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And the point is that using a free search engine is cheaper AND more convenient than reading through a journal. Like, would you subscribe to a poorly curated ve

And the point is that using a free search engine is cheaper AND more convenient than reading through a journal. Like, would you subscribe to a poorly curated version of HN and Reddit instead of just going to the source?

skybrian 9y ago
The argument was that this is inevitable due to basic economics 101 ideas about perfect competition. A specific argument was made about prices needing to be set near the cost of distribution. The point of bringing up video, movies, and books is to show that it's not that inevitable and markets don't have to work that way. Netflix subscriptions pay for a lot more than download bandwidth. Similarly with Kindle. So it depends on the specifics of the market. Currently, academic publishers are not meeting that community's needs very well (understatement), so it's ripe for disruption. Competing with Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify is a lot harder. My guess is that eventually a better service will come along, colleges will be willing to fund it (at far cheaper than today's prices for journals), and many people will stop using SciHub. But, as with the music industry, that may take a while; it doesn't happen automatically.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  I think video and music are only good examples to the first approximation. Video for example requires a vast infrastructure to deliver. That's not something that each filmmaker can do on their own. Music is a little easier, but discoverability is still a problem, and if your song becomes popular, good look keeping your host from dying as everyone streams it. Besides, music is a little more difficult to index than papers. Scientific papers are far easier. The demand even for the most popular ones is likely a lot less than the demand for a semi popular song. It's is easy to self host them. It's also easy to categorize and tag them. And that makes them easy to index. I am going to venture a guess that all scientific papers ever written (stuff that would be published in a journal, not necessarily all the accompanying data), could probably fit on your phone's storage. A kick ass engine to search it could be an app you download. Oh and for the most part there are no licenses to negotiate. You just publish. So while the only way to get a new scientific paper in front of a large audience of your peers was to print 10k copies of it in a journal and mail the journals, publishers provided value. Now they do not. Oh and Spotify is not a counter example. If you could have access to app scientific papers in the world ever published as soon as they are published, but it cost you $10/month we wouldn't be talking about this. It's still too expensive, but in relative terms cheap enough that nobody would give a crap. Subscribing to multiple publications to get a small subset is silly. Imagine if instead of Spotify you had to subscribe to each label's streaming service. Would you?
  - skybrian 9y ago
    I think we actually agree that it depends on the specifics of the market. Otherwise you wouldn't be bringing up all these additional facts about how academic publishing works compared to other markets. The specifics matter - that's my point.
    - IgorPartola 9y ago
      Rereading your comment, yes I think we do agree.

skybrian 9y ago

The argument was that this is inevitable due to basic economics 101 ideas about perfect competition. A specific argument was made about prices needing to be set near the cost of distribution. The point of bringing up video, movies, and books is to show that it's not that inevitable and markets don't have to work that way. Netflix subscriptions pay for a lot more than download bandwidth. Similarly with Kindle. So it depends on the specifics of the market. Currently, academic publishers are not meeting that community's needs very well (understatement), so it's ripe for disruption. Competing with Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify is a lot harder. My guess is that eventually a better service will come along, colleges will be willing to fund it (at far cheaper than today's prices for journals), and many people will stop using SciHub. But, as with the music industry, that may take a while; it doesn't happen automatically.

IgorPartola 9y ago
I think video and music are only good examples to the first approximation. Video for example requires a vast infrastructure to deliver. That's not something that each filmmaker can do on their own. Music is a little easier, but discoverability is still a problem, and if your song becomes popular, good look keeping your host from dying as everyone streams it. Besides, music is a little more difficult to index than papers. Scientific papers are far easier. The demand even for the most popular ones is likely a lot less than the demand for a semi popular song. It's is easy to self host them. It's also easy to categorize and tag them. And that makes them easy to index. I am going to venture a guess that all scientific papers ever written (stuff that would be published in a journal, not necessarily all the accompanying data), could probably fit on your phone's storage. A kick ass engine to search it could be an app you download. Oh and for the most part there are no licenses to negotiate. You just publish. So while the only way to get a new scientific paper in front of a large audience of your peers was to print 10k copies of it in a journal and mail the journals, publishers provided value. Now they do not. Oh and Spotify is not a counter example. If you could have access to app scientific papers in the world ever published as soon as they are published, but it cost you $10/month we wouldn't be talking about this. It's still too expensive, but in relative terms cheap enough that nobody would give a crap. Subscribing to multiple publications to get a small subset is silly. Imagine if instead of Spotify you had to subscribe to each label's streaming service. Would you?
- skybrian 9y ago
  I think we actually agree that it depends on the specifics of the market. Otherwise you wouldn't be bringing up all these additional facts about how academic publishing works compared to other markets. The specifics matter - that's my point.
  - IgorPartola 9y ago
    Rereading your comment, yes I think we do agree.