From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 May 2016 09:40:40 -0400

If content were all open, we would not recognize the world we live and
work in. Is that bad? Not necessarily: different is not inherently bad
or good. What troubles me about conversations about "flipping" the
economic model for published scholarship is that it assumes that the
basic units of content will remain unchanged. But the history of media
tells a very different story, that media of all kinds changes when the
business ecosystem changes. The business model, in other words, is not
something that is wrapped around a piece of content but is a property
of that content. This is McLuhan 101. Shouldn't we go back to reading
him?

Joe Esposito

On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 6:57 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