Sci-Hub has been part of the background radiation for many years, but about a month ago it jumped front and center on my radar screen. The occasion was that a young scientist told me that even though he has access to almost all the research papers he needs from his university library, he routinely uses Sci-Hub instead because of its more congenial user experience. I wasn’t sure if he was pulling my leg or not (I think he wasn’t), but his comment or wisecrack raises the interesting possibility that some of Sci-Hub’s enormous traffic is generated by researchers who are indeed authorized to get access to the material they seek, but not at Sci-Hub. On reflection this is not surprising. InfoDocket’s Gary Price has long lamented the fact that people don’t know what they have in their libraries, which raises the question of how much needs to be open and how much simply requires better tools for discovery, not to mention a seamless user experience.

Before I say another word, let me be clear that this is not a post that sides with Sci-Hub in any way. I think what Sci-Hub is doing is terrible — bad for publishers, researchers, and librarians. I saw one piece on Sci-Hub that invoked Robin Hood, but the name I would invoke is Meyer Lansky (“Lansky was born Meier Suchowlański in Grodno, in the Russian Empire [now Belarus]”–Wikipedia). We should expect that publishers whose commercial interests are threatened by Sci-Hub and other services of its ilk would take action (what I call a “bulwark strategy”). The problem is that you can’t stop there. Elsevier can win a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, and good for them, but sites like this have a way of springing from the ashes or hiding in politically advantageous regions. Smaller publishers, of course, don’t have the resources of an Elsevier, which means that much of the activity to ward off incursions by a Sci-Hub or its ilk is necessarily conducted by companies that obviously have their own interests at heart. I am sure that Elsevier is full of great people who love their children and walk their dogs every day, but do I want them to be responsible for the fortunes of my organization, which otherwise competes with them in the marketplace day after day?

The Kitchen has gone on record about Sci-Hub in two superb posts by Angela Cochran and David Smith respectively. I say “on record” with the understanding that the Kitchen itself has no voice but is rather the sum of the uncoordinated musings of its cantankerous contributors, who are united only in their exasperation at this blog’s three most prominent trolls. David’s description of how Sci-Hub works is a model of technical explanation. Angela sums up what Sci-Hub means to a publisher — how it challenges security systems and demands costly monitoring — and describes very accurately how publishers are reacting now and are likely to react in the future. Oh, and let us not forget that SPARC is on record, too. Here is Heather Joseph on NPR:

I think researchers take for granted that they’re – they’ve been forced into a system of workarounds to try to get access to the articles that they need to do their research. Typically, a researcher will have legal access to only between 50 and 70 percent of the articles that they need to do their work. So I think this database, Sci-Hub, was just another step in a process that researchers have sadly become used to doing.

“Sadly”? These comments by a professional lobbyist should come as no surprise. Cynically exploiting a criminal situation, SPARC simply recites its talking points. Researchers have been reduced to leading a life of crime. Oh, how unjust is the big bad world!

The trap publishers can fall into is to think that a legal victory or even a series of such victories is a substitute for planning the next steps of the industry’s future or that the primary focus should be to set up more roadblocks to the Sci-Hubs of this world and lobbying organizations like SPARC that tacitly support them. One way publishers are likely to respond is to make it harder for pirates to get access to published materials. Angela notes, for example, that some publishers may stop producing PDFs. I think this is highly likely. A PDF is a weapons-grade tool for piracy: a fixed document that can be passed around the conversational channels of the Internet without alteration (it is the Portable Document Format, after all). But here we have to ask whether it is in a publisher’s long-term interest to make its service any less valuable to its authorized users in order to stymie the unauthorized ones. A bulwark strategy alone may not be enough to carry the organization into the future.

Let’s learn something from publishers working in other segments. In the college textbook market publishers have been wrestling with the used-book problem for many years now; by some accounts used (print) textbooks now comprise about one-third of the market. Imagine a lucky publisher that secures an adoption for a text for a course with 30 students enrolled in it. Ten of those students buy a used text, a few borrow books from other students, a few find pirated books online, and some do without the text entirely. So a potential market is reduced by half or more. Publishers reacted to this by trying to make the used books obsolete. Thus texts were updated with greater frequency (not unusually, the life of an edition went from 5 years to 3), but one consequence of this was higher pricing because the huge costs of development had to be amortized over a shorter period of time. But higher prices drove more students to purchase used books and to seek pirated copies — and not to acquire texts at all. The publishers’ solution, in other words, deepened the situation. This is despite the fact that the publishers’ action directly addressed a very real economic problem. Unfortunately, the publishers lacked foresight.

Or we can learn from the trade. When J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter novels, she prohibited her publishers around the world from creating digital editions. The Harry Potter books became the most pirated of all. Now the novels are available as ebooks and sell in the terabytes, reducing the incentive to create and distribute pirated editions. There will always be pirates, but some people are just lazy and won’t bother with services that are inefficient or hard to use, as many pirate sites are.

A real problem for publishers is that the habits of users are being shaped by the Four Horsemen of the Internet: Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google. From these companies users are learning to expect certain things, and even the publishers of highly specialized academic materials are compared to Amazon’s convenience, Facebook’s ubiquity, Apple’s coolness, and Google’s magic. We can cry out, But that’s not fair! Our markets are a fraction of the size for those big tech companies! But fairness plays no role in the marketplace. Publishers have to do more to satisfy their users (and to raise expectations) not because it is the right thing to do but because it is the market-mandated thing to do.

The real question then for publishers is what to do after shutting down Sci-Hub. To prevent future Sci-Hubs from arising, Sci-Hub has to be made to look old-fashioned. New services have to create more value; users have to be presented with features that they just can’t live without — even if they lived without them for decades. And in our heart of hearts, can’t we admit that we are embarrassed that we are still publishing PDFs?