Thought-experiment #1: what will happen if Sci-Hub succeeds? March 10, 2016

Let’s think this through. Ignore for now the questions about Sci-Hub’s legality, and just consider the pragmatics. Imagine that it “succeeds” in that it survives whatever legal challenges come its way, and continues to distribute copyrighted scholarly publications to anyone in the world at zero cost, ignoring the claims of that copyright.

Then what follows?

Extreme scenario #1: no-one cancels their subscriptions

It’s easy to see that this could indeed be the outcome. It’s hard to imagine Harvard deciding “Well, we don’t need to pay Elsevier and Wiley for access to these journals any more, since our researchers can just pirate them from Ukraine.”

In this scenario:

Publishers continue to receive subscription fees, so they are not harmed.

Researchers gain access to material their institutions have not subscribed to, on top of their existing access to material they do have a subscription for.

Other people — patient advocates, unaffiliated scholars and the rest — gain access that they didn’t have before.

Is this a good outcome?

As far as I can see, this is an unambiguous net win for the world: no-one is harmed and many people are helped. So in this scenario, Sci-Hub is a pure good.

Extreme scenario #2: everyone cancels their subscriptions

This is less easy to imagine, but I suppose not completely beyond the bounds of possibility. One can just about imagine a domino effect, perhaps something like the following.

One university, under a tight financial squeeze, cancels all subscriptions claiming that it’s going to get by using only Gold and Green OA. In reality of course its researchers also use Sci-Hub for access to non-OA papers. Nothing catastrophic happens to the university (after all it would hard for a publishers to sue a university for declining to be a customer). A few more smaller universities tentatively follow the lead of the first. The effect snowballs. Finally, the Oxfords and Yales, who are the last remaining subscribers, think “Well, this is silly”, and under the changed environment go ahead and cancel their subscriptions, too.

Note again that I don’t think this is at all likely. But let’s just take it as our scenario for now, and think about what would follow.

Subscription revenue would collapse, ultimately to zero. The first thing to notice is that open-access publishers would be completely unaffected. Publishers whose main revenue is subscriptions would possibly try to find some way to prevent the cancellation trend, but are unlikely to be able to force customers to renew contracts they no longer want. Those publishers will need to transform their businesses to being Gold OA-based as quickly as possible if they’re to survive. But they wouldn’t need to panic too much: they would have several years to do this, as ongoing subscription contracts would still run to completion.

So after three to five years, when most or all of the old subscription contracts had expired, we would be left with an all-open-access scholarly publishing infrastructure. The landscape would include existing OA publishers (PLOS, BMC, etc.) and also probably some but not all of the current paywalled publishers in flipped form. It’s hard to tell at the moment which publishers are likely to survive this transition.

Is this a good outcome?

For big publishers that are used to 35% profit-margins, no. For most other people, yes. (I, for example, would be very happy with this outcome; though not all OA advocates would agree. It would be a good transition for scholarly publishing; but perhaps not the best possible.)

In this situation, Sci-Hub would have acted as a catalyst to greatly speed up the subscription-to-OA transition that many of us would like to see happen.

What would happen to institutional repositories in this world? As sources of open-access manuscripts they would become less important — but they would remain the only legitimate source of the manuscripts of pre-2016 paywalled papers. Institutions use their repositories for other purposes, too, so I imagine they would survive, and maybe even thrive. But other are better positioned to comment.

Intermediate outcomes

What about intermediate outcomes? Could there be a steady state where, say, half of universities cancel their subscription but half keep theirs? Maybe. You could certainly imagine developing-world universities saving money in this way, while those in the developed West keep theirs.

Would that also be a good outcome? I think so. I can’t really feel negative about anything that gives developing-world researchers the access they need. I doubt the loss of subscription revenue for publishers would be very significant in this case — presumably the great bulk of their income is derived from the affluent West.

What does it all mean?

It’s taking me some time to figure out what I think about Sci-Hub (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). But I do finally seem to be groping my way towards a position now.

I’ve looked at two possible extreme outcomes if Sci-Hub succeeds. One of them is an unambiguous good. The other is more equivocal, but certainly contains more good than bad. I’ve briefly considered intermediate outcomes, and they seem good, too.

So I am gradually coming around to thinking that every possible outcome of Sci-Hub succeeding would be good. That suggests that there’s a strong case for being pro-Sci-Hub. At least, there is an onus on those who want to see Sci-Hub destroyed to explain how the outcome will be better than the ones I describe here.

I think “We want Sci-Hub to succeed” is the null hypothesis.