7 ms·
I doubt that Sci-Hub is doing serious harm to the big publishers. Elseview doesn't lose any money when someone downloads an articles from SciHub. They actuall
by tmalsburg2 10y ago
I doubt that Sci-Hub is doing serious harm to the big publishers. Elseview doesn't lose any money when someone downloads an articles from SciHub. They actually save money that they would otherwise spend for bandwidth. The key here is that hardly anyone is buying individual articles. What happens instead is that universities subscribe for journals and this is not going to change because a university can hardly tell their their staff and students: "Hey everyone, we canceled our Elsevier subscriptions. Please use SciHub from now on." This is also the reason why the comparison to the music industry and Napster does not really work. In sum, I doubt that Sci-Hub is such a big deal and much less a game changer. There have always been ways to find pirated PDFs of research articles. Sci-Hub just made it a little bit more convenient.
- detaro 10y agoMore people getting their papers from SciHub means less people using their universities subscriptions, and even less people complaining when the university wants to cancel the subscription to save money.
- tmalsburg2 10y agoIf a university cancels the subscriptions for a journal and the publishers find a way to show that people from that university's network access articles from that journal on Sci-Hub, I'm pretty sure the publishers would be in a great position to sue. Even if the publishers eventually lose, the university would look incredibly bad in the media. Not sure they would risk that.
- stale2002 10y agoSue who? The university? The university doesn't have any control over what their students or professors do in their own home.