quick thoughts on twitter thread

CF

https://twitter.com/MikeTaylor/status/867669210050310144

for thread.



unedited, quick thoughts.



> Downloads lost. Matters to paying authors on OA sites.

Are we asserting that harm to an author hurts an OA publisher?  How?

Lost? Actually, the downloads happened. Perhaps the point is that those downloads are not counted in ALM systems? ALMs cause a huge, nuanced discussion area about how they matter, to whom and why. Frankly, authors who choose to take the harder route and publish in OA journals made that choice in support of *reader access* to the content, either from ideological alignment or funder mandate, or some other reason that bucked the trend created by closed publishers. @sci_hub provides better access across publishers than any other portal in existence at the moment (breadth of catalog, simplicity and ease of PDF access) and this solution: one place to find the publicly supported content is the long term endpoint of an integrated science publishing industry. Also, the download data from @sci_hub is available, at least for some researchers. So even if we give the arguments that author->publisher matters, and that ALMs really matter to authors, then this is a service question, not an effective assertion the nature of @sci_hub hurts OA publishers.  We can simply hook their downloads into ALM services.

> Every journal wants "sticky" pages. Ad revenue and other promos lost.

Simply not true, especially for gold OA publishers.  From my experience, @PLOS ad revenue is trivial; promos are not the focus of their publishing. Authentic publishers want to disseminate high-quality, reliable research results in a timely manner.  It's really about the results in that case.

> Rich full text user features lost if users get flat PDF off Pirate sites

Again, lost? No, users are free to access features wherever they're offered. PDF has become a standard in all academic publishing and to imply that PDF downloads are not available nor the preferred read formats from OA publisher sites does not conform to use data my teams have measured.

> Conflating free due to pirates with free due to OA is hurting OA journals.

This is interesting, and very close to a real issue on idea conflation.  Unfortunately, in this case, the "free" from OA publishers and the "free" offered by @sci_hub are aligned *entirely*.  Both offer no cost, full-rights access to a readable format.  The licenses for the content on @sci_hub from OA publishers are typically printed explicitly on the PDF content.  Both the clarity and conformance of licensing from OA publishers is far better than from non-OA publishers.

There is a series of real "idea/conflation" issues in academic publishing space, and they do relate to licenses and "free to read" vs "free to access, data mine, put things into databases, etc" - but those issues are not coming primarily from OA *publishers*.  Those conflations occur in the grey space typically where non-publisher services are trying to navigate around the subscription clauses and copyright restrictions enforced by publishers.

I would be very interested to hear from OA publishers on this assertion that it's the "pirates" that confuse the issue of free in this space.

> Promotion of a "no one pays" economy is very bad for OA journals not getting funder money.

Not sure if this statement is fully clear.  More explanation please.  This is where it takes my first thoughts: TAANSTAFL is delusional, deriving from the conflation between 'someone had to pay' vs. 'everyone has to pay'.  Gold OA publishers are already paid for their work, and in that arena, both the publisher and the authors want readers to read their articles without payment. @sci_hub helps them both disseminate their work.

> Versioning and pointers to editorially related content lost to user. Retractions and corrections invisible.

https://www.crossref.org/services/crossmark/


>  SH hurts all.

All who?  How exactly?  This seems exactly backwards.
http://issuepedia.org/Mirror_argument