From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 16:50:07 +0000 Responding to Rick Anderson's ultimate challenge, I should like to point him to what the Wellcome is exploring, and what the European Commission is envisioning with a publishing platform, etc. All these funding institutions are coming to the realization, as I have argued before, including with Rick, that the publishing phase of research is an integral part of the research life cycle, and that it costs at most 2% of research. Funders are simply beginning to factor this in. They are thinking more and more about developing their own platforms, and some are beginning to do so. Add to this the growing convergence between publishing platforms and repository networks. Once these two trends find their full bearings and their modus operandi (F1000 Research anyone?), then Rick Anderson's challenge will appear both trivial and passé. Jean-Claude Guédon ________________________________________ From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2018 01:24:52 +0000 Adam, I hope I won’t be accused of shouting simply for responding. You make valid points about the difficulty of negotiating legitimate (i.e. legal) access to toll-access content. Sci-Hub’s relative ease of use is often invoked when people want to change the subject from other salient aspects of Elbakyan’s enterprise, such as her dishonesty, her proud ignorance of fundamental points of law, her disregard for the rights of others (those whose rights get in the way of her own goals), her strange inconsistency when it comes to giving everyone access, etc. But with regard to the ease-and-simplicity question: one of the things I’ve been wondering is to what degree it’s possible to make legitimate access as easy as stolen access. Granted that publishers (and, we ought to admit, libraries) generally do a mediocre job at best when it comes to providing friction-free access to content—even for those who have legal access to it—to what degree does that represent a failing on our part, and to what degree does it suggest that doing things legally and ethically will simply often be more trouble than doing them illegally and unethically? No matter how easy you make the check-out process in a store, it will probably never be as simple as simply walking into the store, picking up what you want, and walking out with it. (Though Amazon seems to be making some headway in that direction right now.) None of that is to say that we shouldn’t do much, much better when it comes to our interfaces and authentication processes. It’s just to say that I’m not sure how reducible the friction is in reality. Surely it can be reduced; but by how much (and still remain legitimate or legal)? One answer to that question might be “The whole concept of ‘illegal and unethical access’ is what we need to abandon. All scholarship should be freely available to all without any kind of restriction.” To which I would say “When you’ve figured out a legal and sustainable way of providing free and universal access to all scholarship, the costs of which don’t threaten to outweigh the benefits, I’ll be very interested to hear about it. You’ll be the first one to figure it out.” --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication Marriott Library, University of Utah Desk: (801) 587-9989 Cell: (801) 721-1687 [log in to unmask] From: adam hodgkin <[log in to unmask]> Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:56:49 +0100 I am sure that I will be shouted at for being an apologist for Sci-Hub, and probably much worse. But please note, before you shout, that I do not approve of Sci-Hub's mode of operation or the justifications that Elabkyan offers. But. But ... It seems to me that Sci-Hub has one great advantage which puts all the main scholarly/scientific article platforms in a bad place. It has a simple user interface, a straightforward database, and (an arguably over-simple) re-use policy which is hugely attractive to users. So it is very hard to see how the mainstream subscription platforms, quirkily designed, and by ownership divided, can answer that. The simplicity arises because almost everything (I exaggerate, but a great deal of the most relevant stuff) is accessible and searchable in one place. And the re-use restrictions are almost completely liberal -- because the restrictions are almost non-existent. If the web had evolved in such a way that different bundles of the web were only searchable from different domains: if Indian content, that is content from Indian domains, had to be searched by an Indian search engine, European content by a European search engine, Chinese by a Chinese search engine and American content by Alta Vista or Inktomi, etc, imagine with what relief all users would land upon a newly invented Google that allowed us to search and then navigate to all web content from all continents and domains from one place. This point may not direct us towards a next step for scientific and scholarly publishing, but it may underline the fact that the traditional vehicles for publishing, deploying, searching and archiving scholarly content are not operating at web-scale. For all its defects disengenuity and deficiencies, Sci-Hub is. If the traditional publishers cannot find a solution to this problem perhaps Gates Foundation, CZI and Alphabet will? Adam Hodgkin www.exacteditions.com and my book Following Searle on Twitter http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo25370730.html