From: "Smith, Kevin L" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2017 13:09:13 +0000 If we are speculating about alternative futures, can't we also imagine a world in which it is Elsevier, Wiley and Springer that cease to exist, or at least cease to dominate the landscape for academic work, and something like Sci-Hub would serve as the central distribution point for that work? It is not really hard to imagine Sci-Hub as a legal service, imo, working directly with those same scholars who are already using it as a major source of scholarly output. Kevin Kevin L. Smith, J.D. Dean of Libraries University of Kansas -----Original Message----- From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2017 20:02:22 -0700 I had not thought of Sandy's very good point. Sci-Hub as we know it, and on their own representation, *depends* on the existing publishing system to produce, aggregate, and make available all of their content -- which they then, um, transfer into their servers. Success for them ideally consists in continued parasitism. One form of failure would be effective destruction of their server by some form of force majeure, which many think unlikely. But another form of failure would lie in the collapse of the ecosystem on which they feed. Without Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, in other words, they are nothing. Nothing suggests that they have a strategy beyond harassment, raiding, disruption. Would anyone care to do the work of strategy for them here on Liblicense? Jim O'Donnell ASU