A couple of months ago I wrote about Jason Shen’s article on how Sci-Hub was blowing up academic publishing. I said I was conflicted about Sci-Hub because they basically make journal articles from academic publishers available for free and that’s easy to see as stealing. On the other hand, the academic publishers, for the most part, do not have clean hands either. It’s easy to see their whole business model as rapacious and exploitative. As I say, conflicted.
Now the publishers are making it easy to root for Sci-Hub. California State University librarian Gabriel Gardner mentioned Sci-Hub during a panel discussion and The Association of American Publishers (AAP) responded by writing Gardner’s dean complaining that he had made favorable comments about Sci-Hub.
Nobody likes a tattle tail, of course, but it’s even worse than that. Gardner, it turns out, was reporting on an article he and some colleagues had written pointing out the problems with illegal sites like Sci-Hub. So not only was the AAP acting in a wholly inappropriate way to an academic discussion that they didn’t like, they didn’t even have their facts remotely correct.
As I said, the publishers don’t have clean hands and this episode just shows that no one should feel sorry for them. For years they’ve run a rent seeking scam on academia and now they’re screaming that Sci-Hub is interfering with their business model. I may be conflicted but it’s hard to feel sorry for them.