Paywalled indeed. My own situation vis-à-vis this article is telling, I think. We had to cancel our Wiley “big deal” last year because we could no longer afford it. Learned Publishing is not among the comparatively small number of Wiley titles we retained. A PDF of the individual article would cost me $42, almost three times more than what the latest NYT bestseller would cost me on Amazon. In itself, this illustrates the market failures that have led to the development of ResearchGate and SciHub, and it is because they are fighting against a collapsing market that these lawsuits are futile.
Interestingly, if Professor Manley has published in a traditional law review, his article would quite likely be more widely available, since they are virtually all open.
Kevin Smith
University of Kansas
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2019 15:50:07 -0700
Stewart Manley of the law faculty at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur has an interesting new article in Learned Publishing: "On the limitations of recent lawsuits against Sci-Hub, OMICS, ResearchGate, and Georgia State University," doi: 10.1002/leap.1254 (probably paywalled for many). He assesses the effect on real world behavior of recent lawsuits advanced and won against institutions pressing forward with open access strategies by major publishers. He gives these "key points":
It's not unprecedented that attempts at definitive action/direction through political/legal institutions may be rendered irrelevant by adjustments in the behavior of stakeholders pursuing their own interests. In this case it makes the author optimistic that moves toward open access will in fact prevail in spite of legal defeats or restrictions.
Jim O'Donnell
ASU