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