Sci-Hub and the Four Horsemen of the Internet | The Scholarly Kitchen

" ... 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 ... 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 ... 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 PortableDocument 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 ... 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 ..."