Why Sci-Hub Won’t Lead to the Downfall of Science Publishers | Lyman BioPharma Consulting LLC

" ... Sci-Hub Pits the Science Publishing Empire Against the Science Rebels ...  For science journal publishers big and small, Sci-Hub represents a direct threat to their business models. For many scientists and lay people, however, Sci-Hub offers an opportunity to climb over the dreaded journal paywall and obtain some degree of scientific enlightenment. The battle lines have been drawn, and the ultimate winner is likely to be the Empire, not the rebels. Let me explain why. Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of science journals, has already taken legal action against Sci-Hub. They got a N.Y. district court order to have the site taken down. All this seems to have accomplished so far was to drive the location of the web-hosting site to Russia, where it is presumably a bit further beyond the reach of Western authorities. To date I have not found any examples of Elsevier (or any of the other large publishing groups, such as JSTOR and Springer) going after any scientists for downloading Sci-Hub hosted papers. If the publishers can’t legally reach Sci-Hub, however, they may start suing the downloaders, assuming that they can identify whom those folks are. A few headlines screaming, “scientist hit with $50,000 in fines for illegal paper downloads” would probably go a long way towards curbing this practice. This approach, of course, is the same one that was (somewhat) successfully used by the music industry against those who illegally downloaded songs from peer-to-peer networks. There are some distinct elements to the economic model used by the science publishers that are not shared with other industries. In the case of science journal access at most research universities and institutions, 'he who orders does not read, and he who reads does not order.' Journals are chosen by library staff (with input, of course, from the local research community) and are paid for by grant money that is aggregated from the individual researcher’s grants. A good percentage of the journals are made available as part of specifically packaged bundles, the cost of which is negotiated on a case-by-case basis and which are protected by secret contracts. As with cable TV channels, universities are forced to pay for some content that they don’t want in order to gain access to specific journals that they do want. Researchers are generally not directly involved in this negotiating process ... So Why Isn’t Sci-Hub a Real Threat to the Empire?

The total number of people in the above groups represents a very small percentage of the total customers interested in obtaining and reading journal articles on an ongoing basis. Put simply, the papers in the Sci-Hub database are being pilfered (for the most part) by people that would never buy the articles as they are currently priced (often $30-$35 each). Therefore, the Empire is not losing much in the way of sales revenues to these pirates; the thieves were never going to buy the articles anyway. This is a very different situation from the music and film industries, where 1) IP pirates are giving away or selling content (songs and movies) at a price that most consumers can readily afford to pay, and 2) the size of their customer base dwarfs that seen for those wanting to read journal articles by a huge margin. Napster put the fear of God into music publishers when it launched since they immediately recognized the danger of massive numbers of their existing consumers illegally downloading their products on their home computers. I don’t expect Sci-Hub will have the same effect on the journal publishers for the reasons outlined above ..."