4 horsemen of the apocalypse
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Painted in 1887.

Sci-Hub has been part of the background radiation for many years, but about a month ago it jumped front and center on my radar screen. The occasion was that a young scientist told me that even though he has access to almost all the research papers he needs from his university library, he routinely uses Sci-Hub instead because of its more congenial user experience. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or not (I think he wasn’t), but his comment or wisecrack raises the interesting possibility that some of Sci-Hub’s enormous traffic is generated by researchers who are indeed authorized to get access to the material they seek, but not at Sci-Hub. On reflection this is not surprising. InfoDocket’s Gary Price has long lamented the fact that people don’t know what they have in their libraries, which raises the question of how much needs to be open and how much simply requires better tools for discovery, not to mention a seamless user experience.

Before I say another word, let me be clear that this is not a post that sides with Sci-Hub in any way. I think what Sci-Hub is doing is terrible — bad for publishers, researchers, and librarians. I saw one piece on Sci-Hub that invoked Robin Hood, but the name I would invoke is Meyer Lansky (“Lansky was born Meier Suchowlański in Grodno, in the Russian Empire [now Belarus]”–Wikipedia). We should expect that publishers whose commercial interests are threatened by Sci-Hub and other services of its ilk would take action (what I call a “bulwark strategy”). The problem is that you can’t stop there. Elsevier can win a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, and good for them, but sites like this have a way of springing from the ashes or hiding in politically advantageous regions. Smaller publishers, of course, don’t have the resources of an Elsevier, which means that much of the activity to ward off incursions by a Sci-Hub or its ilk is necessarily conducted by companies that obviously have their own interests at heart. I am sure that Elsevier is full of great people who love their children and walk their dogs every day, but do I want them to be responsible for the fortunes of my organization, which otherwise competes with them in the marketplace day after day?

The Kitchen has gone on record about Sci-Hub in two superb posts by Angela Cochran and David Smith respectively. I say “on record” with the understanding that the Kitchen itself has no voice but is rather the sum of the uncoordinated musings of its cantankerous contributors, who are united only in their exasperation at this blog’s three most prominent trolls. David’s description of how Sci-Hub works is a model of technical explanation. Angela sums up what Sci-Hub means to a publisher — how it challenges security systems and demands costly monitoring — and describes very accurately how publishers are reacting now and are likely to react in the future. Oh, and let us not forget that SPARC is on record, too. Here is Heather Joseph on NPR:

I think researchers take for granted that they’re – they’ve been forced into a system of workarounds to try to get access to the articles that they need to do their research. Typically, a researcher will have legal access to only between 50 and 70 percent of the articles that they need to do their work. So I think this database, Sci-Hub, was just another step in a process that researchers have sadly become used to doing.

“Sadly”? These comments by a professional lobbyist should come as no surprise. Cynically exploiting a criminal situation, SPARC simply recites its talking points. Researchers have been reduced to leading a life of crime. Oh, how unjust is the big bad world!

The trap publishers can fall into is to think that a legal victory or even a series of such victories is a substitute for planning the next steps of the industry’s future or that the primary focus should be to set up more roadblocks to the Sci-Hubs of this world and lobbying organizations like SPARC that tacitly support them. One way publishers are likely to respond is to make it harder for pirates to get access to published materials. Angela notes, for example, that some publishers may stop producing PDFs. I think this is highly likely. A PDF is a weapons-grade tool for piracy: a fixed document that can be passed around the conversational channels of the Internet without alteration (it is the Portable Document Format, after all). But here we have to ask whether it is in a publisher’s long-term interest to make its service any less valuable to its authorized users in order to stymie the unauthorized ones. A bulwark strategy alone may not be enough to carry the organization into the future.

Let’s learn something from publishers working in other segments. In the college textbook market publishers have been wrestling with the used-book problem for many years now; by some accounts used (print) textbooks now comprise about one-third of the market. Imagine a lucky publisher that secures an adoption for a text for a course with 30 students enrolled in it. Ten of those students buy a used text, a few borrow books from other students, a few find pirated books online, and some do without the text entirely. So a potential market is reduced by half or more. Publishers reacted to this by trying to make the used books obsolete. Thus texts were updated with greater frequency (not unusually, the life of an edition went from 5 years to 3), but one consequence of this was higher pricing because the huge costs of development had to be amortized over a shorter period of time. But higher prices drove more students to purchase used books and to seek pirated copies — and not to acquire texts at all. The publishers’ solution, in other words, deepened the situation. This is despite the fact that the publishers’ action directly addressed a very real economic problem. Unfortunately, the publishers lacked foresight.

Or we can learn from the trade. When J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter novels, she prohibited her publishers around the world from creating digital editions. The Harry Potter books became the most pirated of all. Now the novels are available as ebooks and sell in the terabytes, reducing the incentive to create and distribute pirated editions. There will always be pirates, but some people are just lazy and won’t bother with services that are inefficient or hard to use, as many pirate sites are.

A real problem for publishers is that the habits of users are being shaped by the Four Horsemen of the Internet: Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google. From these companies users are learning to expect certain things, and even the publishers of highly specialized academic materials are compared to Amazon’s convenience, Facebook’s ubiquity, Apple’s coolness, and Google’s magic. We can cry out, But that’s not fair! Our markets are a fraction of the size for those big tech companies! But fairness plays no role in the marketplace. Publishers have to do more to satisfy their users (and to raise expectations) not because it is the right thing to do but because it is the market-mandated thing to do.

The real question then for publishers is what to do after shutting down Sci-Hub. To prevent future Sci-Hubs from arising, Sci-Hub has to be made to look old-fashioned. New services have to create more value; users have to be presented with features that they just can’t live without — even if they lived without them for decades. And in our heart of hearts, can’t we admit that we are embarrassed that we are still publishing PDFs?

Joseph Esposito

Joseph Esposito

Joe Esposito is a management consultant for the publishing and digital services industries. Joe focuses on organizational strategy and new business development. He is active in both the for-profit and not-for-profit areas.

Discussion

341 Thoughts on "Sci-Hub and the Four Horsemen of the Internet"

Everyone who disagrees with your perspective is a troll? Did you really mean to say that? You might not agree with OA advocates, but they’re not just looking for a fight with you. They’re just working towards a better system where less money gets siphoned out of the system into company profits. It’s not about you at all.

Now there’s an unfounded assumption. Why would you assume he’s talking about OA advocates? You must not read this site very much.

They’re just working towards a better system where less money gets siphoned out of the system into company profits.

Which is odd, given that the big commercial publishers are all handsomely profiting from OA, and every indication is that OA will cost just as much, if not more than subscription publishing.

“OA will cost just as much, if not more”? Sources, please.
1) According to Joe, in 2013 OA journals published at least 15% of total articles, but took only 2.3% of revenues; i.e. OA is many times cheaper.
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/11/17/additive-substitutive-subtractive/

2) If OA brings in more money, why do the most profitable publishers do so little of it? Are publishers slashing their own revenues out of principle, because sharing research freely is “reprehensible”, as Joe puts it?

Hi Thomas. I suspect my reasoning is based on the idea that OA doesn’t magically make costs go away, it just shifts the nature of who is paying for those costs. In many ways, it adds additional costs (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/24/the-illicit-love-affair-between-open-access-and-traditional-publishing/). When the Max Plancke Digital Library tried to come up with an economic rationale for a flip to a fully-OA world, they had to go through enormous financial gymnastics and make unlikely assumptions just to get to a break-even point (http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/09/24/the-global-gold-open-access-flip-a-realistic-plan-or-magical-thinking/).

According to Joe, in 2013 OA journals published at least 15% of total articles, but took only 2.3% of revenues; i.e. OA is many times cheaper.

Those numbers are misleading, because they don’t account for what is being spent to publish that 15% of articles. When a journal is published via “diamond/platinum” OA, there is no revenue generated, but there are still costs. For example, eLife spends $8,300 for every article they publish. That $8,300 still must be paid by someone, yet it is not accounted for in the 2.3% of revenues because someone is just eating the cost.

I suspect they are also skewed because they are made up of a proportionally large percentage of journals that are not highly selective. Journals that reject few articles have lower costs. Should that group include journals like Nature, Cell, etc., then the average cost per article will increase significantly.

If OA brings in more money, why do the most profitable publishers do so little of it?

Because demand is so low. Every commercial (and many non-commercial) publisher I know is investing heavily in OA, creating more and more fully-OA outlets, signing new OA “big deals” with funders and governments. As the article you cite above notes, these revenue streams are additive to existing streams, and only a limited number of authors have access to funds to pay APCs (or are under compulsion to do so from their funder). But every commercial publisher is doing their best to gobble up this new revenue stream and encourage its growth.

David, what’s your source for ” eLife spends $8,300 for every article they publish”? I’d like to be able to quote that number with a reference.

Hi John,

It’s a pretty simple analysis. eLife puts out a financial report each year, and I’ve taken their total spend and divided it by the number of articles published. Their 2014 expenditure is here:
http://2014.elifesciences.org/#figures/528e77eebd181c66d702d3df29b8ca68/fig_table_1
And you can tally up the number of articles here:
http://elifesciences.org/archive

We’ve written about this in the past, here looking at 2013 where they were spending more than $14K per article:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/08/18/how-much-does-it-cost-elife-to-publish-an-article/
In 2014, they doubled the number or articles published and likely saw some economies of scale, as well as getting past the initial spend needed to build infrastructure, so they reduced costs to the stated $8,300 per article:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/10/28/open-access-at-a-crossroads/
They are a not-for-profit and so they file 990 forms each year if you’re interested in digging into their finances further:
https://www.guidestar.org/profile/45-3588477

Thomas, I hate to break your bubble but the largest publishers are doing much of it. Elsevier, Springer, T&F, Wiley are very large publishers and the publishers of many OA journals.

PLOS1 is a profitable (generates excess capital as they say in the non-profit world) enterprise and it makes a handsome one at that! PLOS ONE’s massive growth over the last few years generated record revenue, according to PLOS’ financial statement. For 2013, the publisher reported that gross revenue grew by 31% to $50.8 million (up from $38.8 million in 2012).

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/12/02/peak-plos-planning-for-a-future-of-declining-revenue/ At the same time, PLOS’s expenses grew by 35% to $37 million (up from $27.4 million).

Rachel: The costs and the profits are not changed by OA only who pays them are! I hate to say this Rachel but there is no free lunch. Look at the escalating prices at PLOS1.

I remember page charges but we won’t go there!

Rachel, there’s a big difference between referring to the existence of trolls (which is what Joe did) and saying that everyone who disagrees with Joe is a troll.

Aren’t you interested to know who the mysterious Big Three trolls are, though? (I’d love to think I might make that list one day, but I know deep in my heart that I’ve not been participating enough to qualify.)

I wondered the same thing myself. All the Chefs might not even offer the same three names. (Most of the members of my personal Troll Brigade don’t even deign to comment in SK.)

I can’t see how Heather Joseph’s comments can be interpreted as an endorsement of Sci-Hub, tacit or otherwise. Surely what she says is factually correct- that researchers use methods like Sci-Hub (and #ICanHazPDF, torrent streams etc. etc.) because they have no other recourse but to act in not-entirely-legal ways? The access problem is real whether you wish to believe it or not, and merely saying “Researchers have been reduced to leading a life of crime. Oh, how unjust is the big bad world!” is to denigrate and patronise the very suppliers and consumers of scholarly content that scholarly publisher s rely upon.

And please correct me if I am wrong, but copyright infringement is not prima facie a criminal matter? The legality (as well as the morals and ethics) of Sci-Hub are up for debate of course, but is it correct to assume that it is necessarily a criminal enterprise?

Starting an argument over semantics (copyright infringement is not “stealing”, it’s a civil offense, not a “criminal” offense) is a standard red herring technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring) to distract from the more important issue being discussed.

That said, any enterprise that is admittedly based on unauthorized access to secure computer networks would seem to qualify as “criminal”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

Note that you can easily push aside any line of argument you don’t like by saying it’s “merely a matter of semantics”, and dismissing it as a red herring. It’s a fine rhetorical manoeuvre if your goal is merely to “win” an argument; but quite useless as a means of actually learning anything.

If you have unlimited time, it is fun to argue about vocabulary or punctuation.

Neither of these things plays much significance though, toward the underlying issues. As the original commenter noted, “legality (as well as the morals and ethics) of Sci-Hub are up for debate” but then tried to steer the debate away from those matters and toward word choice.

And now I am wasting further time explaining why this is a waste of time.

I do not expect to find a publisher arguing that words don’t matter, and that defining our terms correctly is a waste of time.

1) you and other commenters continue to ignore the admitted criminal activity of unauthorized access to a secure computer network.
2) If you have so much time on your hands that you wish to spend it splitting hairs, go for it. I’d rather talk about the issues.

I’m very pleased that two commenters here engaged in a seemingly endless back and forth over the semantics of the use of legal terms such as “stealing” and “criminal”. I think a careful read of what they had to say makes a more convincing argument than I ever could of the value of such online bickering.

But rather than playing logical games, perhaps you would prefer to respond to the (I think at any rate) substantive issues I raise about Joe’s characterisation of Heather Joseph’s remarks? after all, “I’d rather talk about the issues” too.

I think her remarks were very carefully chosen, and as Joe said, the work of an expert lobbyist. Rather than address the actual impact or ethics of Sci-Hub, she used it as an opportunity to lobby for the cause that she is paid to lobby for. She is clearly very good at her job. There is a difference between saying that Sci-Hub is clearly in the wrong and should cease operating, but one can understand the conditions under which it arose, and what was done here.

I did not see a substantive comment or I would have replied to it. You apparently never read the original post. That is your prerogative. But it is hardly my responsibility to respond to a comment that has no relationship with what I wrote.

Well I did include a direct quote from you, but there we go, so much for your much-touted “objectivity”.

Niel: You are wrong.

Copyright infringement is the act of violating any of a copyright owner’s exclusive rights granted by the federal Copyright Act. There are three elements that must be in place in order for the infringement to occur.

The copyright holder must have a valid copyright.
The person who is allegedly infringing must have access to the copyrighted work.
The duplication of the copyrighted work must be outside the exceptions.

The legal penalties for copyright infringement are:

Infringer pays the actual dollar amount of damages and profits.
The law provides a range from $200 to $150,000 for each work infringed.
Infringer pays for all attorneys fees and court costs.
The Court can issue an injunction to stop the infringing acts.
The Court can impound the illegal works.
The infringer can go to jail.

No other recourse. Let’s see. You are hungry and want steak for dinner, but alas can only afford tube steak (hot dogs). Do you steal the steak of settle for lesser fare.

The cause of the scientist is no more noble than the needs of the unemployed man on the street who needs to feed his family.

Can we please cut out the physical-goods analogies? It’s 2016, surely by now we all know how non-analogous they are. If I were hungry and wanted a steak, then no, I wouldn’t take it away from someone who already has one, depriving him of his steak. But if I could download one — so that he and I both had a steak — then perhaps I would. That is the appropriate analogy here.

Finally: Neil (not Niel) is referring to the observation that most copyright infringement is a civil matter, not a criminal one. That is a distinction which David Crotty prefers to write off as insignificant, but in fact it’s very important in many situations — for example, a civil violation will not leave you with a criminal record.

Mike: You can only go to jail for a criminal matter. Court issues a cease and desist order and a fine and you don’t adhere to the court order. The order is then referred to the criminal court and if the infringer is found guilt of not complying its off to the hoosegow. Read reply to Neil

Mike: No the super market analogy holds. Theft is not defined by the material being physical or not. Witness the music cases. But, good try. In short, stealing is stealing is stealing….

Yes, stealing is stealing is stealing.

And copying is copying is copying.

If you genuinely can’t see how entirely different the two things are, then we have a problem. Redeploying the perfectly good word “stealing” to describe other activities is one of the most obfuscatory and unhelpful things the copyright lobby has done — and that’s saying a lot.

Any analogy with physical goods is fatally flawed and cannot possibly cast light on copyright issues.

Just curious: if a pirate prints copies of a book and sells them illegally in the marketplace, the books printed by the original publisher are not reduced in number and are therefore not literally replaced or disappeared. So, would you call this stealing or not? It seems that a market has been stolen, at the very least.

Mike if you ever get involved in a copyright infringement issue do not hire Misnick as your counsel nor as an adviser. There are court cases that dispute his claims. He is presenting the world as it should be according to him but not as it exists.

Now if you want to argue that there should be a world in which invention and creativity are worthless to those who create and invent I think we would be living in a rather dull world of sticks, stones, and caves.

Yes, stealing is stealing is stealing. And copying is copying is copying. If you genuinely can’t see how entirely different the two things are, then we have a problem.

This reminds me of the popular bumper sticker that says “skateboarding is not a crime.” The problem, of course, is that skateboarding is a crime if you do it in places where skateboarding is illegal.

The same goes for copying. Are stealing and copying very different activities? Well sure, but that’s not the question at issue here; the question is whether both stealing and copying are crimes, and the answer is “yes, under certain circumstances.” There is such a thing as illegal copying. Illegal copying is, in fact, a crime. Whether copying should ever be considered a crime is an interesting question, but for now it most certainly can be.

And in light of currently-prevailing national and international intellectual-property law, what Sci-Hub is doing does certainly appear to be criminal.

I agree with most of that. I am not saying that because copying isn’t theft, it follows that copying must be legal. I’m just saying that copying is a different illegal activity from theft, and that attempts to reason about it using analogies that involve the theft of physical goods inevitably make things more confused.

BTW., it’s better to talk about these activities being illegal (which they certainly seem to be) rather than criminal (which most of them are probably not). I know David thinks this is a fine point, but I prefer to be precise when it costs nothing.

Mike: see
U.S. Code › Title 17 › Chapter 5 › § 506
17 U.S. Code § 506 – Criminal offenses

Just for accuracy.

Infringement can be criminal.

1. You are replying to Charles, not to me.
2. If you were found guilty of an offence, you could care a great deal whether it was a criminal or civil offence. See Civil Law vs. Criminal Law.
3. The medieval scholars viewed with such derision for discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin were in fact discussing a matter of some profundity: the intersection or otherwise of the material and spiritual (or if you prefer, ethical or philosophical) worlds. That doesn’t strike as something to be ashamed of emulating.

David I agree that libraries should be better funded. But to imply that professors who on the average start at over $60K and when a full prof average over $90K for a 9 month contract have to walk around hat in hand is just absurd!

Mike we have a problem. If one holds copyright one owns the work and its rights to distribution and the right to earn money from the effort to produce the work. Thus, to copy a copyrighted work is stealing.

Mike: Copyright is a piece of property. What someone other than the creator can do with it is delineated in the law. The guy who wrote the article cited is just wrong.

“Copyright is a piece of property” is precisely what Masnick says in this article. How can you assert that copyright is property and then literally two sentences later say that Masnick is wrong?

A copyright is property. A copy of a copyrighted work is not.

You could steal my property by taking my copyright away from me — for example, with a contract which you insist I sign as a condition of publication. Or you could similarly destroy the value of a work by removing it from the public domain by retroactively extending the term of copyright. But you can’t steal a copy of a copyrighted work that I have a copy of, because when you copy it I still have it.

The concept of “steal” only makes sense of rivalrous goods. Copyrights are rivalrous; copies of copyrighted works are not.

Mike no one has to sign a contract. I have signed over 1,000 contracts in my 40 years in publishing and I never held a gun to anyone’s head. I never threatened nor forced anyone to sign a contract. In fact, I would not want an author who believed that s/he had no choice. Nor do I know anyone who has forced an author to sign a contract.

What a publishing contract basically says is that I will invest my money and you will invest your time and hopefully we will make a little money as a result. Your money may come in the form of promotion and tenure or in the form of royalties.

Your statement is specious at best.

“No one has to sign a contract”? You know very well that this is not true. Journals claim they have to have the contract (with its copyright transfer) to publish a paper; academics know they need their work to be published for their career. In the absence of options, they sign. I’ve done it myself, before I switched to all-open-access-journals.

There may be no guns pointed to heads, but in the monopoly-ridden “market” that is scholarly publishing, there might just as well be.

The decision to sign is yours. No one makes you sign a contract. You can walk away. I have had authors walk away. They have gone to other publishers and they have had their work published. Now OA publishers don’t want to have the copyright just your money!

The copyright is mine and you have no right to copy it without my permission. Even a copy of my copyrighted work is still mine. If you do copy and distribute your copy of my copyrighted work you are stealing. You are a thief.

If signing a contract for a journal article is a matter of coercion, Mike, it should be possible to get a court to declare a contract unenforceable. Do you know of ANY instance where ANY court has invalidated a journal contract for this reason?

Masnick seems to be arguing along the same lines as L. Ray Patterson, who distinguished between use of the work and use of the copyright, claiming that only the latter involves infringement. Petterson’s theory underlay the copyright policy of the Georgia State University System, until Georgia State was sued by four academic publishers, at which point the State Attorney General quickly abandoned Patterson’s theory as the basis for Georgia’s policy and substituted another policy instead. There may be a lesson for Masnick in that decision.

That‘s the lesson you take from the Georgia State e-reserves case?

And there was me thinking the moral was that there are no depths certain publishers won’t stoop to, no progress they won’t impede, no allies they won’t alienate and no communities they won’t embitter to preserve their profits.

Since you seem to be a stickler about precision of language, you should know that two of the plaintiff publishers are non-profits and therefore, by definition, do not make profits.

You didn’t respond to my challenge, which was to show how Masnick’s argument differs from Patterson’s and, if it is very much the same, why you think Masnick’s argument is defensible if a state attorney general did not.

You are quite right: I should have said “profits and surpluses”.

As you know, in the original court decision, the judged rules in the library’s favour in 70 of the 75 cases presented by the publishers. AAP lobbying seems have been successful in getting some of this overturned (though by no means all). As things stand, no-one knows how this will turn out, as appeals against the appeal seem to be on the cards. In any case, it doesn’t seem wise to base a legal interpretation on a case still in the appeals phase.

I know nothing about L. Ray Patterson.

It’s not MY interpretation of the legal case. It was the Georgia State attorney general that decided, not long after the suit got under way, that Georgia’s policy had been based on an indefensible theory put forward by Georgia law professor Patterson, which seems very similar to what Masnick is arguing. I’m only stating a fact, not trying to interpret anything.

In practice, the signing of the author contract *is* coercion because publishers say “here’s our contract, please sign it for your work to get published”. Only if the author challenges this by saying “no, I will grant you a licence instead”. I know from my own experience that the publisher then says “sorry, it’s either assignment or nothing”. I then reply “in which case I’ll take my paper to another journal”. Only then does the publisher relent and offer me a licence agreement. Not happened to me once, but many times. If publishers were GENUINE about all this they would offer the author a choice: assignment or licence, you the author choose. Now why don’t publishers do that?

“Coerce” is a word which means “to make (someone) do something by using force or threats.” I want to be clear here that this is what you’re saying, that a publisher is threatening you and using force against you (also that you are okay, and whether you need us to send the proper authorities to help you). There is a difference between negotiating a contract and coercion. There is also a difference between one party in a negotiation having a set of requirements and that party threatening the other party. For example, a publisher will often require that figures be submitted in a particular format at a particular resolution. This is required for the work to be published. Many publishers require all listed authors to affirm that they have read the article and approve of its publication. This is required for the work to be published. Should either of these be considered “coercion” as well?

The good news is that authors have a lot of choice in the market, and there are many, many, high quality journals that do not require assignment of copyright from authors. If this is something that is important to you, then it is your responsibility to choose wisely where you publish your work. I encourage you to bring your business to journals whose practices you support.

Coopenheim: That is not coercion that is negotiation. So you grant the license and with that act you take on the responsibility for defending it. The publisher could take you to court to make sure you do. You do realize that don’t you?

Let’s accept David’s, Harvey’s and Sandy’s contention that what publishers do to obtain copyright transfer is not coercion. That word may indeed be misleading, since no threat of force is involved.

My question for David, Harvey and Sandy is: what is the correct term for a “negotiation” in which one party holds all of the power?

Gee Mike you poor powerless person. But then again you have the power to go elsewhere. It seems to me you hold all the cards because you own the property or should I say paper.

I am very surprised that you would say this — or at least, I would be very surprised to learn that you actually believed it.

The reality is that by the time this “negotiation” takes place, the researcher has already invested a great deal of time and effort not only into the actual research, but also the publication: formatting the manuscript in accordance with the journal’s requirements, successfully navigating the very uncertain waters of peer-review, revising the manuscript to tale into account the reviewers’ comments.

What you’re proposing is that a researcher who has done all this should then turn aside, passing up a certain publication in favour of re-formatting the manuscript and references, re-entering the peer-review lottery, and crossing their fingers that the paper finds another home — and that if it does so, it has been delayed only by months, not by years.

All this for a researcher who has other work to do (actual, research!) and who quite likely needs the publication now, for the CV that she hopes is going to get her a postdoc, a job, a promotion, tenure or a grant. (“Publish or perish”, remember?) I don’t know how long its been since you were an active researcher, but I can tell you this is not going to happen in 99% of cases, possible even 100%.

The publisher behemoths know this perfectly well, of course — which is why they push this “negotiation” on all their authors, and get what they want except in a tiny proportion of cases. It’s a cynical manoeuvre at best; even if we accept that the word “coercion” is not appropriate because there is no literal gun to the head, the so-called negotiation consists of “do what we say, or your career will suffer”.

When publishers effect not to know or understand or believe this, all they achieve thereby is to reinforce the increasingly prevalent notion among researchers that publishers have no idea what our lives are like, and don’t care what pressures we work under, and in short are not our partners, as they so often claim to be.

Mike, start your own journal or journals. Solves all the problems, doesn’t it?

You facetious suggestion, repeated several times in this thread, serves only to emphasise how tenuous is your grip on the reality of the lives of researchers.

Mike: BS! I have dealt with authors for over 40 years and they are not naive.

Start your own journal as Joe suggests!

Given that the author holds the ultimate power here, the choice of where to submit their paper and the ability to withdraw that paper and submit it elsewhere, I’m not sure the question makes any sense.

David: Perhaps it is time to offer courses at various meetings explaining the publishing contract and why various clauses are included.

Mike, you act as if the author has no responsibility for where they have chosen to submit their paper. Journals make their licensing terms evident up front. If you read the instructions to authors, as surely any responsible author does, you know in advance what will be asked of you. There should be no surprises late in the process if you have paid attention and chosen wisely. If the disposition of the copyright is that important to you, why would you invest all the time and effort without even checking the journal’s clearly available policy? Why not contact the editor if you have any questions? Even still, if the author has been completely negligent in looking out for their own interests, they can pull the paper if they realize that they have failed to read the instructions they were clearly given up front. How is this in any way unfair?

I have always felt that charging excessive prices for ‘archive’ articles by commercial publishers is egregious. They have benefited from sales to many research libraries and can certainly absorb the expense of scanning by low wage off-shore workers. If the APS can supply their backfiles virtually for free, when are the large commercials going to ‘man-up’?

Egregious. Interesting. So you are an arbitrator of price. I think the price of cars is egregious as is the price of housing, food and in fact everything.

Price is determined by what the market will bear. You can look at a given company and say they are making too much money, but then again you did not take the risk, nor did you experience the loss of failed endeavors.

Perhaps that egregious price is covering the cost of a struggling new journal that would not be available without the egregious price.

Great post. To answer your question of whether publishers are embarrassed to still produce PDFs, we base our decision to do so on usage patterns and we’re still seeing the vast majority of full-text downloads going to the PDF. There is a cost to producing the PDF, so our decision is purely based on user preference and not what would make sense economically.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise that researchers like the portability of the Portable Document Format. It’s super-helpful to shove a library on a USB stick and take it everywhere, including places that don’t have Internet connections. (Museum basements spring to mind, an important venue of research in my field of vertebrate palaeontology.)

That Joe considers the portability of PDFs to be a flaw just beggars belief. If Sci-Hub offers better value than publishers do, then the solution is for publishers to improve their offering to compete, not degrade it further.

Sci-Hub does not offer a better product. It offers OUR products. If university students find Sci-Hub, which lacks a competent search engine, to be easier, than the discovery services are cooked. Clearly folks see value in what publishers do otherwise no one would want to steal it. The authors could always donate the manuscripts post publication to a sci-hub like site, but they don’t because largely they don’t care. They don’t even put them in their university repositories without threats and mandates.

Well, Angela, if you believe that Sci-Hub doesn’t offer a better product, you have to wonder about Joe’s friend: “a young scientist told me that even though he has access to almost all the research papers he needs from his university library, he routinely uses Sci-Hub instead because of its more congenial user experience.”

“The discovery services are cooked” — yes, quite likely. But publishers who don’t ask why that’s the case are going to find it hard to understand the appeal of Sci-Hub.

I really think this is important to understand Mike. I am asking a question here. Publishers know why the discovery tools are not popular with end users but the librarians keep buying them so there’s that. But the claim here is that people are using Sci-Hub even for content they have access to. This is confusing to me.

I have, unfortunately, spent a decent amount of time recently in Sci-Hub. If you have a DOI or a PMID, it’s beautiful. In many cases, it serves you the PDF within seconds. The search is crap (and in fact is not working right now anyway). We know that researchers generally start their search in one of two ways: PubMed for related research or Google Scholar. A user finds the article they want from a competent search engine and can in two clicks access the PDF (if they have access and that is what I am talking about here). In order to use Sci-Hub instead, they have to copy and paste the DOI (usually on the abstract pages so there is one more click on the publisher site) or the PMID number for medical papers, open another browser window, go to Sci-Hub, pop in the DOI to the Sci-Hub search bar, enter the capcha code, and maybe (probably) get the PDF. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this is easier.

Now, if you start on Google and follow the links, yes, you may find stuff that your university doesn’t have. Google very helpfully will point you in the direction of every version of that paper on the web (giving preference, by the way, to any free access PDF it can find). This also seems infinitely easier than using Sci-Hub. So my honest to goodness question is this–if you are at a location with great access to most of the content you ever need, why on Earth would Sci-Hub be easier?

Perhaps Joe’s friend was off-campus?

Another issue here is that we use the word “search” for two rather different activities. One of them really is searching, e.g. “tell me what papers you know about that pertain to sauropods”. The other might be better termed locating, e.g. “take me to the paper with DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0125819”. As you pointed out Sci-Hub is much better at the latter than it is at the former. But if the latter predominates, then maybe that’s enough?

Does it predominate? I know it does in my own search patterns, but then I work in a relatively small field where I usually know what specific paper I want. It might be very different in bigger fields where there’s no expectation that you’ll be familiar with all the literature.

My young scientist friend has on-campus access to one of the larger academic research libraries.

We get reports from CrossRef on DOI resolvers so we know when someone is searching by DOI. It is a tiny fraction and can actually be almost entirely traced to a DOI link on an external page and not that people are using DOIs to search for content. I simply don’t buy it that the average user always knows exactly what paper they are looking for.

As for off campus access, most universities have remote access for students. It’s why Sci-Hub works at all. As long as you go through the university VPN, you can have access.

Interesting on the rareness of DOI searching. (Although of course not all DOI searches go through CrossRef — not even for the DOIs that CrossRef issue.)

Searching for a specific paper that you know you want needn’t be by DOI. Maybe it’s more common that people land up at the official page for a paper by other means (e.g. Google search), and find it convenient just to shove “.sci-hub.io” on the end of the domain-name? It would be interesting to know what proportion of Sci-Hub downloads come from DOI/PMID searches, text-searches, and direct URL addressing such as onlinelibrary.wiley.com.sci-hub.io/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2007.00728.x/abstract;jsessionid=745BA1462CAB18F61562A76DD496CBD2.f02t04

Off-campus access exists, yes; but can be cumbersome enough that it could be one of the reasons some people prefer to use Sci-Hub. Never underestimate the appeal of a solution that Just Works. Apple has built its entire empire on that.

Interesting analysis, Angela. It really sounds like Sci-Hub is popular precisely because of the piracy it delivers.

> In order to use Sci-Hub instead, they have to copy and paste the DOI (usually on the abstract pages so there is one more click on the publisher site) or the PMID number for medical papers, open another browser window, go to Sci-Hub, pop in the DOI to the Sci-Hub search bar, enter the capcha code, and maybe (probably) get the PDF. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this is easier.

Angela, all you have to do is browse to the pay-walled paper and click a bookmarklet (like a normal link but it executes some computer code when you click it) in your bookmark bar. Very, very easy.

Mike it is hard to compete with a thief. The thief has no or little costs.

It is true that you can’t beat a thief (or indeed a copyright violator) on price. But you certain can on features. That’s why Netflix is so popular, even in the present of the Pirate Bay.

That’s not the only reason, though. There are some of us who refuse to use Pirate Bay on principle, because we respect the property rights of others. (Heck, there may even be many of us. Who knows?)

Yes, some Netflix users avoid Pirate Bay because they want to avoid copyright violation. But I doubt they would have been able to build a business on that. Their success is surely due to how easy they’ve made it to use their product.

I’m mention Apple again here. They sell their hardware at way above market prices because they’ve made it so easy to use that people are prepared to pay the premium. In essence, by buying someone else’s laptop for $1000 instead of a MacBook for $2000, you’d be getting $1000 worth of “free hardware”. But for many people, including me, that $1000 is not worth the time it would cost me. Hardware that Just Works is worth a premium. The same would be true for a scholarly content system that Just Worked.

Wow, it’s hard to know where to start with this one.

I’ll just say this. Feel free to perpetuate an us-vs.-them narrative. But please can we not have the howls of mock outrage when scholars perceive publishers as a them who are vs. us?

Well argued. It seems to me that bulwarks and a sea change are both needed to keep this crazy ship afloat. I find the arguments of legality and that SciHub obtains most material through “donated” credentials incredulous. If I am entrusted by my employer with keys to the warehouse and I “donate” them to an acquaintance who shows up in the dead of night at the loading dock to fill up her truck, that’s not donating because the keys weren’t mine to donate. That’s aiding and abetting a crime.

The sea change is to improve legal access to the point where for the majority, legal access is more convenient than the pirates. Music piracy is still with us, but my impression is that the low-cost individual subscription streaming services and the $0.99 individual “article” purchases kept legal access in the game. There’s a lesson there. Stiffening the bulwarks by eliminating the PDF seems reminiscent of Apple putting DRM in all its music. It fed the backlash. The old-fashioned PDF works with tools like EndNote, it’s not dependent on my being online or being credentialed. Messing with PDFs is why Springer is my publisher I love to hate. They lock down PDFs to prevent readers from annotating files with notes, rotating sideways tables, and other features I take for granted.

Yes, there is still legal access as a ‘game’ in the music industry, but my musician brother who used to make a small living from selling vinyl and CDs is no longer able to make a living from his music despite the success of iTunes, Spotify et al. 99c minus what Apple et al take leaves precious little for 99% of musicians. There is indeed a lesson there.

As William Patry so eloquently put it “Denying consumers what they want cannot succeed as a business model, and no law can save copyright owners who refuse to satisfy consumer demand.” In this case the demand is for access seamless integrated with the discovery systems researchers actually use, not systems that require them to step outside of their normal workflow. When users with library-supported access go to SciHub rather than the library resources can you say it’s wrong? Yes,but the vendor got paid, the user got the content–everyone got what they wanted. There’s two very basic problems that drive users with library-supported access to content to go to SciHub. The first is the user experience as the post points out. When I go through Google Scholar and my choice is immediate access to a PDF through an archive or ‘find text’ through our resources I generally go to the archive because I know that find text will return multiple database access points, then often a repeated search or a down load or JSTOR requiring I agree to their terms. If we want our researchers to use our licensed content we need to stop annoying them and just get them the article. The second problem is that library resources are not well integrated into the discovery systems the researchers are actually using. Solve those two problems and Ned Stark will not have been beheaded, Thin Mint cookies will have negative calories and Bambi’s mother will appear alive at the edge of the forest.

The fallacy in your argument is that the vendor did not get paid! Sci Hub stole the material.

In what manner are publishers and holders of copyright denying anyone access to their materials?

Er, huh, I mean….

No not at all. I can go to my local university library with my drivers license in hand and access all their holdings and all the holdings they have access to. Were you denied access to published material when writing your dissertation? I think not. It may not have been as convenient as now and it may have cost you a few bucks, but denied access. No!

For a person in a third world country lack of access was and is a matter of economic decisions on behalf of the government in power. SciHub, I believe comes out of Russia. Perhaps Putin should put more economic resources into library resources and less into invading his neighbors.

What is this physcally-going-to-a-place that you speak of? As a denizen of 2016, the concept is unfamiliar to me.

You think “It may not have been as convenient as now and it may have cost you a few bucks” is not a big deal, but it is. Friction kills momentum. Today’s researchers can be twice as productive as those of forty years ago because they don’t need to spend half of their time grubbing about in stacks, making photocopies, and trying to find misplaced copies of journals. Modern researchers simply will not tolerate going back to that world. You may deplore the fact, but it’s a fact none the less.

Mike: Today you don’t have to go to the library. You can do everything from home. Of course you have to go to the lab. Now what an inconvenience, but…

Our discussion was on access. The use of stolen material hurts you, me, and everyone in the chain, if it didn’t it would not be a crime to do so. Say, in the citations, you had to give where you got your material would you be so quick to use stolen material?

From your argument you seem to advocate stealing everything that can be stolen for the sake of convenience or cost, at least that is what you appear to be saying.

No, that is not what I am saying.

First, note that I make a distinction — and so should you — between stealing a thing (which deprives the original owner of that thing) and copying or sharing (which does not). Even if I advocated copying literature using Sci-Hub (which in fact I have not done) it certainly would not follow that I would also advocate stealing materials such as reagents.

Second, as I said I am not advocating the use of Sci-Hub. I am saying that it is inevitable that such a useful service will be used, whether we like it or not. It’s providing something that people need. It’s quite futile to say “people should drive to a library instead” — they simply will not. They may or may not be morally justified in that decision; that’s a separate issue. I am talking here about what people will do, not what they should do.

Building a business plan on the latter is not necessarily wise.

BTW., for avoidance of doubt, I may mention that I have not in fact used Sci-Hub at all in my own research: my only uses of it have been experiments to see how it works. (But I have obtained many other papers by means not authorised by their publishers, and I doubt there is a researcher alive who has not.)

May I remind you, Mike, that there was a major court ruling against Texaco that photocopying by its researchers to make their lives more convenient actually did constitute copyright infringement.

Mike you seem to forget that one transfers the copyright or ownership to the publisher who is now the holder of the copyright. This a right of the author.

Sandy, I’m not clear what this observation is in response to. I’m not aware that anyone (certainly not me) has claimed that Sci-Hub does not infringe copyright.

Mike forgive my hyperbole. I do not think you advocate thievery but you recognize that it happens. So, how is it to be stopped. Price is not the answer because one cannot compete with free. Is litigation the answer? Yes, but only if the person carrying out the act lives in a country which will enforce judgments. Will the moral argument work. No, because everyone’ morality seems to be different now-a-days. So in my mind the only answer is technology or overwhelming the system with requests. The later would require an enormous effort, so that leaves technology. I know nothing of technology but perhaps one who does can sabotage the site. Put something in that erases all the articles. Who would have thought cyber warfare would come to a journal article that is read by perhaps 100 folks!

Mike forgive my hyperbole. I do not think you advocate thievery but you recognize that it happens.

I’ll happily forgive that!

Knowing a bit about the relevant technology (I’ve been involved in Web development since about 1997) I am extremely sceptical that an technological measures can take down Sci-Hub or prevent access to it. A better strategy — maybe the only one that will work — is to build something better.

Dear Mr Kane, As an open access advocate from Nicaragua, a country in which almost half of the population live under extreme poverty, I strongly disagree with you. The socioeconomic condition of a country and the effects it has on its population should not be a barrier for its citizen to get access to information. Your comment is discriminative for those of us being affected by bad governments. Just because you can get access to information easily, doesn’t mean everyone who needs it can.

Natalia:

I am for open access what gives you the idea that I am not? You do realize that the costs associated with OA are merely transferred to the author who usually pays from a grant which could have gone to scholars in countries who find themselves in countries facing socioeconomic distress. Natalia there is no free lunch.

In fact, prior to retiring I suggested starting a series of OA journals.

Your problem is where you live and not that you don’t have access. Your country spends about $50 Billion per year on the military and a little more on all of education. I have no idea what library budgets are but I am sure you do and that you campaign vigorously for increased spending on libraries.

You have access to journal articles if you have a computer and a hook up to the internet. If you don’t have that then you have no access and whether the article is OA or not makes no difference. Some journals have an embargo but generally almost all journals are open access after the embargo period.

I will guess you have a pen and a piece of paper and that you can jot down what you want to use from an article after reading it for free on the web. What I find curious is the excuse of I can’t use it because it is not free or it is not available for immediate cut and paste instead of just taking a note. I guess it is the convenience factor. Also, I guess they don’t have the same regard for trees when it comes to their research and would cut one down rather than take a note.

Perhaps I am being too critical but then again you attacked me as one who does not appreciate the trials and tribulations of living in a country facing socioeconomic want. In fact, I do appreciate those kinds of situations and have for years and years. I have even lived in such countries and done work in such to improve the situation.

I do agree with you on the plight but suggest you work to change the conditions and not rail against publishers who for the most part make their goods available for free to impoverished nations.

According to this tweet from the Eigenfactor Project, Nicaragua spends ~$50M on military, not ~$50B. That’s 0.8% of their GDP. Compare to US’s >4% of GDP.

Harvey,

I never 1) Said you were against open access or 2) attacked you. I want to make clear that I do not support the violation of copyright. I came across this article today trying to figure out more about sci-hub and read different users opinions.

I do disagree with your comment. Sometimes a country doesn’t spend money in subscription fees because they simply can’t. The socioeconomic barrier of a person SHOULD NOT be an excuse.

I am not saying that access is in the hands of the publishers, and I am not “railing” against publishers either. I respect publishers, authors and admire the important role they play in scholarly communication.

I am pretty sure many of Sci-Hub’s users come from third world countries. However, Sci-Hub is not the answer, but there is a reason why its here. It is a symptom of something being wrong with the system. otherwise, it wouldn’t be here.

Thank you for clarifying your position. I am not sure the users are from third world countries but rather eastern European countries – thus, from whence sci-hub originates and from.

Mike I will add. OA has solved no problems. The paywall has only shifted to the author away from the subscriber. What about the author who has no money or grant to pay for his publication. Now that is denial of access of another kind one to which you put a blind eye

That’s a distraction, the problem is that the integration of access with the ways in which our users discover content is lousy and users will go with the easiest, most seamless method available. As to having stolen the content–if the end[user could have gotten the content through a legal, library-purchased or licensed source then yes, the library paid for the user to have access to that article and the user got the article. Was it sleazy? Yes, but If we pay for a user to get an article and they got the article the vendor didn’t lose any money on that transaction.They may be losing money from other transactions but they don’t when the library has licensed the content. The problem is HOW the user got the article, not that they lost revenue. SciHub stole the content no argument.

Unfortunately, integrating the Internet is impossible, because change is everywhere we look.

As a publisher who is losing both subscriptions and book sales because libraries are not seeing enough usage of the content we produce, I disagree that the publisher has lost nothing when a licensed user access our content outside of their library’s license. Libraries depend more and more on analytics to make purchasing decisions. What you describe subverts that process and has real world consequences.

How would it help your library stats, and chances of making a sale, if someone were unable to access an article due to forbearing from using Sci-Hub?

We’re trying to have Google Scholar index our books. It took a while to convince them to consider indexing books because they said, generally, the e-book experience is so bad they didn’t want to inflict it on their users (and I have some sympathy for this view). However, once we’d convinced them that we publish books just like journals, they accepted to index our titles. However, there is a sticking point, Google Scholar insists on directing users to the free-est version, which, in our case is our read-only version. We’d like Google to point users to the landing page which offers users a choice of version – read-only (which is free to anyone), PDF or ePub (both premium editions accessible only to subscribers or purchasers). I’m not trying to annoy anyone, I’m trying to offer a choice of formats and generate the revenue that keeps our (non-profit) publishing programme alive – but Google seems to have another agenda . . . .

The costs of research itself vastly exceed the costs of publication of that research. For 35 years, unaware of Mendel’s 1866 paper, researchers designed and executed experiments that, however cleverly thought out, were based on inadequate information. In the 1890s several groups independently rediscovered Mendel’s results, which William Bateson then brought to world attention. Had SciHub existed in those days, not only would there have been great financial savings, but many therapies that we now take for granted – insulin, penicillin, etc – would likely have arrived decades earlier. As documented in our Bateson biography, scrape the surface of the research enterprise and, time and again, the Mendels gush forth!

I think the question is why wasn’t the paper discovered? It seems to me that a lack of indexing was the problem. Something, publishers addressed in later years.

Indeed, as an argument for Sci-Hub this is absurd. As Angela points out, Sci-Hub is a poor discovery tool. It’s primary offering is piracy.

Perhaps my comment was not clear. I do not think Sci Hub helps in relation to the example given.

Mendel was ‘indexed’ by Wilhelm Focke (1834-1922), whose summary of genetic experiments reached Darwin in 1880. He passed it on to his young research associate (George Romanes) who was able to read German. Romanes mentioned Focke’s citation in an Encyclopedia Britannica article. It seems that few accessed the Mendel article because of the language and its location in a few inaccessible libraries. This is a well-known example of a quite general problem. Often it is access to information that limits the rate of scientific advance. Even if they know that a piece of information exists, researchers may not be able to access it. Ask not for whom the bell tolls … .

Forsdyke: Did not know that. Thank you for the information. So the problem was the time and not the information. What we have is an article penned in a foreign language not known by other researchers and a very limited library system. I just do not see how Sci Hub addresses those problems.

Part of the problem may be the comfort of authors with the old, dependable, print-image PDF. I spent nine years editing a journal that featured mathematical models and geographic information systems (GIS), two obvious candidates for advanced displays. I tried hard to encourage authors to include interactive demonstrations, videos, and all the whizz-bang stuff you’d see in an exciting conference presentation. Nothing! Nada! Zip! The PDF was all their tenure committees needed, thank you. Maybe a new generation will think differently, but it looks like we’ll be dealing with pirates for a long time.

I think I just broke the law and I am here to confess. 🙁

For ages I have been wanting to get copies of several papers I wrote 20–30 years back. Some full papers, a book chapter, and some a few abstracts. I just couldn’t get myself to pay $30–40 for my own abstract! I went to Sci-Hub and most worked with a single click. If anyone says they would happily have paid around $300 instead, perhaps they are a more ethical person than I am. I take my hat off. 😉

I hate to say this, but I would have paid. I signed a contract that I intended to honor when dealing with the publisher. In it there is a clause regarding purchasing material after the comp copies were given to me.

Say someone walked into the company you work for and said I will pay you $20 cash instead of the normal $40 if you set my page and there is no need to tell your employer. Would you do it?

Most authors who have signed contracts with publishers have done so under the coercion that “without a signed copyright transfer form, we will unfortunately be unable to progress the publication of your paper”. Whether those coerced contracts have legal weight is up for debate (I don’t know enough to participate but I’d like to watch). But as for their moral weight? Zero.

Mike: I worked for many large publishers both private and non profit. Don’t want to sign the copyright transfer, fine. But, I want all rights of distribution. You as an author want to go to court and fight for your copyright rights do so. They generally said: Oh, you won’t fight for my rights and I said no, why should I? I don’t have any rights to the work. They signed once they understood what they were signing.

I would like an example or two of coercion.

Harvey, I am no longer making my car payments, because I was coerced into signing the sales contract with the car dealer under the coercion that, “without signing the sales contract, we will unfortunately be unable to progress with your driving of the car.” I really needed to drive the car, so clearly the contract holds no moral or legal weight.

David: I’m not a lawyer but I believe coercion involves the use of force or threats.

I and you have been reading publishing contracts for many years and I have not had anyone say that they were coerced into signing a publishing contract. Nor, have I heard of a case involving the word coercion in reference to a publishing contract – a contract which has probably been read and re read by a bevy of Philadelphia lawyers!

Like you, I find it strange that someone with such a passion and insistence on using precise language and legal terms would use such a derisive term as “coercion” to describe what is a perfectly legal license. One might even describe what he is doing as “redeploying the perfectly good word “coercion” to describe other activities is one of the most obfuscatory and unhelpful things” he has done.

no matter which novel publishing formats will be pushed forward by big-E and their ilk > tools to revert them to easily-distributable PDFs will be available instantlty, i guess. scientists will be readers for yet a while after all. and as they’re also writers not only of words but also of code – the younger ones – my guess won’t be far off.
sci-hub etcetera will continue to flourish as long as publishers dare to charge ~35 bucks for one-time 24h access to a single paper. my students (at least) would not hesitate to buy online PDF papers legally with a price tag of 1- 3 $. so the publishers have actually a means to make sci-hub obsolete.

Mike: Econ is interesting because everything exists in a vacuum. The second response kinda destroys the argument. Additionally, the market is impinged by governmental intervention in the form of regulations and taxes….

His argument reminds me of trickle down economics. It works on paper but not in reality.

So you really cannot compete with free especially in a niche market.

not so hard, harvey, i assume. look at iTunes and how this made (music) file sharing pirates look uncool. now even iTunes is turning uncool as most people embrace streaming services. paid services, of course. the four horsemen know their business…

Christoph: I think the difference between the entertainment media and SciTech is shear size of market. In actually, we are talking about peanuts. According to the AAP total sales of all books and journals came to $28 Billion. The value of the US entertainment industry including books and journals is over $2 Trillion. http://www.statista.com. Thus, the idea of mass market sales of S/T is simply none existent. The S/T market is non elastic.

I am an advocate of OA for scholarly publishing for monographs for several reasons, among which are that monographs should be made available to many more people worldwide than they are now when only about 300 copies end up in the print collections of a handful of top research universities, and that OA will put pirates out of business.

“a young scientist told me that even though he has access to almost all the research papers he needs from his university library, he routinely uses Sci-Hub instead because of its more congenial user experience.”
Who knows this claim is true? Nobody will check, so you can say anything you want.
Regardless, what does this fury on Sci-Hub mean? In only a couple of days, three posts have been quickly cooked in this kitchen?
If I may, stay in your kitchen for your salad, and let Sci-Hub serves publishers and researchers.
Publishers should be happy that Sci-Hub exists because they are the lone and real winners from it. If authors cannot find papers, they simply won’t cite them, and the publishers will be the big loser. I personally do not cite a paper if it is not available for me. Many times I have sent kind requests to authors to get copies of their papers, but I did not receive any answer…
Publishers are the only and real winners from Sci-Hub and alike. Researchers won’t download papers to make money with, but to read them and cite them (colloquially to advance the scientific knowledge).
If this is bad for publishers, then I do not cite any paper anymore. What an author would win from downloading a paper from Sci-Hub other than to cite it and thus benefit the publisher while making an advertisement for him at the same time?
What should we do when we do not have access to a journal or when we do not have enough money to buy articles or to subscribe? Do you think that those publishers are poor enough that we should be charitable with them?
You may were impressed by the great numbers of comments on the previous pots on the same subject, and you said why not to take my part too.
Sorry, but your philanthropist saga in this kitchen for fortunate publishers does not fit much; when you have no right to have a copy of your own manuscript, you should think twice before singing your saga here on Sci-Hub. Try to put yourself in the shoes of a poor author, small lab or a group with very limited sources, but not in the skin of well-heeled predators who try to swallow everything they can.
Publishers pay a lot for advertising purposes, Sci-Hub makes ads free for them. I do not see where is the problem?
Why you don’t focus on the practice of Researchgate, Twitter, Academia and so on? All these channels are used for sharing and ads purposes but you seem focusing only on weak and poor people.
Bad kitchen.

Many of the comments here don’t address the issue of how the underserved can gain affordable access to the scientific literature. There are no easy answers here. I don’t think the publishers are really threatened by Sci-Hub as a good portion of the users of Sci-Hub would likely not be paying for the papers they are stealing. Read my blog post from yesterday at http://bit.ly/1OJN0nP for a more thorough discussion of the issues involved, including why the $0.99 scientific article marketplace, which I suggested 5 years ago, never happened.

I just read your blog post. I’m afraid you are not familiar with the cost structure of scholarly publishing, including the size of the market over which development costs can be amortized. That’s ok. It’s not your business. Personally, I choose not to opine on the pharmaceutical industry, about which I know nothing beyond what I read in the NY Times.

You are correct that I know little about the cost structure of scholarly publishing. What I do know is that there are large numbers of folks who can’t afford to access the literature. If I’m poor and hungry, I don’t need to know the cost structure of supermarkets to solve my problem. I need to know where I can get food now. I wrote a previous post (find it at http://bit.ly/1OgxmjB) detailing numerous ways people can gain access to published papers in an effort to help folks (prior to the setting up of Sci-Hub). What I would love to see is experts such as yourself and others come up with some strategy by which the underserved can gain affordable access. Do you see some way that this can happen?

I personally doubt that there are large numbers of people who (1) have the expert knowledge required to read and benefit from the scholarly literature but who (2) cannot find a way to access what they need. The arguments I have seen to this effect are completely unconvincing.

If these individuals don’t exist, then who are the people who are using Sci-Hub?

People who want access to research papers but are unwilling/unable to pay anything at all for it?

It is an empirical question but I suspect that most Sci-HUb users simply find it easier to access the online pirated article then to go through the more laborious legitimate access procedures, some of which have been described above. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, Sci-Hub offers all the advantages of theft over honest toil. This in no way makes these users “underserved” by the legitimate system.

I’m not defending sci-hub here, but if you’re right it is a pretty damning indictment of the current system. If sci-hub can deliver papers at essentially zero marginal cost in a manner that is sufficiently more convenient than the “legitimate access procedures” that thousands of researchers are driven to what you call theft, the current system is performing the task of document delivery most poorly indeed.

In other words, scientists are paying a huge cost in terms of inconvenience so that the publishers can control more tightly who gets access to the literature.

They have zero marginal cost because they are stealing what they are presenting. I would bet they have a program which searches the web and captures articles and then places them on a server. You know like credit card theft…..

This is the kind of wild, unjustified, unjustifiable arrogance and elitism that makes so many people want to throw up their hands and walk away completely from the encumbents in scholarly publishing. That leave people wanting to say “Well, screw you then” and go straight to Sci-Hub. If all the people on Who Needs Access? and the millions like them truly mean nothing to you, then I guess you mean nothing to them, either.

Mike I don’t know how to break this to you but it is not the millions but rather the dozen or so

This response from local-government jockey Jason Lowther is of interest: “Wow – what a coincidence that I know them all personally. I’ve had three local government practitioners raise this THIS WEEK”.

Mike, your sanctimonious insults aside, the list of supposed millions that you link to embodies an absurd model of the diffusion of scientific knowledge. This is one of the fundamental fallacies of OA, namely that non-experts should read journals. It ignores the fact that there is a vast system in place for translating, summarizing and communicating science to non-experts. The reason this system exists is because only a few people can understand the typical journal article. (Local government officials are certainly not among them.)

Capable is a far cry from want, need or desire to read it. When at a conference many, many, many years ago someone asked Mr. Jovanovich who is your audience. He said everyone who can read. But, that answer begged the question just like the 40% who are capable of reading S/T literature.

A better study would be how many read various articles in a specific journal and how much time is spent reading the article.

Indeed, millions are capable, fewer need or desire, but how many? In our case, we’ve made all our content free to read by anyone with an Internet connection in parallel with providing a ‘pro’ service to our traditional readers at subscribing institutions. Result? 85% of our rapidly growing usage is from non-subscribers (and our usage at subscribing institutions is growing too). I know of other experiments with OA monographs where readership is far, far higher than when the book was essentially accessible to scholars at mainstream institutions only. My conclusion is that the potential readership for scholarly content is much larger than most publishers (and authors) realise, but it is also true that few are willing to pay to access this content. And there’s the rub.

You have a lot of experience in this area, Toby, so I defer to your experience, but then how do you explain the fact that, as studies have shown, some 40% of monographs in academic libraries never circulate–and this is to a campus audience of students and scholars who have the motivation to seek out such specialized knowledge as one would presume not many members of the general public do (unless they have a special cause they are engaged with, as Christy Collins is). It just boggles my mind to think that the average citizen would ever want to consult articles in a journal of theoretical physics, say, when most of the articles will be written as mathematics that very few of us have any chance at all of understanding.

Having a tertiary degree does not make one capable of understanding a scientific article, far from it. Most articles deal with very narrow technical subjects that only equally narrow experts understand. The language is highly specialized because it is about things that only a few people are studying.

Monographs may well be much broader and this is an empirical question. (When I first started studying the diffusion of scientific knowledge I was amazed to find how little research there was on the topic.)

I run an advocacy organization for a rare genetic syndrome. I have a high school diploma and one half of a fine arts degree in acting (which involved lots of yoga and humming). I wade into research literature almost daily. It’s true that I don’t understand everything that I read, but I have learned from attending scientific meetings and reading papers, that researchers, amazingly, don’t understand everything that they read either. While I understand how someone working in a very discrete area could be puzzled about the need for access by non-experts, “scholarly literature” is deep and wide and there are surely many varied use cases like mine. I don’t have any dramatic stories about how access to a paper saved someone’s life, but I value access very much and I think that it enriches our disease community. I don’t know why there would need to be large numbers of people like me to make access compelling, but there are an awful lot of rare diseases and advocates for more than a few of them are working to build knowledge.

Christy, keep in mind that the issue here is a need so compelling that it justifies the forced restructuring of the science journal industry. I do not think that supporting political advocacy meets that high threshold requirement, but then I do not know what your organization does in the way of advocacy. I am also curious as to why the existing forms of access do not meet your needs, such as reading abstracts and wideout authors?

My use of research literature is for helping the patient community work toward getting appropriate care (not political work), and it helps me to understand the research landscape. Reading an abstract only is sub-optimal, as it would be for any professional researcher. The restructuring of scientific publishing seems inevitable, when I started doing this five years ago, I could almost never get papers. Now about half of what comes into my Google alerts is already open. I have only emailed authors a couple of times. Once I got no response and the other time I was told that my request would get passed on to another author, who I never heard from.

Christy: I looked at your site and you have a list of papers. Whether open or not could or could not be a concern to your audience, their decisions are theirs. Now, papers of interest to you or your audience can be viewed either free or for a fee the decision to read is up to you.

I am still puzzled, Christy. To begin with, all US funded medical research is already open access, via PubMed, and has been for years. But I still do not understand what you do. I do a fair amount of advocacy work, mostly on US policy issues, including science policy and OA policy. All policy work is political, including OA policy. My question therefore is what do you advocate to whom?

That’s not actually true; until very recently, only NIH-funded research was required to end up in PubMed Central. In the last year, that has expanded to include AHRQ, but there are a surprising number of other federal agencies that are not yet on board. This includes the Department of Education, which funds a lot of the work in my own area of research (language and speech disorders). Ditto the EPA (environmental exposures and toxicology), etc. The NSF is working towards requiring public access for the work they fund, but there’s a long way to go yet- the policy was released last year, but I think it only went into effect last month or so, and still has a very long way to go.

Furthermore, both the NSF and the NIH allows publishers to impose a 12-month embargo on papers from appearing in PubMed Central, which means that— in the absolute best-case scenario— the OP, should she rely solely on PMC, would be seeing a picture of the research surrounding her disease of interest that’s at least a year out of date.

Oh, and there is also quite a lot of research that takes place *outside* of the US! Or, inside the US but is not federally-funded (private foundations, etc.). So, while I am personally the biggest booster of PubMed and PubMed Central that you will ever encounter, it’s not a cure-all for the problem of public access to research.

Quite right, Steven. I should have said almost all medical research, not all medical research. The NIH research budget roughly equals all other Federal basic research combined, in all fields, from astronomy to computer science. So there are in fact a few small medical research areas beyond NIH, but they are few and small. And yes there is a 12 month embargo in PMC, but I think that is quite sufficient. There is a long road from basic research to patient care, a road many years long. So I am skeptical that patients need public access to research.

Not sure what you mean, Mike, as usual. The PMC research is accessible to the entire world, after 12 months.

Maybe by “the rest of the world”, they meant “research done by non-US persons”?

>

Thanks very much for that link, David! I had not been aware at how far the policies had gotten. I suspect that I am hardly alone in that regard among researchers, as well- I work with many computer scientists who, I can assure you, have little to no knowledge about these issues, unfortunately. I know that the NIH has been very aggressive (and rightfully so) about enforcing compliance- any publication you want to get credit for on your biosketch for a grant application has to either be linked to its PubMed Central entry or be explicitly marked as being exempt from the policy, which has been a very effective tool in getting researchers to pay attention. I imagine that NSF, DOE, etc. will follow a similar path, if indeed they haven’t already.

-SB

>

Remember though, that the NIH has been required by law to have their policy since 2008. They’ve only recently begun to actually enforce those rules. The other agencies are in a nascent stage, just figuring out and implementing their policies. The NSF has publicly stated that they don’t intend to enforce the policy for several years. These things take time and the US government moves slowly. One nice thing about the CHORUS initiative is that it will automate public access on behalf of authors, whether they’re aware of their requirements or not.

There is a model by which access to the literature is available to those who are not privileged enough to be at institutions with well-stocked libraries or with pockets deep enough to buy the content they need – it’s called freemium. In this model the content is made available online, for free, in a basic form and the costs of publishing are recouped by selling premium versions and other services to those institutions and individuals who find value in them. At OECD Publishing, we switched to a freemium business model and, four years on, we’re still in business. There is another publisher, Open Editions, on the same track.

Hi Stewart,

I think your piece makes many good points, although at the same time it does perpetuate some misinformation about how publishing works (and conflates all publishers as being the same as Elsevier and their ilk). You are right in that this is not an existential threat to publishing.

There have been and continue to be efforts to provide low cost access to research papers. Aside from charitable efforts like Hinari, Research4Life, INASP and others, there’s also DeepDyve, which provides exactly the sort of 99 cent per paper access you suggest. It’s been around for years, and from my own experience and that which I hear from other publishers, uptake has been close to non-existent. If there really was a huge market of folks willing to pay $1 to read an article, why are none of them doing so?

I think the other side of the question that no one seems to be asking is, if a university hires a professional researcher to do a job, is it that university’s responsibility to provide that researcher with the tools they need to do that job? We have universities sitting on billions of dollars in endowment funds, building new luxurious gymnasiums and pools for undergraduates, investing fortunes in football teams, and yet they simultaneously plead poverty when it comes to paying for one of the most essential tools needed by their own researchers (so essential that many have declared they are forced to break the law in order to gain those tools).

Isn’t part of this a failing on the part of universities to adequately fund their libraries?

Concerning DeepDyve, where I formerly was an advisor, the company is small but profitable and continuing to grow. Yes, small, but the demand is not nonexistent, and being profitable is quite an achievement for any early-stage company. I think your point holds, though: there is little demand for iTunes-like pricing for scholarly material. I am simply taking exception to the word “nonexistent.”

I don’t think that one can say there is little demand for an iTunes like pricing structure for scholarly publishing since the concept has never been tried. When I buy a song on iTunes, I own it and can put it on any of my devices to enjoy at any time. Rental is not the same thing as owning, be it scholarly papers, rental cars, or hotel rooms. If Deep Dyve allowed you to buy papers for $1, then I think it would really have taken off.

There is one key point about Deep Dyve that I think is missing here. Correct me if I am wrong, but Deep Dyve allows you 24 hr access to read a paper, but you cannot download and save a copy. This is not in any way the same thing as buying the paper for $1, as I want to keep articles I read in a file. I don’t want to depend on my memory for what the article said; I refer back to them all the time.

Hi Stewart, will try to respond to a couple of your responses here:
DeepDyve: My understanding of how it works these days is you pay a small fee and get unlimited access to reading papers, and the ability to print out some number of those papers. So yes, you can keep a permanent copy of the paper, but no, you do not get access to permanent ownership of a PDF version (though apparently they offer discounts toward purchase of PDFs).

I suspect that there is deliberately limited functionality here. If you’re paying less than a subscriber pays for access, then it seems reasonable that you should receive less. What’s interesting though is that there seems to be something of a disconnect. If there is indeed a huge market of those without access who would be willing to pay $1 to read a paper, then this sort of solution would seem to fulfill that need. Since it doesn’t seem to be happening, either 1) that market doesn’t exist, or at least, claims that people who want free articles would be willing to pay $1 for access are incorrect, or 2) it is not access that is desired, it is convenient ownership in a particular format. If the latter, then what is being sought goes beyond mere access to knowledge, but instead speaks to a desire to own a particular tool.

Thanks for clarifying this for me. I think one problem that Deep Dyve has suffered from is a change in its business model over time. I did look at this years ago, and it was not set up as you now describe. If people don’t know how this operates, they won’t avail themselves of the service. You make a good point about the distinction about the format issue. For many scientists with poor or no access, yes, they do want to have a copy on file. Papers are often like manuals, where one needs to refer back to them from time to time for technical details.This is why I think the rental model is not ideal to this market.

The other key thing to note is how much their prices have dropped. It used to be $2 to $5 to read an article, and now it’s a monthly fee to read an unlimited number of articles, really down to pennies a read if you want a lot of access.

I will look into this. Clearly their old model wasn’t working, and maybe they are not doing the best job at getting the word out.

There’s a little button on almost everyone’s keyboard. It usually says “PrntScrn” or other similar abbreviation. Equivalent alternatives exist if that is somehow disabled. Bottom line: if you display something on someone’s screen, there is no technological way to prevent that from being copied, saved and shared. Heck, the very act of getting something on someone’s screen technologically involves all three.

So, it might be article rental sites claim to sell 24h access, but I’d be very surprised if anyone ever “rents” an article twice.

You raise excellent points about what role universities should be playing in adequately funding the ability of their researchers to access the literature. Unfortunately, there are many people outside of universities that have legitimate needs to access these same materials. How can this be funded? While there are many ways these folks can get access to some papers (see http://bit.ly/1OgxmjB), these ways are often difficult, impractical, incomplete, and sometimes illegal (like “borrowing” your professor neighbors ID for remote access to the library collection). Sadly, no one has tried out the “buy (not rent) a paper for $1” model. The search for easier solutions continues.

I actually proposed this idea 5 years ago (see http://bit.ly/1TR8TcK). The main problem is the monopoly that publishers hold on the literature. I don’t think any of them are going to give me (or anyone else) a license to sell an article for $1 that they are selling for $30. Let me know if you know of any publishers that will do this.

Why don’t you start your own publishing company? Why complain? Why not just do it? Show us all how stupid we are.

Stupid? I am looking to the brilliance of the chefs at the Scholarly Kitchen to propose some solution to the problem I have outlined. Do you not agree that unaffordable access is a problem for many? With your great knowledge of the publishing industry, which I freely admit I lack, do you have any suggestions to put forward?

I don’t agree that unaffordable access is a problem. Publishers have been and are making their materials available to 3d world countries for decades.

Do you think that all people in “1st” and “2nd” worlds have means to access all publishers materials?
You should either working in an ivory tower or ignoring what 1st, 2nd and 3d worlds mean and how many people and authors do struggle to keep the minimum of source for keep lab running…

Richard I would have to see the budget expenditures for arms and the leaders lifestyle. I would like to see audits on how much comes in and how much actually reaches the people. I did much work in underdeveloped nations.

I do not agree that unaffordable access is a problem for many. Access is a privilege of membership (e.g., being a student at a university), not a right. Can we stop this debate now and simply agree that we have no common ground upon which to base a conversation?

“Can we stop this debate now and simply agree that we have no common ground upon which to base a conversation?”

That is certainly how it looks.

Or a drivers license from the state in which you reside and any public university library of that state is open to your inquiring mind. Membership umph!

Sorry, meant to do all this in one response. Perhaps there is an economic reason why no one has taken what is an obvious idea and put it into practice. As you yourself admit, you know little of the economics of scholarly publishing. Could the simple answer be that it is not feasible to run such a company? That it is unlikely that there is enough of a market to make it viable?

Factor in also the problem in selling your product a la carte at a lower rate than you sell it for as a package. Generally in life, it is cheaper to buy in bulk and one receives volume discounts.

$1 per paper seems a completely randomly chosen price anyhow. iTunes seems to have standardized at $1.29 per song these days, but what does the price of music have to do with the price of a low-volume niche product like a scholarly paper? Is there an upper limit that you think people would pay for a pdf of a paper? $35 is clearly too high, but that price is based not on trying to drive pay-per-view revenues, but instead on protecting subscription sales. What is the high end that would be acceptable?

The economics are complex. Even with iTunes, which was a great success at the start, it now appears to be giving way to a streaming model. You may be correct that there is no way to successfully run a company as I suggested, but if it hasn’t been tried, we simply don’t know. The music market, as we all know and as I have written about previously, is a different model from scholarly publishing, and differently sized as well.

It seems that some (many?) of the chefs don’t think that there is a problem with affordable access to the literature for some groups. If that is the case, then there is no need to dream up solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. You might find it of interest to read comments from the In The Pipeline blog (http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/03/01/why-scihub-might-not-matter) to see how at least some scientists view this issue.

I’m not sure I’d generalize anything about the Chefs (very few have weighed in here). Nearly all of us who work for publishers work for not-for-profits, so if anything, we’re on the lower price end of things. If there were an obvious and workable solution that would greatly expand access to research literature, it would be worth exploring, much as so many of us are doing experiments with and working our way further and further into things like gold and green open access (and the question remains open on both of those). We don’t claim to know everything (except maybe for David Smith), so perhaps putting all the pressure on our small group of authors to solve all of the world’s perceived problems may be a bit much.

Didn’t mean to put all the burden on your group. Just wanted to see what your thoughts were. From my perspective, problems that people don’t think exist won’t attract much effort to fix them, which is why I try to put the spotlight on them.

But if some groups have a need then they should find a solution and one that does not involve stealing other’s property.

David asks:

There’s also DeepDyve, which provides exactly the sort of 99 cent per paper access you suggest. It’s been around for years, and from my own experience and that which I hear from other publishers, uptake has been close to non-existent. If there really was a huge market of folks willing to pay $1 to read an article, why are none of them doing so?

For a researcher, who needs the article tomorrow as well as today, and in six month when handling the reviews, and when down in the Internet-less basement of a museum, there is a huge difference between buying an article (PDF) and renting the limited-term right to access it inside a Web jail. I’m not remotely surprised at the failure of DeepDyve. It’s simply not selling what researchers need.

Let’s be quite clear then, since specific wording is so important to you. We are not talking about access to information, you are talking about a specific product in a specific format that is tailored to your specific needs. There is then no question about publishers blocking access to knowledge, or refusing to sell access to papers for very small fees, but rather you are complaining that publishers won’t sell you the product you want in the form that you want for the price that you want. You are not asking for the “basic human right” of access to knowledge, you are asking for convenience and you are upset because that convenience comes at a cost that is higher than you wish to pay. There’s certainly a business argument to be made for finding a way to meet a customer’s needs, but it kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the “I answer to a higher law” argument.

it’s not like you to be so obtuse, David. What researchers need in order to do research — and what parents of sick children need in order to understand their conditions, and what fossil preparators need in order to avoid destroying unique specimens — is access to the research in a form that does no evaporate, can be searched, printed, extracted, stored on computers and USB sticks, sent to co-workers, etc.

It happens that at present PDF is the most convenient and canonical form for this, but there is nothing magical about that format. EPUB would probably be just fine, if publishers supported it.

But “access” that is only available at special times, under special circumstances, under special restrictions, is simply not good enough for most purposes. It’s OK for satisfying a casual interest, but not much more.

I think we’re saying essentially the same thing here. This is not about abstract noble notions like “access to information” or “access to knowledge”. This is about your desire to have an effective set of tools produced for you to do your work. You do not, however wish to pay for those tools, or at least pay what some of the makers of those tools charge. That’s a very different argument than claiming that publishers are evil because they want to hide knowledge (and frankly it’s probably a better and more realistic argument).

Also, parents of sick children can gain free access to those tools and much more through PatientInform (http://www.patientinform.org/) and PatientAccess (http://www.publishers4patientaccess.org/).

I’m not sure abstract noble notions like “access to information” or “access to knowledge” mean anything unless that information comes in a form that can be used.

Parents of sick children known to me do not find the means provided by publishers sufficient. But once again, as with HINARI and its kin, we have a much more fundamental problem here. All these programs, laudable though they are, amount to special boons handed down from on high by the grace of publishers who still maintain ultimate control. Researchers, teachers, doctors, parents and all the rest are reduced to the status of peons, going cap in hand to the almighty publishers in the hope of picking up some of the scraps from under the table. Don’t you see how unacceptable this is? Or, if not that, then don’t you at least see how unacceptable people find it?

Mike your comment is just silly. When my child was sick I went to a specialist and asked for a suggested reading list. He gave it to me and I went to the library as well as to my computer. Guess what if there was a pay wall I paid. Do you really think a search and downloading of technical medical literature means anything? I will be blunt you don’t squat about immunology and it would take you months if not years to read technical literature on it and have the understanding needed to intelligently discuss it with a clinician. Nothing bothers those in the medical profession more than discussing a new pill ad!

Honestly, would you get into a really technical discussion on some esoteric topic in molecular biology or do what your colleagues do, nod your head and look like you know what is going on.

Your animus is misdirected, Mike. It is not the purpose of private enterprises to serve the public interest; it is to serve the interests of their stockholders. On the other hand, it is the purpose of the federal government to serve the public interest. So you should be urging the government to better disseminate the results of the research it sponsors. The failure here is the government’s, not the publishers’.

As always, there is plenty of blame to go around. Please don’t ever think that when I criticise publishers, I am saying that governments are blameless; or than when I blame governments I am saying that scholars are blameless.

As you rightly say, “It is not the purpose of private enterprises to serve the public interest; it is to serve the interests of their stockholders”. That is precisely why private enterprises must not be handed control over scholarship.

As CEO of DeepDyve, I thought it worth responding to David’s comments:
1. DeepDyve no longer offers individual $0.99 rentals. Several years ago, we transitioned to a monthly subscription model.
2. DeepDyve revenues have grown 6x since 2012 and we have distributed millions of dollars in royalties to our partners.
3. DeepDyve is profitable company that is providing a legal means of affordable access to copyright content. We have always behaved with integrity and transparency to earn the trust of this industry.

I caution David and members of the industry from becoming cynical with regard to startups. Most will fail but I prefer to celebrate the attempt rather than disparage the loss. Having been both an entrepreneur and a public company executive running a multi-hundred million dollar business, I can tell you there is nothing as scary or stressful as starting a company. Not all startups are motivated by greed or operate in some dream world. Most startups ultimately desire to create something new, to solve a problem and to delight the user. That is Sci-Hub’s (misguided) mission b/c in their estimation, the industry is not doing it, so they feel they must. Ironically, it was the same circumstances (inconvenience; high paywalls) that led to DeepDyve’s creation, we simply chose the legal path.

I think it’s more important than ever to be skeptical toward startups (which is different than cynical). As publishers,we face a near-constant barrage of requests for free/low cost rights usage of content from thousands of startups looking to use it to profit. Very few are viable, let alone likely to profit, so one has to take care where one invests one’s time and reputation.

That said, my opinion of DeepDyve has evolved over the years, from “wait and see” to “that audience doesn’t seem to exist” to “it’s still probably worth doing”. I’ve ended up as a supporter of DeepDyve within my own company where we employ the service. I continue to be unconvinced that there’s a huge audience clamoring for this material in this form, but I think it’s worthwhile to make it available just the same, particularly because of the very low price offered. For those that can’t afford a subscription or a regular pay-per-view price, this presents another option, a good thing in my opinion.

I am not embarrassed to publish PDFs. Format still matters. I’m tired of trying to track down page numbers for articles which I’ve downloaded (legally) via aggregated full-text collections. My journals are both published as PDFs.

Worth a read:

I am so tired of people insisting on changing the entire paradigm of science publishing based on lies and ignorance. I’ll say it again: Open Access is a fine idea, and I support the existence of OA publications and I have published in them more than once. And I will again if I have the money to do so. But demanding OA to the destruction of subscription-based journals is a bad idea for a bunch of reasons.

http://complexroots.scientopia.org/2016/02/29/free-legal-access-to-most-articles/

The reasons I can think of is the decline and fall of a particular industry sector, plus thereby putting people out of work. I guess that’s what happened to the typewriter industry, the carbon paper industry, the crystal radio industry, the horse-drawn vehicle industry, etc. Sometimes industries have to move on or die.

Your examples are all of technological revolutions. OA is not a technological revolution, it is a political movement, seeking a policy revolution. Note that most developed countries are in fact implementing open access policies, so in that sense OA as succeeded. But destroying the subscription journal industry is not part of that success.

David asserts “OA is not a technological revolution, it is a political movement”. I would dissent from both those descriptions. OA is an inevitable consequence of a technological revolution (the Internet). In a world with free distribution and transmission, not taking advantage of that for our research is idiocy. A political movement may prove necessary to get us to the sane world where we actually use the Internet instead of building businesses on the pretence that it doesn’t exist; but the movement is not the end, it’s the means.

OA is not a technological revolution, it is a political movement”

One prominent open access advocate recently declared it a religious movement:
http://otwartanauka.pl/in-english/experts-on-open-access/open-access-will-remain-a-half-revolution-interview-with-richard-poynder

OA is an inevitable consequence of a technological revolution (the Internet).

“Inevitable” is a word which means, “incapable of being avoided or evaded,” so the faith required to make such a declaration would indeed fit well for a religion. It is also an interesting declaration given that media availability on the internet is converging upon subscription models for things like video (Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) and music (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.). Perhaps those companies have yet to get the divine message.

Fair point about media companies. But of course they have a wildly different business model from scholarly publishers — they have crazy ideas like paying the people who create the content, for example.

As for “inevitable” — don’t you see Sci-Hub as evidence of that? It was always going to come along eventually, and if it gets shut down another one will be along soon afterwards.

Ah, but Sci-Hub is not open access, despite what its creator wants to believe. Seems irrelevant to your claim.

Also, if you think music and movie companies fairly compensate creators, you haven’t been paying much attention for the last 100 or so years. As for scholarly authors, I highly recommend Paula Stephan’s book, “How Economics Shapes Science” for an explanation of the benefits that researchers reap from publication.

Mike, we agree about the consequence part, but little else. New technologies often breed political movements. (“Political movement” means calling for government action.) I wrote about this in my 1973 essay “The Structure of Technological Revolutions.” We see it especially in the areas of health, safety and environmental protection.

Happily these movements seldom succeed in their more extreme forms. In the present case, there is no indication whatever that the world’s governments are going to forcibly restructure the scientific publishing industry along the lines that you and your cohorts are calling for.

Free! There is nothing free on the commercial sites of the internet. Someone is paying! OA it is the author or the granter or the government which means me and I don’t want to pay for things like research on fossils!

But that aside. Mike there is no free lunch.

Show me where something is free on the internet.

You make a good point that Sci-Hub is not true open access — certainly not Budapest-compliant, which so far as I am concerned is the gold standard. It is effectively what Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad designated “gratis open access” — free to read, but with no other freedoms included. The pragmatic reason for that is the freedom to read is the only freedom that is in Elbakyan’s gift. While her ability to distribute copies lies outside US/UK legal jurisdiction, researchers’ ability to re-use those works does not.

Nevertheless, Sci-Hub represents the tendency of the Internet to “leak” — a tendency whose strength is seen in the continuing success of the Pirate Bay even after many years of Big Content doing is very best to shut it down.

I think that trying to prevent something like this has something of a Canute quality. I can understand why people want to try, but I don’t think the can succeed. So irrespective of the moral aspect, the strategically wise decision for scholarly publishers is probably to plan for a future than includes Sci-Hub or its equivalent. The most obvious way to do that would be to hasten the transition to Gold OA, of course.

(And, publishers: as you do this, please don’t screw it up by insisting on non-free licences that are not BOAI-compatible. If you do, you’ll be offering nothing that Sci-Hub doesn’t offer. Legitimate re-use is one of the unique benefits that you can provide and Sci-Hub cannot.)

This gets back to Poynder’s other key assertion, that there is still no consensus definition of “open access”. I’m also not clear on why the things you think are obvious or just really want to happen are “inevitable”.

There are also clear and obvious differences between material that individuals use for entertainment and material that professionals use as part of their employment. For the latter, there is a layer of law-abiding employers who are responsible for the actions of their employees, and in the case of universities, these are groups who have a vested interest in protecting intellectual property (not to mention avoiding liability that might affect the billions of dollars in endowment upon which they are sitting). Because there are responsible parties here with motivation and willingness to obey the law, I suspect there are only limited comparisons that can be drawn between the two.

I strongly agree that analogies with the entertainment business are likely to produce more fog than illumination. Let’s agree to stay away from them.

I don’t know, I’m always happy to play Taylor Swift to your Kanye.

It seems the publishers have backed themselves into a corner here.

Either- A. Most everyone who can benefit from technical journals has reasonably easy access to them via libraries, university accounts, etc., and so Sci-Hub won’t get much use so is not a threat to publishers.

Or- B. The access to journals provided by publishers is inconvenient to those who can benefit from Sci-Hub, so the pricing models (none of which goes to the researchers), demographics (David Wojick’s insulting view that so few non-students/professors can understand technical literature), assumptions of mobility and time (Harvey Kane’s archaic suggestion researchers waste hours and dollars traveling), etc. by publishers aren’t realistic. And thus Sci-Hub will be used often, because it offers a valued service to those who desire but cannot get it from $30 pdfs or temporary and deliberately worsened DeepDyve/ReadCube (‘hey, why aren’t people flocking to my app that lets them listen to a song once a month only when they log in for it, and doesn’t let them control the volume or pause?’).

So is your system working for its clients or not? Sci-Hub’s success indicates the latter…

so the pricing models (none of which goes to the researchers)

Except of course for the thousands and thousands of journals which are owned and published by university presses and research societies,which return every single penny of surplus to the research community. As was the case with Ms. Elkbayan, if you don’t know much about how publishing works, it’s best to do some research or ask someone, rather than publicly flaunting your lack of knowledge.

Admittedly my experience is based on my field of vertebrate paleontology, but as far as I know, zero percent of the money made from buying pdfs goes towards the authors of the articles themselves. For instance, our prize journal, the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is owned and published by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (recently jointly with Taylor and Francis). Even ignoring any part T&F have in the process now, the authors pay the SVP to publish their papers, and no money from pdf or subscription purchases ever makes it back to them. It may go back to the ‘community’ in the sense the SVP staff get paid (but not the peer reviewers), just as some of the money from buying Journal of Systematic Palaeontology pdfs may have gone back to Cambridge University via their press which published it until 2010 (when T&F began to do it). But publishing in paleontology never gains you money, instead you have to do it in order to keep your job teaching or curating, so that you can apply for more grants to get the money to research and pay the publishers to accept your next paper, so that they can make money off of it…

You may see why the pricing model neither encourages me to pay for articles or go into academia.

Mickey I suggest you follow David’s advice. You seem to know nothing about publishing and academia.

Hi Mickey,

Scholarly publishing is an enormously diverse landscape. You have a wide sweep of types of publications, a broad range of subject matter from the humanities to the hard sciences, and many different publishers employing many different business models. There are publishers who charge neither authors nor readers anything (and lose money on every article published), and publishers who charge quite a bit for their services and are enormously profitable, and everything in between. That’s why it tends to raise my hackles a bit (and I apologize if I was abrupt in my previous answer) when the industry is portrayed as a monolith (which usually translates to “all publishers = Elsevier”). Every author has a lot of choices about where to publish their work and a chance to follow their own priorities, and to support the companies that best serve their needs.

For the record, I was editor in chief of a journal that pays authors a royalty based on usage of their papers. There are journals and services that pay peer reviewers for their efforts. I recently worked with a journal that gives authors a membership in the society that owned the journal, along with a subscription to the journal. Funds earned by society journals are returned to authors if they take advantage of scholarship and grant programs by that society, if they take any of the training or services offered by that society, if they attend meetings presented by that society, and if they benefit from the public policy or lobbying efforts done by that society. No, it is not a direct deposit of cash in their pocket, but there are benefits that do translate into financial gain (lower prices on any of the above plus the career and funding benefits that result from them).

I think the biggest misunderstanding about how journals work is that people continue to think of them as “product” based companies, rather than “service” based companies (we discussed this on this blog a while back: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/05/14/ask-the-chefs-are-we-a-service-industry-or-a-product-industry/). Back in the day of the print journal, it was easy to get this impression because there was a physical object one would receive. But the reality is that we are selling a set of services that researchers need (best described here by Michael Clarke: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/01/04/why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/). Doing those services, particularly doing them well with rigor, can be expensive. Someone has to pay for those services. One of the nice things about gold open access is that it makes this into a direct transaction, the author pays a fee to the publisher for services rendered.

What most authors choose instead is to get those services for free (or a reduced amount if they’re charged page charges) and instead push those costs off on other members of the community. The publisher offers the services at no charge and then works to make back those costs (and some surplus) by selling subscriptions to readers. In this case, the author is getting vital services necessary for career advancement and funding, and fobbing the costs off on the rest of the community. One of the benefits here is that instead of concentrating all the costs on one author, the costs are spread broadly across the entire community.

If you’re really interested in the economics of scientific research, I highly recommend Paula Stepan’s book, “How Economics Shapes Science”.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088160&content=reviews

First, thanks for your (and the other David’s) detailed replies to my comments. Even if we don’t agree, I appreciate the effort.

As I said, my experience is limited to vertebrate paleontology. In this field, I have never heard of a journal paying royalties to authors, or giving them memberships or subscriptions. A scant minority do pay their peer reviewers. Maybe other fields are different, but those wouldn’t affect how I view paleontology publishers and pdfs. As for indirect benefits for the author, I don’t know of any other job for which this kind of compensation would be seen as reasonable. “As an author of novels, you don’t get directly paid to write them, but you get to attend book expos for free”, or “as a cook, you won’t get paid for people buying your books of recipes, but the prestige you get from having popular books will advance your career.”

This connects to your next paragraph, because those publications also need editors and publishers, but somehow the authors still get paid. So there are workable methods where the authors and publishers get paid, and the consumers still pay (a reasonable price) to purchase. Again, liken your remarks to a book author- “We’ll publish the book you’ve worked long and hard on for free, but we’ll reap all the monetary sales. Looks great to have a bestseller on your resume though, right?” Publishers may view journals as service-based companies, but then again they are the service providers. It seems increasingly true that authors, the product providers, want journals to be product-based companies instead. Surely that’s understandable.

Actually, you should take a look at the evolution of the music industry. Napster and its ilk resulted in such reduction in sales of CDs that musicians were compelled to rely more on income from concerts, t-shirt sales, etc. to make a living.

Thanks Mickey, for the rare opportunity to get to argue in favor of open access to one of our commenters. This doesn’t happen often enough.

Paleontology is a field that kind of falls in between the extremes. It does see some funding, but nowhere near as much as health-related fields. It’s also a lot smaller a field than some really broad subject areas where, even with minimal/no funding, there are so many researchers that costs are spread so widely that they remain low per subscriber (think of some of the Humanities fields). These limitations likely make it more difficult to experiment with new publishing models in your area, and it’s why we see so many experiments involving very broad journals covering many areas of research.

It is interesting to me that you bring up book publishing as a parallel. Having done science book publishing for a decade, very few of our authors made much of anything from their books, other than a small token royalty. Scholarly books are different from trade books in that they usually cost a lot more to produce and they are only of interest to a much smaller audience. That means they usually have to be priced fairly high to earn back what was invested in producing them (a really interesting recent study from Ithaka looked at these costs and the small sizes of the markets: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/03/02/costs-publishing-monographs-report-ithaka-essay
Our authors were writing our books because of some combination of 1) wanting to help their fields progress and 2) wanting to receive the recognition such a book would bring to their careers as a leader in the field. Any royalties were a small bonus on top, but were way down the list as far as their motivations (and probably result in less than minimum wage rates if you add up the time spent writing).

There’s also a breed of folks out there, particularly in the business world, who write books solely for the reputation. Think of people like Seth Godin or Chris Anderson, whose books are mostly there to give them more credibility when they ask for 5 figure fees for giving talks at conferences. People are also asked to write for things like the Huffington Post for no compensation other than exposure. Like you, I’m probably a bit dubious of this as an approach, at least the value of “exposure”.

But with journals, the “exposure” isn’t necessarily the pay-off, it’s that journals offer the things that funding agencies and career advancement/hiring committees require. It’s pretty hard for a researcher to get a big grant or tenure without publishing a paper, and that’s the measuring point that academia has chosen for advancement. Because academia has chosen this as the measuring stick, the rewards seem a little more obvious. Probably another benefit for an author in the sciences is that the paper brings recognition to any technology that they and their university have patented and drives rights sales, at least in fields where this is common (not so relevant to paleontology).

What’s interesting about your desire to see authors get paid is that it is very much in the opposite direction that publishing has been moving for the last decade or so. Open access very much cements publishing as a service industry, as there is no product being sold. There are no sales upon which to base royalties, and authors themselves are asked to assume the financial burden and take the financial risks, rather than the traditional way of having the publishers pay for things and then be responsible for earning it back through sales. I think paying authors a royalty is do-able (I’ve done it for a journal myself, but it’s a rare example), but what it would do is eliminate open access altogether, and likely, given the economic practices of commercial publishers, result in higher prices for subscriptions.

Would that be worth getting a $20 or $50 check once a year?

I’ve heard similar things about scientific book publishing, but there are differences from article publishing that should make things more profitable for the latter. Namely, scientific books are much longer than most articles by an order of magnitude, so take much more time to write, edit, etc.. Also, books are physically created, whereas articles aren’t necessarily so. I have no idea how exactly all the factors would work out, but it’s surely true that most authors of most books make a profit, right? Technical articles are niche, but so are most books besides the bestsellers.

And yes, I think the Huffington Post situation is as deplorable as the technical journal situation in paleontology.

Regarding funding agencies and committees, this is another situation you don’t see as reasonable for most jobs. Outside of academia, how many careers pay you for doing one thing (generally teaching or curating in paleontology), but also expect you to work off the clock and pay for your work to be published, without monetary compensation, just to keep your job or advance? It’s crazy really, and not at all publishers’ fault. But by taking advantage of that situation, publishers do end up looking like the Huffington Post- “You need this exposure for your career, so you’ll do it without pay while we see profits.”

That is an interesting point comparing my desires to OA. But just because a service is free to consumers (or more accurately already payed for via taxes; in paleontology very little funding is from the private sector) doesn’t mean the workers don’t get paid to perform that service. So it’s not contradictory to have researchers getting paid to publish while also having publications be free to download. What I wonder is how authors would only see $20-50 a year when publishers currently have an apparently successful business model that charges ~$30 for a single pdf download, even against rampant piracy. Even in a small field like dinosaur paleontology, there are at least a few hundred people interested in any given paper.

Namely, scientific books are much longer than most articles by an order of magnitude, so take much more time to write, edit, etc..Also, books are physically created, whereas articles aren’t necessarily so.

There’s not that much difference between a journal and a multi-author book. Also, many (most?) journals remain as physical objects, and many books are done solely as eBooks, so there’s not really a difference there either.

but it’s surely true that most authors of most books make a profit, right?

Kind of. Let’s say you spend a year writing a scholarly monograph. You publish it (the publisher pays all the costs and takes all the financial risk) and you’ll typically receive an 8% royalty on a book that sells for $100 and sells around 300 copies. You receive $2400 for a year’s worth of work. Would you consider this “profit”? Or perhaps there are other motivations for writing that book other than direct profit from sales?

Outside of academia, how many careers pay you for doing one thing (generally teaching or curating in paleontology), but also expect you to work off the clock and pay for your work to be published, without monetary compensation, just to keep your job or advance?

I was trying to think of another example, not sure how this one holds up, but how about this: You’re an actor and you get paid to act in a movie. You are then asked, without compensation, to spend weeks on a press junket to promote the movie. You are not paid for doing interviews that magazines and television shows will profit from, and you do not share in those profits. Further, you do not earn anything more regardless of how the movie performs. However, if the movie has a strong impact, it will advance your career, increasing your future earnings for the next movie you do. Does that work?

It’s crazy really, and not at all publishers’ fault. But by taking advantage of that situation, publishers do end up looking like the Huffington Post- “You need this exposure for your career, so you’ll do it without pay while we see profits.”

Indeed, publishing is a reactive industry. We respond to the needs of academia and provide services to meet those needs. It is always easy to blame publishers, as we are an easy target, and it is much easier to ask others to change than to put your own house in order. But make no mistake, publishers did not create the career structure of academia, nor do we control it. If you can convince your colleagues to do something differently, we will adapt to that.

So it’s not contradictory to have researchers getting paid to publish while also having publications be free to download

Well, you are getting paid to publish, via your salary. I don’t see how you can expect publishers to give a product away for free and also pay authors. How would that work–the author pays a fee to publish, the product is given away for free, and the author is paid from what pool of revenue exactly?

What I wonder is how authors would only see $20-50 a year when publishers currently have an apparently successful business model that charges ~$30 for a single pdf download, even against rampant piracy. Even in a small field like dinosaur paleontology, there are at least a few hundred people interested in any given paper.

Ah. The $30 price is something of a red herring here. Pay per view sales for papers are fairly non-existent, and the majority of readers get their papers through subscription access. Via subscription access, you’re paying somehwere between pennies and maybe a few dollars per download, depending on the publisher and the deal your university has put together with them.

Mickey one of your contentions is that the author does not get paid for producing an article. That is a fallacy. The author gets tenure, gets grants, gets invited to conferences, etc. In short, the author does get paid. Now the author does not have to publish and if so will not get tenure, will not get grants, and will not go the conference for free!

As an aside, I should mention that the only profession in the world that allows one to dabble in what one is interested in with a life time guarantee, once tenured, is academia.

What should the author receive for his/her article? How about a cost plus arrangement or in other words the author will receive payment after costs are recovered. Ask someone in your department just how many paid downloads his/her publisher made off of the article. But, then again the publisher should be allowed to recoup the costs of publishing the article after all what is good for the goose is good for the gander! In the past there were page charges and authors complained so the publishers ended that stream of revenue and instead increased subscription charges. Now, academics complained like you are that subscription’s cost too much so publishers instituted OA. Now, we are beginning to hear rumblings that OA fees to authors are too high!

Instead of complaining about that which you know little about except that in your experience going to the library is inconvenient and time consuming and the cost of an article is too high. How about you providing a solution. A solution that takes both parties into account.

Lastly, remember: there is no free lunch!

Well, I was comparing single-author books to journals. A multi-author book might as well be a subscriptionless journal. Are many scientific books sold only as ebooks? In paleontology, about the only time a recent pdf isn’t available is if the paper was a book or part of one.

As for $2400, yeah. That’s more than I’ve ever made in retail. Note most authors actually get paid for another job (again in paleontology, teaching or curating) too, so an extra couple thousand bonus a year for writing? I’m sure most would jump at the chance.

Not a bad example in regard to actors, and athletes have a similar situation to that. Although both do get paid far more than curators/professors. At least the ones considered worthy of most interviews do. Also, don’t the production companies and such pay for the press rounds because they’ll make more money with more exposure, so the actor isn’t paying to go to awards shows and be on tv, etc.? Both of which seem more glamorous than anything researchers get.

“How would that work–the author pays a fee to publish, the product is given away for free, and the author is paid from what pool of revenue exactly?”

As I said, I was thinking of services that are based on government, not private funds. I mean, the police, fire departments, etc. are paid for via taxes as opposed to private funds. But the public gets these services “for free” because they’re covered by mandatory taxes. Yet the police and fire workers still get paid. So it’s not mutually exclusive in principle at least.

“The $30 price is something of a red herring here. Pay per view sales for papers are fairly non-existent, and the majority of readers get their papers through subscription access.”

Color me unsurprised. In paleontology, that’s because the ones with ‘free’ subscription access distribute copies to those who would otherwise have to but cannot pay the $30. So the system’s not working as intended, since the high price leads to black markets whereas a lower price would get some sales. It goes back to my original question- “So is your system working for its clients or not?”

I suggest you ask your professors if anyone in the department has received tenure without publishing. If anyone has received a grant without publishing.

I am gathering from this conversation that you are a graduate student. All of us here have been one and all of us have struggled as you. But, we did not expect anything for free. We may have wanted it but did not expect it.

In all of your examples someone pays.

Lots of suppositions here. Easy to get some data. Just drop a note to the society and ask how much they have made off of pay per view.

Look back in this thread and I believe there are some articles cited on readership for articles. You will be amazed at just how small the market is for technical material. If memory serves the market for most articles is between 50 and 300 sets of eyes.

Maybe things work very differently in your field than paleontology, but your statements are if not false, then highly misleading. You don’t get tenure for publishing, you get it for excelling in various aspects of your job if approved by committee (part of which is publication history, but no one says ‘ten articles published? now you can’t be fired’). Basically no one “gets grants”. You always have to apply to them, which I hear takes a large portion of researchers’ time. Almost everyone in paleontology pays to go to conferences, even if you’re a member of the hosting society (though you can get a reduced rate). Even the most prolific tenured PhDs have to pay.

“I should mention that the only profession in the world that allows one to dabble in what one is interested in with a life time guarantee, once tenured, is academia”

You can still be fired with tenure, it’s just a more tedious process. And plenty of professions let you dabble or more in your interest- if you’re interested in that profession. Those people who love surgery, writing, preaching, designing, whatever, get paid to do that.

“Ask someone in your department just how many paid downloads his/her publisher made off of the article.”

In paleontology, the “big four” publish the vast majority of papers and have huge profit margins.

“Lots of suppositions here. Easy to get some data. Just drop a note to the society and ask how much they have made off of pay per view.”

I’m the one arguing here that pay per view is priced past what the individual can afford, so doesn’t that prove my point? Only the bulk subscription plans of libraries are affordable (sometimes), so the people paying are the ones going through university libraries and paying indirectly via tuition. But SciHub being popular indicates there are numerous others who can’t afford pay per view, thus the current system is failing.

Your economic argument falls on deaf ears. If the library wants more money then they have to convince the administration that more money for the library is in the best interest of the University. Do you know how subscriptions are decided on your campus?

Mickey, I never said anything about students and professors. My point’s based on my research on scientific language. Most, probably almost all, journal articles use extremely narrow technical concepts that only experts in those concepts can fully understand. This has nothing to do with location, or formal education for that matter. For example, even though I work in scientometrics I cannot understand the core content of a lot of articles in the journal Scientometrics, because they are addressing technical issues that I am not expert in. Often these concepts are mathematical, because science involves a lot of math.

This is why the diffusion of scientific knowledge involves a great deal more machinery than just the journals. It is a vast and complex system. That everyone should read journals is simply a fallacy.

“That everyone should read journals is simply a fallacy.”

And yet, people inconveniently keep wanting to read journals. A fact that must surely put some kind of a dent in your hypothesis? Or do you just conclude that they are all mistaken in wanting to read the journals?

Mike, your hand waving, sloganistic replies are unhelpful. What percentage of the world’s population, roughly, want to read journal articles but do not have subscription access? And what is the basis for your estimate? As I keep saying, it is an empirical question.

Mike just who wants to read journals? I know of no one except those involved in the topic of the journal.

You know of no-one except subject specialists who wants to read journals? Then I can only assume you’ve not read the comments by Christy Collins, Mickey Mortimer and others here, or by Josephine on my blog, or the editorial by ex-BMJ editor Richard Smith, or any of the many stories on Who Needs Access?, or the many many more on Your Story Matters. In short, your head must have been in the ground (or somewhere else where it’s too dark to see) for you to hold this completely untenable position.

Harvey: “No-one wants to read scholarly articles.”
Mike: “How about person A?”
Harvey: “Person A is a special case.”
Mike: “What about people B and C?”
Harvey: “They’re special cases, too.”
Mike: “What about all these other thousands of documented cases?”
Harvey: “Uh, er … Your argument is specious at best.”

What this amounts to is that you made up your mind long ago, and you’re ignoring all contrary evidence. There is obviously no point in continuing this conversation, so with this message I am bowing out of this sub-thread. You are free to have the last word, and I here commit not to respond, however ill-informed, illogical or otherwise infuriating it may be. Enjoy.

Mike some do but the vast majority of the world’s population does not nor can they nor can you for that matter.

This is a complete misrepresentation, Mike, and a telling one at that. This is not a none or some issue. It is a few or many issue, specifically how many? Harvey and I have offered reasons to think that the numbers are relatively small, certainly not enough the justify the forced restructuring of an entire industry. Your anecdotal evidence does not address this central issue, in fact it distracts from it.

There is also the second central issue of what benefit to society would come from this access? Idle curiosity is not a reason for disruption. In that regard what are your “thousands of documented cases” cases of, exactly? To begin with, where is this documentation. I would like to look at it.

Thanks Mike. Apparently you really do not understand what I am saying or why anecdotes (or stories) do not resolve this central issue, which is the size of the need for access. We cannot do cost-benefit analysis with stories.

First, I urge you to change your wording when arguing this point. Claiming any given person SHOULDN’T read a journal article comes off as incredibly elitist. What group of people shouldn’t read technical literature, what are the negative effects their reading it will cause, and why are publishers or anyone else in a position to tell adult citizens what they shouldn’t read?

In any case, you said “I personally doubt that there are large numbers of people who (1) have the expert knowledge required to read and benefit from the scholarly literature but who (2) cannot find a way to access what they need.” Well, those who can find a way to access what they need are those people who have access to university library subscriptions. Hence students and professors (and the very rich I suppose). In any case, yes many technical articles use specialized language, but you’re ignoring a few key factors. Someone interested in a topic will often still gain some benefit from a paper they don’t fully understand. As a kid, I read the semi-technical book “The Dinosauria”, and though it took me a decade to get a hold on the minutiae of braincase and vertebral anatomy, the parts I understood taught me a lot I couldn’t have learned from the non-technical literature. Anyone advocating education knows that you don’t teach kids by limiting their reading to what they already completely understand. We see words we don’t know and wonder ‘what does that mean?’. We now have the internet which is full of sources to teach us understanding of these concepts, so those of us who are interested in learning can educate ourselves. Ironically, many of these are journal articles themselves. So if I want to learn about the names used for the webs between vertebral structures in dinosaurs, Wilson’s 1999 article will teach me, but is behind a Taylor and Francis paywall itself. 😐

Mickey: You want a pair of shoes go to the shoe store and buy them. Notice you have to buy them. You want to read an article either pay or go to the library and read it for free. Notice unlike shoes you can read it for free! What is so difficult about this concept?

Mickey, I cannot imagine saying that people should not read journal articles. Where did I say that?

As for people benefiting from reading articles they do not understand, I have to once again wonder how often that happens. I doubt it happens often enough to justify restructuring an entire industry by force, which is the issue here. As you, yourself note, the web is full of non- and semi-technical material that is effective at various levels of understanding. That is a lot of the vast machinery for the diffusion of scientific knowledge that I referred to above. I myself make great use of it.

“I cannot imagine saying that people should not read journal articles. Where did I say that?”

Comment 158606 above- “This is one of the fundamental fallacies of OA, namely that non-experts should read journals.” If ‘non-experts should read journals’ is a fallacy, clearly non-experts shouldn’t read journals.

Regarding people benefiting from reading journal articles, first note that most of the time anyone can understand SOME portion of any article. Almost any paper is going to be understood partially by anyone who can read it. But since your statement probably addresses people reading articles they don’t fully understand, it goes back to my original point. If there aren’t many doing so, Sci-Hub won’t be a factor because most everyone who wants an article will have free access via their university library anyway. Unless you are arguing people are downloading articles they won’t benefit from, in which case I’d like to hear an explanation and how it deprives publishers of their deserved funds.

I response to Harvey- The concept isn’t analogous to journal articles. What if it were possible to duplicate shoes by pressing a button AND none of they money spent on shoes went towards paying the people collecting or refining the material, designing and manufacturing the style, but only to those who created and designed the shoe box. Oh, and the shoes cost $1000. In that case, I’d be far more likely to steal shoes. If pdf prices weren’t ridiculous and/or authors got some percentage and/or pdfs took more than a click to copy, your concept might make sense.

So I did not say it, Mickey, or anything like it, as I thought. My simple point, which I have now made repeatedly, is this. One of the central arguments for OA is the claim that millions of non-experts should be reading journal articles, for their and society’s benefit, but they are prevented from doing so by lack of access. Based on my (scientific) research into the diffusion of scientific knowledge, I think this claim is false. The numbers are probably much lower.

There is no suggestion in my point that those people who want to read journal articles should not do so. Your interpretation is incorrect. The issue I am raising is one of numbers.

Uhhh… but I quoted you. If you misspoke, that’s one thing, but “This is one of the fundamental fallacies of OA, namely that non-experts should read journals.” pretty clearly indicates non-experts should not read journals. Now, if you don’t believe that and are actually arguing very few non-experts benefit from reading journals, you go back to my original point. Namely, that if this number is so small, pirating via SciHub won’t matter because the experts already have free access. So how does SciHub damage publishers if non-experts (even those who want to read for their own benefit, as you state, and not society’s) aren’t using it in large numbers?

Yes I am arguing that few non-experts will benefit from reading journals. As for Sci-Hub the problem is that the experts do not have what you say, that is free access. They have subscription access. If sufficiently expanded Sci-Hub would lead to widespread subscription cancellations, ironically destroying the industry, or forcing it to change to an author pays model in order to survive.

But the access most professionals have is via university subscriptions which they only pay indirectly through tuition, if at all. The university libraries are the ones that pay directly. In vertebrate paleontology at least, very few have subscriptions to any journal (besides the couple associated with societies). Can you even have a personal subscription to most journals anymore(?) (I checked a few, and they only had Institutional and Corporate), and if you can, surely no one can afford a ~$200 subscription for each of the tens of journals that would be needed for most topics to cover most papers.

I am not sure what your point is, Mickey. We seem to be talking past one another. But I think my point is clear. Free access along the lines of Sci-Hub will either kill the journals or force them into an author pays model. Is that what you want?

“That everyone should read journals” may be a fallacy, but everyone having reasonable access to research is not. From my point of view – an illustrator and animator – it sounds like you find I should be excluded from access to research, because I haven’t worked my way into the communities that would allow me access – and in order to gain access, I’d have to have it. After all, who can be expected to learn to read papers if they don’t have access?
This is a very unfortunate point-of-view, methinks. And not just for me in the face of such an elitist sentiment. Moreso, it’s sad for you as you’ll be missing out on the feedback loops of public outreach and an ever more accessible publishing system that includes more technology and visual communication to lower the bar to understanding research.

First of all, there is a lot of existing access to research besides journals, as discussed at length above. A lot of it is far less technical than journal articles, so probably more useful to you. There are also various ways to access journals, also discussed.

Second, how do you propose that the journals be paid for when everyone has free access? Do you really think that millions of authors should be forced to pay to have their research published, so that you might draw something? Or do you see another way to pay?

There is nothing elitist about this. The big question is simply who pays for the publications?

I have no idea where you live but if there is a library in your city you have access. I see you have a computer ipso facto you have access.

Are we to take you seriously?

I see you have a computer ipso facto you have access.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

The answer might be that the system is not working for non-clients. But then the same thing could be said about any number of other media industries, like cable TV. So, what’s your point?

Sandy the point is that the free lunch bunch wants free cable, phones, cars, meals, housing, along with information delivered as they want when they want it and bedtime stories.

After participating in this conversation I have come to Joe’s conclusion: They should start their your own journals, expect no compensation for their efforts, accept no fees for access, and deliver the journal in any format desired at the time demanded!

As for Sci Hub they are a bunch of thieves serving a bunch of freeloaders.

The problem, Sandy and Harvey, is two-fold in this aspect.

To Sandy’s response, people who aren’t university libraries or very rich are apparently a large source of potential clients for technical journal publishers. We want pdfs and need thousands for our research, but if each costs $30 that is simply impossible. That’s 3-5 hours of work in the US for one paper, even ignoring poorer countries. Acknowledging the differences between tech lit and video stated elsewhere in this thread, it’s as if cable TV cost $1000/month. Almost no one who wanted cable could afford that, so there would be rampant piracy when possible. That’s a pdf every day, which is less than are published in e.g. dinosaur paleontology. There’s a reason the vast majority of pdfs any paleontologist has are gained through back channel methods like tediously emailing authors- no paleontologist can afford an extra $1000+ a month to use the publishers’ system. And if they’re not the intended clients, who are?

To Harvey’s response, we want a free lunch if it is basically free to produce. Back in the day, publishers actually put a lot of money accomplishing what individuals could not (physical publishing and distribution, etc.), but now not so much. A lot of ink has been spent debating exactly what publishers add to papers, but it’s certainly less than the unpaid authors add, and technology has made it basically free to make a copy anyway. It’s a fundamentally corrupt system, since the primary creators whose input I value aren’t getting paid more if I buy it anyway. So what incentive do I have to scrimp to pay people who only deserve a small fraction of the money for something it costs no one anything to copy? Which I couldn’t do even if I wanted to because I don’t have over $1000 laying around every month, so it’s not like they could expect to get my money in the first place. So if I were to use Sci-Hub (which I haven’t tried), no one would lose money from it. Certainly not the people who wrote the papers.

As an aside Harvey, note non-OA journals expect compensation [from authors] for their efforts AND demand fees for their access. So they get money from their suppliers and clients. You don’t see how this is unfair?

Mickey: There are enormous costs in producing articles. As for authors, they receive free copies upon publication. They get tenure, promotions, grants, etc all because of publishing. So don’t cry for them. Those who publish reap rewards.

You have no idea as to what it takes or costs to publish an article. I know of no researcher who needs 1000s of articles.

I can only conclude that you just do not know what you are talking about.

Why does a head of lettuce cost about $3? After all you only have to put a seed in the ground and it grows and then some guy or machine picks it!

Mickey, regarding fairness, journals cost money to produce, collectively several billion dollars a year, even without printing costs. There seem to be just four reasonable sources for these funds:
1. Readers (via subscription, which may be embedded in Society membership)
2. Authors (via APCs)
3. Funders, especially governments (probably via ownership)
4. Research institutions, (via sponsorship or ownership)

Which do you consider fair?

Harvey- You realize that since any number of pdfs are basically free to produce via copy-paste, that the author getting free copies is laughably worthless, right? This has been joked about before in paleo blogs. If the author is granted 20 “free copies” of the pdf, are they then to deny or pay for the 21st pdf requested? It’s just stupid to discuss copies of a product that is basically free to reproduce.

From my perspective, it’s YOU who don’t know what you are talking about. I never said researchers needs thousands of articles, only that for my field it’s more than one per day. You do realize that most every researcher has to spend their time begging for limited grants? It’s not as if you publish a paper and you get a promotion or get tenure. Academics need to get publications or else they lose their job, which is usually (in vert paleo) teaching and/or curating, not even authoring papers.

As for lettuce, I love salad and can afford enough lettuce to have one ~20 days a week, but I couldn’t afford enough pdfs to study my subset of dinosaurs. The argument is that $30 isn’t worth a pdf’s value. And I’ve yet to see anyone claim that 4 page Nature/Science pdf was totally worth $30.

David- I’d say funders when applicable, but without that, readers. But it has to be a reasonable amount. The current $30 per pdf is just naive. Some should go to publishers, but not the 100% amount they usually get now. Maybe an 80/20 split, with papers costing ten cents per page. The publishers get some, the authors get most, yet it’s a bit better than photocopying from the library even if you live on campus.

Mickey you thoughts are full of fallacies. To extend your analogy, shoes have no worth after they are produced, after all they are there just like a PDF file.

You say that just because you can push a button that there is no value. I suggest that you look at the costs involved prior to the creation of the button you push.

You say the cost is too high. Maybe so maybe not but you are not the owner of the property so you have no idea as to the costs involved. I do suggest you study up on publishing and discover the costs involved because you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. David provided some sources. Can you justify the price of a $30,000 car? How about the price of a pencil?

No you advocate stealing just because of the convenience. Say all publishers no longer provided material via computers. You would have to go to the library and the cost of that you say is prohibitive because of the value of your time. So your time is worth more than say $30 per hour? If so, the cost of the article is a bargain!

I never said authors and publishers shouldn’t be paid (quite the opposite). But the ability to almost effortlessly copy an item should factor into its price. If anyone could click a button from their computer and have a shoe created in their house, the price of shoes would fall precipitously. Making the thing’s important (but technical authors never got paid for that, except for indirect ways like keeping their jobs), and quality control that a journal does is important too, but manufacture and distribution are null and void for files via the internet.

Regarding pencils and cars, apparently their prices are fairly reasonable because few people purchase either on the black market. But Sci-Hub and alternatives are popular because pdf prices are not reasonable, in part because the product is easily copied.

And yes, if the internet didn’t exist, articles would be worth more. But it does, so they’re not. The reality of the situation affects what price is reasonable. I don’t know why you don’t get this. Your comment directly below (“Why not just read the item on the screen and take notes?”) is similar in that it ignores the technological reality of the situation. If we have the tech, why are we paying for what we could have for free?

Mickey if you say that the price is too high you obviously do not need the item. Why not just read the item on the screen and take notes? That is how it was done and then the publishers earned nothing from the article. Oh, wait, I forgot that is not convenient but stealing is!

Mickey, I think you have mischaracterized the issues. Your A in particular is incorrect. What has been discussed is the possibility that many of the non-subscribers can get free access to some of the articles they want, although the effort may be considerable. The extent to which this is true is an empirical question, so we are all just speculating. But that discussion was largely independent of the issue of Sci-Hub, and it certainly does not imply that Sci-Hub is no threat to the journals.

Bear in mind that we are now past 200 comments, with probably between 1000 and 2000 sentences. A good bit of this reasoning has been about OA per se, not Sci-Hub. In fact an issue tree of this body of sentences might be quite interesting, as far as mapping the sub-issues is concerned. See my http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/07/10/the-issue-tree-structure-of-expressed-thought/.

Your B seems to ignore the central point, which is that Sci-Hub’s benefits derive from theft. The subscription system cannot “work for its clients” if this means giving away the product. No production system can. Sci-Hub is not an alternative model, it is simply piracy.

Why go through with a considerable effort though? This addresses Harvey’s response below as well. The amount of effort is indeed an empirical question, and I think some like Harvey don’t get just what it takes non-students to get access to a university library. I attended the University of Washington and enjoyed my access when there, but as with many Americans didn’t follow that up with working in my field. I’m lucky to live within an hour of campus, which is not true of many Americans, let alone world citizens. So I can lose two hours a day driving, plus gas cost, plus parking cost at the university’s lots (or time cost to find parking in the city away from there and walk). Maybe you don’t realize, but you can’t just walk into the UW and start emailing yourself pdfs or photocopying pages. You need to get their proprietary card to work in their copy machines, or get a temporary ID to use their computers. And of course they’re only open certain hours, mostly overlapping normal working hours. So I can give up most of my day off to do this and spend money on it, or just get it from my home instantly for free any day of the week. Contra Harvey, it’s not just a “walk across campus”, nor do us researchers have over $1000 to rack up on our credit every month. ‘It’s that simple- just fall into massive debt or live on a university campus!’ 😐

The deriving from theft point is what I addressed above. To use Harvey’s example- I want shoes but cannot pay for them. Luckily, the shoes can be duplicated instantly with no cost. Thus if I steal this copy, no one will lose money because I couldn’t and so wouldn’t pay for the shoes anyway. In what way am I a thief? No one has less money or goods because of me. Because there’s no cheaper official method to get these papers, no more savvy company can ever gain my service instead. As technology increases, this is going to become ever more of an issue. It’s just media now, but if matter becomes basically free to replicate, watch what happens then…

I have to go to Publix every week if not more often. I have to spend at least an hour getting parking, standing in line and paying about $1,000 per month to feed the family. What is the difference?

You seem to be missing the point that SciHub is stealing the articles and putting them up for all to use. What is the difference between using their service and receiving stolen goods? When you use SciHub you are abetting their scheme.

Lastly, so what you are saying is that on the one hand it is inconvenient to go to campus and on the other you don’t want to pay for something you say you need but it is convenient to steal that which you need. So who is hurt? The owner of the property.

Mickey, I agree that using a library is probably one of the most laborious modes of access to content for nonsubscribers. I myself use Google Scholar, discussions on blogs or listservs (I often do not need the article to learn its content), followed by author requests. As to why go through the effort, I suppose it is to get the content, so I do not understand your question.

As for theft, what you have done is point out a disanalogy in Harvey’s case and then change the case. Unfortunately, your case is inapplicable to the present issue because you confine duplication to those who would never buy the item. In the journal case there is no way to do that, so the issue is precisely loss of subscriptions.

Note that i the IP world there are plenty of cases where duplication is a crime. Identity theft and espionage come to mind.

The difference Harvey, is that no one can press a button to duplicate food. So to steal food you’re robbing those who cultivate and prepare it, whereas it cost anyone almost nothing to copy a pdf. I’m a cashier and I get paid to process groceries. Why don’t authors?

Following, it IS inconvenient to go to campus but I don’t want to pay so much for what I need. Bring it down to a dollar per pdf, and I would. Who is hurt? The publisher who I don’t think should be getting all the money anyway. So why should I feel bad for that?

David- Discussions are great but any scientist should rely on the original material. I wouldn’t depend on a summary when citing a paper. “As to why go through the effort, I suppose it is to get the content, so I do not understand your question.” Because we can get the content with almost effort at any time of the day. You claim a disanalogy, but in reality publishers have priced most pdfs out of the range of paleontologists. We would never buy them because it’s more than we have. The journal would lose nothing. And yes, it may be a crime, but the issue was never the legality. Legal doesn’t equal right.

Mickey: The food analogy is valid. General foods is hardly a farmer.

To steal is to steal is to steal regardless of whom you are stealing from. Are you suggest that is it ok to stick up a millionaire but not a working stiff? I hope not!

I wrote my thesis going from library to library across the US. I paid my own way and considering that I was earning about $7K per year that resulted in my wife and I eating lots of tube steak!

“Mickey: The food analogy is valid.”

It is not. No analogy between copyright violation and the theft of physical goods is ever valid. Every such analogy increases confusion. Can we please stop making things more obscure?

You will forgive me if I don’t find the statements of “Copyhype” definitive, especially as it’s a site run by and for the copyright-holding industry.

Copyright infringement is a different thing from theft. While you continue to fail to see that, you will never be able to understand the issues confronting scholarly publishing, and especially those raised by Sci-Hub. All your analogies will be broken right out of the gate, and you will simply confuse yourself more and more.

And with that, I sign out of this sub-thread. You may have the last word; For my own sanity, I hereby undertake not to respond further, no matter how wrong your closing comment is.

“Shooting the messenger” is a type of ad hominem logical fallacy, an attack on the character or motive of the person making the argument, rather than addressing the content of the argument itself.

I’d say that copyhype article is at the very least quite well researched and provides a significant amount of legal precedent for the use of the word “theft”. Also worth reading is how it clarifies the difference between “civil” copyright infringement and “criminal” copyright infringement (and why “criminal” seems an appropriate word to use here).

Mickey: If the choice is abetting a thief or walking across campus, I think I would take the walk. Or researchers can take the easy route and enter their credit card number. It is just that simple.

You want a new pair of shoes you can either steal them, pay for them or not get them. Those are your choices.

My suggestion is not archaic but yours is immoral at least when it comes to SciHub

‘Across campus’?

And if I have to catch public transport for an hour each way to get to the campus, to get to my closest subscribing library? Maybe I don’t have a spare 2 hours to try this out…

(This is a drive-by comment. I don’t want to get into a discussion, but just raise a point)

Mickey driving to the shopping center or the supermarket in most of the country involves an hour trip including parking.

Are you saying that it is OK to steal for the sake of convenience. It sure seems that you are saying that!

This is to all the replies above…

Harvey- I think most anyone if forced to choose would rather rob the millionaire than the “working stiff.” I’m using a consequentialist ethical scheme, so that the millionaire suffers less than the average person would. If you’re a deontologist and so “to steal is to steal” is true regardless of the conditions, then we probably won’t agree about SciHub. Also Harvey, the fact you suffered is no reason anyone currently or in the future has to suffer to do their research.

As for the law, we’re debating what’s right here, not what’s legal. They are not the same thing.

Finally, I highly doubt >5% of the US population lives an hour from a grocery store. The inclusion of parking was to indicate most university libraries require paid or subscription parking. Grocery stores are far more plentiful and free to park at. But yes, depending on the situation for consequentialists, it IS okay to steal for convenience. You can come up with the most biased example- the victim is a billionaire, a jerk, punched your mother and kicked puppies, and if you don’t steal from them your family will die. Most people would steal from them, but there’s going to be a range. Apparently publishers have such low standing among many wanting pdfs, that taking $30 for a paper doesn’t concern them. The point is that saying “But you’re breaking the law for your convenience!” isn’t going to sway many on my side.

We are going far afield here but you as a consequentialist believes that it is morally right to kill a millionaire for his/her money but not to commit the same act to a poor person!

You are right we cannot agree!

You believe that stealing is OK if it is convenient for you to do so. Especially, if you are stealing from someone who has more than you do. But, then again the person who has less then you has the right to steal from you. Lock your door!

We are going far afield here but you as a consequentialist believes that it is morally right to kill a millionaire for his/her money …

Woah. woah! Who said anything about killing anyone? Mickey’s point was, and I quote: “I think most anyone if forced to choose would rather rob the millionaire than the “working stiff.” I’m using a consequentialist ethical scheme, so that the millionaire suffers less than the average person would.” I think that is hard to disagree with. Do you in fact disagree with it? With what Mickey said, I mean, not with an unrelated straw-man proposition.

Mike Consequential ism is an extension of utilitarianism – that action is best that produces the greatest good for the greatest number” (Jeremy Bentham). It does not rule out murder and that argument was presented by I forgot who.

Thus, to say who mentioned murder, I did because it is a natural extension of consequential ethics.

But, lets stick to the fact that using SciHub is abetting thievery – to wit you yourself does not use it.

Well, there are some Republicans who would argue that robbing the millionaire might reduce investment in new business that could have “trickle down” effects on improving the lot of the working stiff. Consequentialism can be used in different ways to reach different conclusions.

Thanks Mike, for the reply below. Are you even trying to be honest here, Harvey? The obvious point was that millionaires have lots of money, so robbing from them has less of a negative effect of their life than robbing from the “working stiff.” But both of these people have only one life, so killing either is equally damaging to them. Similarly, I never said stealing was okay if it’s convenient or if it’s from someone richer than I. But both do factor into most peoples’ morality. Namely, the easier it is to steal, including the chance to get caught, the more people are going to do it. And the less effect it has on the victim, ditto. If you had the extreme situation of you pressing one button to have a lot of what you value and being immune from punishment, plus your victim plus anyone else never learns of and never suffers from your crime, most people would commit the crime. But it’s a range, and you’re not immune no matter how holier than thou you pretend to be. Place you in an extreme situation, and you’d near certainly compromise your morals for what you value.

And to reply to the responses below, indeed consequentialism doesn’t rule out murder. It could be the case where killing someone led to a greater good, and anyone can come up with an extreme case that would be agreed on by almost everyone. But plenty of self-described deontologists justify murder too (often in the sense of ‘you do X, you should be murdered’), so it’s not as if it’s an extension of only consequentualist ethics. And yes, Sandy, consequentialism can have different conclusions depending on what you know and what you value. But I’d still say the vast majority of people function under its assumptions, and that it’s more reasonable.

Heather who decides the common good? The mob?

No Heather I hate to burst your bubble but it is not OK to steal from millionaires, nor thousandaires or poor people. Nor people like yourself whom may have more than others but less than others too. BTW this is so regardless of motive nor self perceived purity of your endeavor. To dig a ditch is just as noble as working in the lab.

Again, Heather… er Harvey, you seem to have trouble responding to my actual points. I never claimed it was “okay” to steal from anyone, only that consequentialists can see it as a lesser evil in some situations. I’m also not saying that consequentialism is correct, only that many people behave that way so that your repeating “but it’s stealing” has no effect.

To point out either the untruthfulness of your claim or the disconnect you exhibit from most of humanity, you claim it’s never okay to steal and that “this is so regardless of motive.” So, and answer here with a yes or no, would you choose to steal a pdf via Sci-Hub if it meant everyone you cared about wasn’t tortured?

Mickey: First you did say it was OK to steal from one who is better off than you.

Second, you need a good course in logic you are arguing for the position of false equivalency.

This comment just to thank Mike Taylor to defend the point of view of scientists disfranchised of their copyrights, in discussions of Sci-Hub and related topics. We would need more courageous voices like his.

The problem is that the language of disenfranchisement is not an accurate description of the reality. It is a loaded, politically charged term that attempts to persuade people that all publishers are nasty brutes whose only concern is to make gobs of money off the backs of exploited scientists.

Hi,

It is nice to see that the topic is being discussed in such great detail here.

What I would like to say is quite contrary to what the author has said. I like what Sci-Hub is doing and really want more and more Sci-Hubs to come up, so that publishers are forced to change the way they think and behave.

Additionally, this should also force researchers to change the way they think and stop chasing publications just because they have some “impact factors” to boast of and or can provide H-factors as a kick back later.

My views on this topic are in greater detail on my blog.
http://www.coffeetablescience.com/2016/03/why-sci-hubs-story-is-so-crucial-to.html

Overall, I think Sci-Hub is revolutionary. Sounds illegal right now. But has the potential to change th way publishing works. And we should not let this effort fail.

While Sci-Hub is clearly illegal, it isn’t hard to sympathize with users without access to commercially published journals … especially when, for example, Acta Materialia (Elsevier) in 2015 was priced at $5092 or $6.69/article, while the Journal of Materials Chemistry A (RSC) was priced at $3026 or $1.78 per article.

How many weak analogies have been put down so far?

On to 300 comments!

I do not get why people are claiming that Sci Hub is pure thievery. Does anyone know just how much revenue those big-shot publishers are making. Sci Hub was a radical, illegal idea, but it actually was quite effective for getting the message around that Open Access is not only morally good, but also economically viable.

I think the stance one adopts really depends on his or her point of view. As a scientist working in a government institution from a developing country, where public perception of our works reigns supreme, the gist of the matter is simple: The big publishing houses are what the general public perceive to represent the whole academic publishing industry. So if Elsevier is making profits of 35% off publishing research results funded by public tax money, and the public still has to pay them to have access (pay-per-charge or subscription), then the industry itself surely must be corrupt….

Enter Sci-hub, which provides a way to access the publications free of charge. In the eyes of the general populace, this effectively amounts to giving back to the public what should have rightfully been theirs in the first place. Sounds like Robin Hood for sure.

It does not matter that the big publishers are very different from the small academic publishing houses trying to eke out a living. It does not matter that Sci-hub stands on shaky legal/moral grounds. It does not even matter what we scientists think about the issue. What matters is what the public perception of the issue is. The public knows that the government funded the research, but in the end the general public is not allowed to read about it without paying more money under the status quo. In an age where electronics component manufacturers count themselves lucky to make a 6% profit, it is pretty hard for the public to swallow somebody making 35% off what they consider public property. If the public views academic publishing as big bad sharks (no disrespect to sharks), I am afraid that we will only see further cuts into library budgets (“we should not allow our hard-earned tax money to enrich a few publishers”), which would fuel more usage of less legitimate means to obtain journal articles.

But why blame the publishers, who are only taking advantage of an opportunity the government gave them, and not the government, which could easily have posted every research report it funded for public use? The animus is misdirected here, in my opinion. Do you blame the aircraft industry for making profits out of government Defense Department contract work?

First of all, there is enough blame to go around. The government will be blamed for funnelling money to these ‘big sharks’ (even though they are usually completely innocent). Actually we do have a research report database, but most of the reports are one-page affairs with terse language, and there are just not enough people assigned towards maintenance and compliance checks. Nor is there money to hire such people because resources need to be shifted to more important issues, such as disaster relief and social welfare – we’ve seen cuts to our research budget when the jobless numbers came out in the past, and there is some noise about shifting the agriculture research budget to frost relief at the moment. Believe me, scientific research is very low in the hierarchy of issues that politicians need/want to address, because it is very hard to obtain immediate results as ammunition for the next election – and scientists are few and have very little lobbying power compared to the general population.

You can’t compare scientific publishing with the aircraft industry, simply because the aircraft industry is directly involved in matters of national defence, which happens to be one of the top priorities in any government. Probably a better comparison would be with hospital chains, which (at least here) can post profits upwards of 30%. The public can tolerate this behaviour because they provide an absolutely necessary service. You could get rid of all scientific publishing houses and there would be little impact on the lives of the general public (of course there would be an outcry from scientists like us). So the core of the issue is this: private scientific publishers, which are really not absolutely required in a society, are making an obscene amount of money out of research funded by the public. If the big publication houses were making profits of 10-15%, or if the public did not know their profit margins, then there would be much less animosity towards the publishers.

So what it comes down to is not access not convenience but profits that someone thinks are obscene. I just wonder who is the arbitrator of profits. It seems to me the arbitrator is the consumer. Don’t buy but don’t steal either. Don’t contribute an article to a publisher who think is garnering obscene profits.

But, in the final analysis don’t steal or abet stealing at least don’t do it if you are a moral person.

BTW what I think is obscene is the raising rate of tuition but then again much of that money goes to salaries. How about that, having to teach say 6 hours per semester and earning about $90K for a nine month contract. The rest of the hours are supposedly spent doing research but then again who checks? Now that is obscene!

Yes, someone thinks that the profits are obscene. Unfortunately, that someone is the majority of the non-scientist population, which are represented by Congress, which in turn determines how much money researchers will receive and in what way they are allowed to spend that money. It is unfair, but nobody said democracy was fair. So: less money allowed on publication and library subscription -> less money paid to publishers. Guess who will be hurt the most, the large or the small publishers?

Our key performance index (KPI) still uses impact factor (particularly in the biomedical sciences) or journal ranking as the main indicator. Getting an academic position and rising through the ranks all require a good KPI. And we all know who publishes the journals with the highest impact factors…. and the libraries will probably have no choice but to subscribe to the large journals while cutting costs by stopping subscription of the smaller/niche journals.

FYI, the average salary for a tenure-track assistant professor here is around US$ 30,000 per year, usually with teaching loads of up to 9 hrs/week (I’ve heard of people with 12 hrs/week or more). Granted, our cost of living is about half of that in the US. Individual research projects in academia funded by our Ministry of Science and Technology have an average annual budget of US$ 100k for physics/chemistry and US$ 35k for the biomedical/biological sciences, but at least almost half of our science projects get funded. And our funding situation is already better than a lot of countries in the region.

$30K in many societies is a pretty penny. Here is the salary scales for the California system which pretty much mimics the US.
http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/compensation/

You say you read about 50 papers per month, do you need to keep them in some drawer in you office of home? Why not just book mark them and refer if needed?

Oh, I forgot the convenience factor makes theft OK!

Bookmark them? Many journals are paid by our library on a per access basis to publishers. If I load the same article twice on the browser, the library has to pay twice. We were told by our library staff to download the PDF version (which is allowed under our subscription terms) if there is even a remote chance that you may need to refer to it later.

thus, you have access to what you need. so, you are saying that you need more than the library provides. i think it would be wise to speak with the library and not steal that which you do not have.

Regarding tenure and KPI that is an argument outside of publishing. I suggest you take it up with your deans. Regarding grants etc write to your congressman.

Sounds to me like your beef is with politicians, then, who do not adequately fund scientific research. Why should publishers bear the blame for getting into an activity that the government chooses not to support, or has insufficient funds to do so because politicians have other priorities. Are politicians not supposed to represent the interests of the public? If the public really wants access to scientific research badly enough, they can vote for politicians who make this a high priority. As for defense funding, boondoggles like the F-35 fighter jet show that it would take cutting back on the production of just a few of these unneeded planes to fund all scientific research for years. It’s a weak argument to claim that everything spent for national defense is really necessary.

I am neither blaming politicians nor publishers, I am just stating what could be the end result under current cost structures and public perception of research. Let’s face a fact: Scientific funding from the public sector is not going to go up for a long time in most countries. Leaving morality aside, if the current trend continues, many researchers will have no choice but to get their papers from one free source or another. I usually read about 50 papers every month (that’s not a big number); if I had to pay for each and every one of them at US$ 30/article, it would amount to US$ 1500/month, which is enough to hire a master-level research assistant. The temptation is just too strong to get ‘free’ papers and use the money saved to hire more people, buy more reagents, etc. You can call them amoral, but the end result for most publishers is that subscriptions will fall, and even if Sci-hub is closed down, you can bet that they will find other ways to get the articles for free.

I now understand, nobleness of your purpose and lack of funding to do research that interests you and possible few others puts you in a position where theft is a necessary evil and therefore OK.

Doesn’t anyone take notes anymore?

My point is that in the current system many authors don’t have free access, hence that system isn’t working. Which is why authors depend on alternative ways to get pdfs, like Sci-Hub. So you’re defending a nonfunctional system.

But yes, I’d rather have an author-pays model where the journal gets a little money (e.g. a few hundred for unlimited articles via PeerJ) than one where downloads and subscription packages are outrageously overpriced which leads to unnecessary library expenses and black markets.

Mickey the point is that authors do have free access. Show me where they do not!

Well Mickey, I see nothing dysfunctional about the present system. But it is clear that you want an entirely different system. Unfortunately PeerJ is not a viable alternative.

David:

Since Mickey has identified everything wrong both real and imaginary I suggest Mickey designs a system that fills the needs of the entire scientific community.

I, for one, would like to see her plan! Of course she has to provide for costs, indexing, archiving, delivery, production, marketing – you know all the things that are now expected. I am sure she has thought all this out and now it is time to share her vision, or if she has not it is time for her to stop harping.

No she doesn’t Harvey. She, like many OA advocates, is contemplating a different system. Her model is actually well known. Perhaps you have missed it.

No Harvey, it is the ultra-cheap APC journal model. The journal still exists but it is limited to whatever can be done for a few hundred dollars per article. I think Harnad has been calling for this for years, as have others.

David if you have time could you send me a citation so I can look at this model. I wonder how realistic it is. Plos can’t do it.

I have no citations, Harvey, but I do listen a lot. The ultra-cheap journal is a common thread in OA discourse. (Mind you there is another thread where journals disappear altogether, they being obsolete.) There are two routes to this cheap journal world. In one the immediate deposit of articles in open repositories guts the subscription journal industry. This looks to be Harnad’s preferred route. In the other, funder price controls on APCs do it. Both are plausible but not yet apparent.

Harvey wrote- “Mickey the point is that authors do have free access. Show me where they do not!”

I could come up with numerous examples in my own field where university libraries don’t subscribe to some journals often (e.g. Ameghiniana, Zootaxa), but you realize you replied to an example of this on this very comment thread? Comment 158480 above by Bazargan. Your reply was “I hate to say this, but I would have paid. I signed a contract that I intended to honor when dealing with the publisher. In it there is a clause regarding purchasing material after the comp copies were given to me.”

At this point, I wonder if you’re even trying to be honest.

As for David’s reply, how can the current system be functional if it’s falling to piracy so easily? If you have a functional system, then most buyers would legally pay the suggested price, and competition would keep prices affordable. Functional systems don’t have popular black markets.

And yes, PeerJ seems like a fine alternative to me. Authors still pay, albeit a reasonable amount, and readers get pdfs for free. One sticking point between the sides in OA is that publishers tend to see far more value in their contribution than authors do. I’ve certainly seen no difference in quality or peer review between PeerJ and e.g. Nature/Science or Elsevier publications.

“I’ve certainly seen no difference in quality or peer review between PeerJ and e.g. Nature/Science or Elsevier publications.”

I beg to differ. PeerJ reviews have enormously more value, as they are actually available to read to the whole population, not just the original author. I deeply resent all the time I’ve spent writing reviews that have only ever been read by one person (two if you count the handling editor) — especially on those occasions where the review seems to be ignored anyway. Often a significant amount of effort goes into reviews, and it’s crazy for that effort to be thrown away. Publishing peer-reviews is a no-brainer, and just one of the many ways that PeerJ is an objectively better venue than the others you mention.

Mickey: I don’t think what authors pay to PeerJ is reasonable it should be no more than $2 per article!

First note you ignored my first three paragraph replies to other points.

Even the last paragraph ignores that my point was that non-university-affiliated people want pdfs (as Sci-Hub shows), so the library situation doesn’t matter for them. But if we’re addressing the university library situation, why is it wrong to try to get the suppliers to change their model but right to try to get more from the funders under the current model? The people in charge of university funds could easily say the libraries’ pleas fall on deaf ears because the funds are limited and if they go to e.g. sports, they get a lot more revenue. And if every plea is falling on deaf ears, might as well use Sci-Hub because we need the articles for our jobs but cannot afford them.

Mickey your complaint is not with publishers it is with the HPER department and how your university is funded be it private or governmental. You just said so with your argument. It is a matter of money not access or anything else.

When my wife said she wanted a fine painting I said: sorry no Monet!

As for not answering your three paragraphs I fear that they have been answered in the past. Unfortunately, they are not the answers you want!

As I suggested: Go to the library or turn on your account at home and take notes. Try it you will save a tree!

Again, why should social change only be implemented by convincing your funders you deserve more? The university library will never have the income and thus the clout to beat the athletics division in a fight for funds. Besides being another potential philosophical difference between us, I’d note not much social change is actually done via money, as it’s the rich who have set the status quo as it is. Instead it’s often done via a mass rejection of the system due to perceived unfairness, which makes it unpopular and inefficient to maintain. Mass rejection like, say, frequent use of Sci-Hub.

Ah yes, there is nothing like thievery which you advocate because you are too lazy to take notes or make a trip to the library. I’ll bet there isn’t a safe chicken where you live because of your lust for free food!

Again, it’s like you don’t even comprehend my points. “Again, why should social change only be implemented by convincing your funders you deserve more?” Do you have an answer?

Taking notes is not an alternative to a professional using a paper for their research. Unless you’re transcribing, there are often sections that are important later (or you wonder ‘did they mention this?, it’s not in my notes, but…’). Plus illustrations. Why not just tediously photograph every page with your phone in that case? Also, If I had a chicken duplicator, how serious and widespread would the harm be, assuming I only used it for my own consumption? Negligible.

As I have said you advocate thievery for convenience. If you really need it pay for it. If you are hungry either grow your own food of buy it!

Apparently WordPress makes it so that comments only go so many replies deep, even if I change the URL reply-to number. 158886 above is to David Wojick at 158841. and 158887 is in reply to Harvey Kane at 158820.

Comments are closed.
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