From: Michael Magoulias <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 5 May 2016 03:18:39 +0000 Well....not everyone is happy. A lot of publishers aren't, for starters, even the small number who are sitting Smaug-like on large enough piles of cash to help cushion the discomfort. With library budgets getting consistently cut, many publishers are not in fact getting "paid for subscriptions." The very sound, but impossible-to-prove, worry is of course that the existence of SciHub, and let's not forget dear old LibGen, are preventing the sales that would normally have taken place for journals and books. Incidentally, the "Robin Hood" fantasy that SciHub is focused on the "expensive" science journals makes excellent propaganda, but does not square with the facts. They have taken everything. Books and journals in the humanities and social sciences have been ripped off just as systematically as the applied sciences. And anyone who thinks that humanities journal titles are prohibitively expensive just hasn't been paying attention. But I'm most perplexed by this assertion that "convenience trumps all." In the context of scholarly journals, it's certainly important for information to be obtainable without undue effort. I know many scholars across all disciplines who bemoan the absence of print journals in their libraries, since that was an exceptionally convenient way of scanning the latest literature. (Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's easier or more satisfying to use than its precursor. The history of eBooks thus far seems to demonstrate this very point.) More importantly, "convenience," however defined, is at best a second order value for the constituency that both libraries and presses are meant to serve: scholars and researchers. I've seen a lot of editorial statements over the years, and not one of them has ever mentioned the word "convenience" or its cognates. For them, "excellence" comes as close to being an absolute value as anything. This can mean producing an imaginative theory requiring evidence to substantiate it, it can mean producing the evidence that supports or falsifies the theory, it can mean a characterization of a novel phenomenon, or it can be a novel interpretation of a phenomenon previously thought to be well-characterized, and many other things besides. There is nothing particularly convenient in the production or consumption of this material, certainly not in the consumerist sense of how convenient it is to get a hair dryer through Amazon Prime these days. For me, and this is just a private view, the essential weakness with OA advocacy is that it fails to recognize the distinction between "good work" and "bad work," and this the fundamental distinction governing academic activity. When I read threads like this one, the implicit suggestion is that an OA repository of unremarkable or even lousy papers would be considered preferable, because more convenient, than a subscription-based product containing the top journals. The fact that hardly any major academic and professional societies have made their flagship journals OA, I take as proof that many, perhaps most, academics think differently. This is may be a good moment to make the possibly awkward observation that both ARL and ACRL publish titles with institutional prices that far exceed those offered by university presses for many of their journals. I can't think why this gorgeous irony isn't mentioned more often, since it shows that when librarians act as publishers, they really do act as publishers, even commercial publishers. I suppose this unrecognized affinity might make some people happy some of the time. Michael Magoulias University of Chicago Press Sent from my iPad On May 4, 2016, at 7:10 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