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


On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 7:42 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: SANFORD G THATCHER <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2018 19:40:35 -0500
>
> This is a very interesting article and, as far as I can tell, accurate in its
> reporting of the facts.
>
> What surprises me is that in  acountry like the United States that has a long
> history of anti-communism so many people in academe want to play ball with an
> avowed communist ideologue like Elbakyan. Her basic premise comes right out of
> the French anarchist thinker Proudhon, who famously said "Property is theft!" I
> wonder how many of her supporters really would like to see the US turned into
> an authoritarian country like Russia, which is what Elbakyan wants to happen.
>
> Like Peter Suber, as he well knows, I have been a supporter of open access
> going back to a time when that term did not yet exist, and I agree with him
> that Sci-Hub gives open access a bad name.  While thinking she is working in
> the public interest, she has done untold damage to university press publishing
> in this country by encouraging the theft of monographs as well as journal
> articles. A lot of presses with journals programs depend on surpluses from
> those programs to internally subsidize publication of monographs, so efforts
> like hers have resulted in making it ever more difficult for junior scholars
> especially to find outlets for their monographs.  There are a few efforts to do
> open-access monograph publishing, but they are way behind where OA journal
> publishing is and meanwhile untold damage is being done to young scholars'
> careers and futures through the externalities of programs like Sci-Hub and
> LibGen.
>
> Ironically, publishers' efforts to combat Sci-Hub have led them to bring the
> courts into the fray and strengthen legal precedents that can be used against
> other, perhaps more
> constructive OA undertakings. Sci-Hub's legacy may be a more repressive legal
> environment overall--not that Elbakyan cares because her ultimate aim is to
> bring down capitalism itself.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 05:19 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
> >Date: Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 4:52 PM
> >
> >"In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by
> >four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server
> >hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers
> >available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that,
> >one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer
> >with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her
> >email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: 'YOU HAVE BEEN
> >SUED.'"
> >
> >https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit