The second clause certainly seems to relate to copyright. But you will notice that it specifically refers to the rights of authors. So where this applies to scholarly publishing at all, I take it to be a statement against mandatory copyright transfers, rather than a reinforcement of publisher-owned copyright that have been taken away from authors.

That has not been my experience. I have had many long, tedious conversations with publishers on this subject, and they have not generally been keen to observe Article 27 part 2.

LOL!

To be fair, I am referring here to experiences that I had some years ago. Ever since I Became Enlightened, I only submit to open-access journals, so the issue doesn’t arise.

But this is the future, and Sci-Hub is about the past.

That is a very important point, and much overlooked. The enormous majority of open-access schemes that have been proposed and implemented related to work being done now, to be published in the future. It’s nice, and not completely unrealistic, to imagine a future in which all scholarly publishing is Gold OA, and publishers are appropriately paid for services rendered without needing to lock up knowledge. But even in that utopia, there’s the small matter of the last 300 years of scholarship, most of which remains under lock and key. Until that changes — and I don’t know of even any serious proposals towards fixing it — Sci-Hub and similar systems will have a purpose.

I see that you have not found any better argument to reply than accuse your opponent of some ‘ignorance’. I will take this as a kind of a personal attack. When personal attacks become involved, it is better to stop the discussion.

You know, when some organization advertises itself as a non-profit, people are not going to imagine a greedy publisher that restricts access to information with paywalls. When hearing ‘non-profit’, people are going to think about all those organizations that help poor people in Africa to get education and food, and et cetera.

But those publishers who use paywalls do the reverse: they deny these people their chances.
That’s why I’m saying that is not fair to advertise these publishers as ‘non-profits’, even though they can be non-profit by some formal definition.

Yes, that’s why this article has just defined Sci-Hub as a black side warrior.

I will chip in on the question of “criminal” from a legal point of view. To call someone a criminal when they have not been convicted of a crime is quite simply wrong, and may be defamatory. David may wish to use the word in a popular sense but unless and until the owner of Sci-Hub is convicted an offence which carries a judicial penalty (as opposed to damages), it is in law wrong to call them a criminal. Does David think it is OK to call a lawyer a criminal because, thanks to their incompetence, they get sued for damages by one of their clients?

To add to this pedantic subthread, I’ll also note that whatever laws Elbakyan is or isn’t breaking, “stealing” isn’t the right word to use. Copyright infringement is not theft.

As I told before, I have nothing to discuss with you further because you resorted to a nasty kind of personal attacks, simply calling other people ignorant instead of providing proofs is not going to make any interesting discussion.

Nobody is running away. I simply prefer polite discussion, not the one you’re trying to start.

Dear Sir,

I replied to substance of your comments already.
And please learn to be polite on your discussions.
I know it may be hard for you when you understand you’re wrong, but this is not the reason to resort to personal attacks.

Not to mention HathiTrust! And, gee, we have the Power 5 football conferences making billions of dollars, don’t we? Isn’t that scale enough?

Sandy, I find it very distasteful that you would contemplate violent military action as a way of preventing people from reading and using scholarly research. I can only hope that this is a joke; if it is, then it’s one in poor taste. (Imagine your reaction if an OA advocate were to suggest car-bombing Elsevier headquarters. I hope we’re all better than that.)

I am glad to hear that it was a joke. I couldn’t tell because, so far as I could determine, your earlier suggestion of a DoS attack on Sci-Hub did appear to be serious.

But it’s pretty clear that when you look at the evasiveness over how the access credentials are obtained, this is not some principled stance – it’s a VERY shady operation indeed.

I don’t think we can know that at all. If I were running a site that used other people’s credentials, and if those credentials were willingly donated, I would consider it my responsibility to those people not to disclose the fact.

And I don’t think “this is not some principled stance” is at all a tenable position. You only have to look at the nature of Elbakyan’s arguments — the appeal to human rights laws, for example — to see that a principled stance is exactly what it is. They may not be principles that they agree with, but they are evidently ones that Elbakyan believes in very strongly.

How do I know Elbakyan is not lying about her motivation? I suppose I don’t know, any more than I know you aren’t lying in your comments, or David Crotty in his, or Tom Reller in his. My policy is to assume people are telling the truth unless it can be shown that they’re not. I thought that was pretty universal.

The other half of this equation is: what do you think Elbakyan has to gain? She is putting herself in the firing line of a big, well-resources and litigious corporation in return for … what? A couple of BitCoin donations? I can’t see any credible motive for her actions other than the ones she claims, namely to make scholarly research freely available to the world. Doesn’t Occam’s Razor suggest to you, as well, that is the real reason?

Sandy, I can see that you’re very emotional about this issue, and this has caused you to speak loosely in your comment here: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/25/a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-oa/#comment-158301 to which I refer by link because threading on this blog has been troublesome for years.

There was never anything shady or wrong in what Mendeley did, thus we never needed to defend ourselves from anything. How VC-funded companies work is that they either go bust, go public or get acquired. It’s only a sell-out if the company stops doing what customers loved it for and we haven’t done that. Mendeley was valuable enough to enough people we weren’t going to fail, but our niche also isn’t big enough that it made sense to go public. We continue to provide our valuable service as a part of Elsevier and though we were forced to make some minor changes that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise, we are now in a position to show the industry how services can be a growing part of revenue, even as subscription revenues falter. Did you notice RELX posted gains for 2015 ahead of expectations? Take a look at what drove those gains and come back here.

We did and do feel very strongly that Open Access is the right thing for the research community precisely because it enables the creation of more valuable services. This has been our argument from day one and it is our practice today. Everyone in our industry, commercial and society publishers both, should pay close attention to the signals that are being broadcast by researchers because those signals tell us what valuable services need to be created. Because we have no intrinsic right to exist, we must demonstrate value to them. If our value proposition is so weak that a little website cooked up by one person can threaten it, we need to work on our value proposition! To continue your example of music sharing, what stopped the reign of Napster et al, wasn’t their acquisition, it was iTunes and the like. Access to your music on-demand on your device of choice is what people wanted and Sony was institutionally incapable of capturing that market, so Apple did and they became the biggest company ever. The path to success for a for-profit company will always be, “Give customers what they want.” As Steve Jobs famously said, this may not be what they say they want, so it’s our job to find that out, and we’re getting a very loud message right now.

I have some possibly ignorant but persistent thoughts on the non-profit thing, about which I would love feedback. The difference between a for-profit entity and a non-profit one is that when people don’t want what a for-profit offers anymore, the company goes away or re-invents itself. A non-profit, however, can continue for years pulling in donations from people who aren’t the consumers of the product. I sympathize with the plight of scientific societies, who have provided valuable services to their membership for years, and with university presses, which provide an outlet for authors who otherwise would be ignored by big commercial labels. I don’t think you have much to worry about, though. You might need to do some fundraising a little differently, but as long as people still think you’re worthwhile, you’ll be fine. Commercial enterprises are in the process of re-invention and clearly we’re not moving fast enough to stay ahead of where the customer wants us to be in terms of ease of access and discovery. That’s a business challenge we are taking on and in which we believe we will be successful.

My point is that, were I a Kazakhstanian medical researcher without access to articles that I needed for my work, it would be cold comfort to know that researchers in Ethiopia did have access. I think it takes some kind of disconnect from reality not to see that Kazakhstani researchers in this position will welcome Sci-Hub with a frank and simple joy quite out of keeping with the complex issues we’re discussing here. From their perspective, it’s simply the difference between being able to do their research and not.

Of course, I don’t for that reason expect the Kazahkstan’s government to officially adopt a pro-Sci-Hub position. But you can bet your intestines that its researchers will.

Because Kazakhstan is not a lower income country, but an upper middle income country. This is World Bank GDP classification. http://data.worldbank.org/country/kazakhstan

And for the record, Chile is high income country (http://data.worldbank.org/country/chile). And guess what – most of our “high” GDP is concentrated in the upper 0.1%, where a few families enjoy. If we were to take away the richest 1% from Chilean GDP, we would be like Congo.

Paywalls ARE a problem.

Not noted are other peculiarities of the market for academic work. In what other market are the people who benefit from the goods sold not the ones paying for it? Libraries pay for subscriptions, and though some individuals do, this is a diminishing part of the market. In OA fees are very often not paid by the authors but by some institutions, whether funders like Wellcome or authors’ universities. Only if the fees were being paid by the authors themselves would there be the kind of competition you talk about. Why should authors care how much the APCs if they are not paying for them, any more than they are concerned about the high prices of journals that libraries pay for?

“By the way “printing presses” were never a cost for universities. The ONLY university press in the US that had a printing plant was Princeton”

Actually, the Ohio State University Press started as an office in Ohio State’s offset printing press back in the 1930s. Initially the printing press handled the student newspaper, printing Extension reports, faculty developed textbooks, journals, and the occasional monograph written by OSU faculty (typically in Ag Science but not exclusively). OSU Press slowly evolved into what we might now might consider an independent scholarly press, but didn’t concentrate solely on discipline-based humanities scholarly publishing until the 1950s.

And yes, I have considered the fact that if OSUP had stuck with exclusively publishing their own faculty’s work, in both the sciences and the humanities, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

The more you know…?

“Wait, the claim here is that the last 20 years have only shown the “polite and reasonable” side of the OA movement? Seriously?”

Compared with Sci-Hub, I mean. Attempts to negotiate a settlement. Not direct action.

Thirty years ago, access was extremely limited. Today, access is unprecedented.

That is certainly true; but I do hope publishers from 30 years ago are not claiming credit for this. It was something that was done to them (by the Internet), not by them. Established publishers have had to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way: I’m sure I don’t need to remind this audience about PRISM, the RWA, the endless talk about “our content”, the bribing of congressmen, and so on.

Is it perfect, not yet.

I hope we are in agreement that this is something of an understatement! Estimates vary, but I usually see numbers between 20-40% of papers available as open access. I would describe 99% as “not perfect” and 40% as “shameful”.

Authors who are not satisfied with “legacy” publishers have so many options now. I continue to be shocked that “author choice” is only a good thing if the author only chooses what the advocates want.

That’s only shocking if you assume a priori that author choice is what advocates care about. For the most part, it’s not. I want authors, and publishers and universities, to do the right thing, which is get the world’s store of knowledge into the hands the world — the whole of the knowledge, not 40%; the whole world, not an elite. Sometimes author choice is a good tactic towards attaining this goal; sometimes it’s not. But it was never the goal.

No, maybe not. As I’ve said, that’s not really my main concern. A researcher who receives a grant to discover something about malaria, who writes up the results, and who wants to keep those results paywalled away from those who need to use those results, isn’t really an object of sympathy to me.

As I often say, there is plenty of blame to go around in scholarly publishing. I do hope do-one ever infers from my criticism of publishers that I think researchers are blameless. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You assertion is wildly at odds with the experiences of researchers around the world.

See http://whoneedsaccess.org/

Ah yes, the old “Why would the reports the researchers are required to submit to the government not be enough?” gambit. These mythical reports — I have never seen one. Never. I have certainly never written one. I am sceptical of their existence.

Requesting reprints is annoying and time-consuming at best (something tells me you don’t have to read many papers requested from authors…), but it becomes especially frustrating when the author is in heaven (or hell or has maybe just left academia). The emails tend to bounce. I’d be interested to hear your solution for this case, David Wojick.

More generally, the papers that are hard to find are exactly the older ones – sometimes the journals no longer even exist or have gone out of fashion (so institutions no longer subscribe), authors have moved many times, the “archives” are strictly paywalled and there are fewer copies knocking around the web. A case in point in my field is the archives of the Journal of Neurophysiology, which require a separate subscription not paid by my institution. Not even sci-hub seems to work for these (I would happily have used the site in this case).

To David, every example of the present system not working is a bizarre outlier, which shouldn’t be taken into account. No true Scotsman would ever need access to a paper they can’t get.