From: Robin Sinn <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 4 May 2016 12:47:11 +0000 Ann, Interesting thought experiment. But if most of the articles researchers want are OA, then isn’t Google Scholar the de facto winner? There won’t be any need to jump through institutional authentication, so GS would point directly to the VOR on the publisher’s site. Robin Robin N Sinn Sheridan Libraries Johns Hopkins University From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 3 May 2016 14:42:47 -0400 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 most situations (even if not realistic in every single one). BUT the desire SciHub even more clearly satisfies is convenience: the high value of finding so much of what a scientific researcher needs in ONE source, no matter who the author or publisher. It appears that a sizeable proportion of the SciHub readership comes from institutions where there are already subs to these journals. And in the case of developing countries, a lot of the readership may come from institutions where publishers are already providing free or vastly discounted access via organizations such as Research For Life, INASP, and EIFL. I am trying a thought experiment: imagining SciHub-as a large Open Access source, being 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. It doesn't seem to me that better library by library discovery services are a sufficient answer. Large scale aggregation can be a powerful companion to OA, but how can we all get together and make it happen legally (SciHub is not legal). Perhaps as more and more 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 (which poorer institutions and countries can't afford, even as content becomes "free"). 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