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
> On May 3, 2016, at 5:04 PM, Ann Shumelda Okerson <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Ivy -- interesting usage counts; thank you for sending them along. My
> takeaway is somewhat different from yours. That we'd be better served
> by open access is surely true in many situations (even if not
> realistic in all).
>
> BUT need SciHub even more clearly satisfies is convenience: the very
> high value of finding so much of what a scientific researcher needs in
> ONE source, no matter who the author or publisher. See, it appears
> that a sizeable proportion of the SciHub readership comes from
> institutions where there are already subs to these journals. Amd in
> the case of developing countries, a lot of the readership likely comes
> from institutions where publishers are already providing free or
> hugely discounted access via programs of organizations such as
> Research For Life, INASP, and EIFL.
>
> I (who think SciHub as it exists today is illegal) am trying a thought
> experiment: SciHub as a large Open Access source, funded by our
> existing subscriptions and big deals.
>
> We can and should find ways to scale up the OA side, but as we do
> this, we will still be weak on the convenience side of things. It
> doesn't seem to me that better library by library discovery services
> are a sufficient answer here. Large scale aggregation can be a
> powerful companion to OA, but then how can we all get together and
> make it happen legally?
>
> Perhaps if most of the article literature becomes open access,
> services will develop to aggregate in a sophisticated way? 1Science
> already does a lot of this for us. These services cost money... I'll
> stop here.
>
> Ann Okerson
>
>
>
>> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:37 PM, LIBLICENSE <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> From: Ivy Anderson <
[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 02:01:15 +0000
>>
>> Toby, that's a very perceptive question. I shared the University of
>> California's download stats with John Bohannon but he didn't use that
>> information. In 2014, our total ejournal download figure (html+pdf)
>> was 33 million. We think those numbers are a little skewed because
>> some publishers take users directly to an html version, and if the
>> user then selects a pdf, a separate download is counted. We've done
>> some research on this but haven't been able to devise a consistent
>> normalization formula. But still, 30M downloads at just the
>> University of California, large as we are (250k students and faculty),
>> makes 47M SciHub downloads look like not such a big deal. I suspect
>> it's practically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.
>>
>> UC is evidently not a big user of SciHub. Still, my takeaway is that
>> we'd all be better served by open access if we can figure out the
>> business models - this is clearly what people want.
>>
>> Ivy
>>
>> Ivy Anderson
>> California Digital Library