed to get a book contract on a trade press looking
>at the connection between digital piracy and Proudhon. He actually got
>another contract for a University Press as well, but neither of them
>have helped in the current academic job market, where he was used up
>and tossed from a post-doc. In short, the threat to his livelihood
>comes not from the pirates who might share his work: it comes from the
>rotting academy that would rather exploit his labor as an adjunct (or
>less) than give him a tenure-track post as a promising young scholar
>and teacher. In other words, his problem is  definitely more Marxist
>than Proudhonian.
>
>And if we're being honest about what caused monograph budgets to
>collapse, it wasn't Russian pirates: Sci-hub doesn't even include that
>many monographs so far as I've been able to tell. LibGen might have
>more, but it is still a very scattered selection. I have yet to find
>my latest monograph on any pirate site (from fall 2016) and yet my
>royalties are still as bad as you'd expect them to be had it been
>rampantly pirated for years.
>
>No, library budgets seem to have shrunk in direct proportion to the
>slow (and then fast) capitalist expropriation of serials, the highly
>privatized market arrangements, particularly in the U.S., shrouded in
>NDAs and offered at profit margins of 30% or above. One might even say
>(at risk of starting an all out LibLicense war) that the Big Deal
>killed the monograph. Or at least put it on life support. And
>capitalism (especially our primitive, American, anti-intellectual
>capitalism, that only sees knowledge as important when it is spelled
>with $$$) is killing all of the above, including the scholar and the
>students they teach. In that context, I think throwing their lot in
>with the communists seems pretty reasonable.
>
>I have no doubt there are - and will be - collateral damages in this
>war, and it does pain me to see university presses taking a hit. But I
>am also skeptical of the real total of lost revenue due to piracy:
>just as I do the numbers offered by the MPAA and RIAA. When someone
>downloads a pirate copy it doesn't necessarily represent a lost sale.
>In many cases, as the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report
>demonstrates, those who pirate may not have the means to purchase the
>full price item: they may be poor grad students, or from developing
>countries, or in universities, like mine, where the library budgets
>have been frozen for years and the individual stipend for books was
>eliminated even before that. But the same report notes that pirates
>are also the most likely consumers of legitimate media once they have
>the means.
>
>http://piracy.americanassembly.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/MPEE-PDF-1.0.4.pdf
>
>I'm actually surprised, in this context, that all libraries aren't
>co-sponsoring more projects like UnGlueIt, Knowledge Unlatched, or
>SCOAP3. I suppose there is only so much of a budget that can go
>towards those endeavors and it may not be scalable. But pooling
>resources to help pay for the open access fees (or, better yet, more
>heavily subsidizing their university presses in the first place)
>ultimately seems to make more sense than paying excessive fees to
>companies like Informa or Elsevier who see their serial and monograph
>publishers as little more than cash cows.
>
>The latter are understandably upset that someone else appears to be
>skimming off the profits. But the collections on SciHub and elsewhere
>are spotty at best - particularly if you have a particular article or
>monograph in mind. They may be the first stop for some consumers - out
>of convenience or necessity - and I imagine there is quite a bit of
>random discovery, but most all of us end up at the bookstore or the
>library for the thing we actually need to read - and most of us have
>to use what ILL is still available (or allowed by publisher contracts)
>to actually get it.
>
>In that regard, you are probably right to frame Elbakyan as being more
>of a danger because she wants to bring down capitalism than that she
>is now helping make Aaron Swartz's Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto a
>reality. If she wasn't hiding in Russia, I'm sure she would have
>suffered his fate in short order. Anti-communism has never been an
>ideology to shrink from the violence necessary to enforce its
>dictates. But it is ironic indeed to be re-fighting the Cold War over
>the distribution of knowledge - and to have the U.S. be on the side of
>keeping it locked behind walls. Then again, walls are the new face of
>American freedom.
>
>Thanks for that lively and provocative post.
>
>-Sean