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Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

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Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#71

Post by aninhumer »

jobigoud wrote: post #43
aninhumer wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.

Yeah, good idea. Sort the papers by popularity, and when grouping them find the distribution that minimizes the distance between any paper and the top-popular ones for atomic block size.

I don't think you need to do anything that complex. Just find the N most popular papers and make sure there's one in each block.

Or thinking about, you could put them at block boundaries so people grab two blocks when they download them, in which case you'd only need half as many popular ones.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#72

Post by tmalsburg2 »

detaro wrote: post #68
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #67

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 th…

More 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.

If 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.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#73

Post by stale2002 »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #72
detaro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More 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.

If 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.

Sue who? The university? The university doesn't have any control over what their students or professors do in their own home.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#74

Post by nisa »

redsymbol wrote: post #66

> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in revenue... How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1],…

> What do they spend all that money on?

Here is the most recent annual of their parent company:

http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/...

I don't have the time nor knowledge to give a summary on this but it's quite interesting - e.g. page 8 - 50% of their income are subscriptions and 80% of these are electronic. The other 50% are "transactional" I guess that means fees.

I can't read investor reports but I guess some answers are in there.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#75

Post by gleb »

nisa wrote: post #74
redsymbol wrote: post #66

> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in revenue... How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1],…

> What do they spend all that money on? Here is the most recent annual of their parent company: http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/... I don't have the time nor knowledge to give a summary on this but it's quite interesting - e.g. page 8 - 50% of their income are subscriptions and 80% of these are electronic. The other 50% are "transactional" I guess that means fees. I can't read investor rep…

Page 94 - Consolidated income statement

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#76

Post by nickpsecurity »

redsymbol wrote: post #66

> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in revenue... How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1],…

Terrible comparison. Best to look at other publishers. To start with, let's look at one with free labor for contributions and review. It costs $45.9 million a year. You might have heard of it:

https://annual.wikimedia.org/2014/#s-6

The next comparison would be finding a firm that does all of Elsevier's services. You start by knowing what they are. They're a part of Relx Group which describes its activities here:

http://www.relx.com/OurBusiness/Pages/Home.aspx

That's a lot. Elsevier itself mainly buys, accepts for free, and hosts research. They might pay reviewers. They also do commercial work for businesses. They also try to make money for shareholders. That always adds up. ;) Here's their annual report.

http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/...

It has a lot of data but can't directly answer your question. For Elsevier, three things stand out as possibly high-cost items:

1. 17,000 editors reviewing the articles for 2,500 journals. Whoever manages journals plus editors already constitutes large cost.

2. 23% of the revenue is by print sales. A physical print adds real cost to things esp when we're talking big, technical reports and books.

3. There's in-person sales and sale agents for subscription models. Probably lots of sales agents. They'll likely take a commission.

4. The amount of money involved with publicly traded means there's going to be plenty of compliance, management, and executive overhead. On top of nice, executive compensation.

These together would easily make it cost in $100-500mil a year range. Probably more.

EDIT: As gleb said, the Consolidated Income Statement on PDF reader p 98 will tell you in detail what they spend it on. The above activities are common among these types of organizations, though.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#77

Post by return0 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #76
redsymbol wrote: post #66

> In 2015, the company earned $1.1 billion in profits on $2.9 billion in revenue... How in the world does a company like Elsevier accrue $1.8 billion in expenses? Apple's 2015 worldwide operating expenses were $30 billion [0], or about 17 times higher. Yet Apple's costs for manufacturing, retail, sales, payroll, etc. ought to be hundreds or thousands of times greater than Elsevier's; Apple has 115,000 employees [1],…

Terrible comparison. Best to look at other publishers. To start with, let's look at one with free labor for contributions and review. It costs $45.9 million a year. You might have heard of it: https://annual.wikimedia.org/2014/#s-6 The next comparison would be finding a firm that does all of Elsevier's services. You start by knowing what they are. They're a part of Relx Group which describes its activities here: http…

- the 17.000 editors are almost all unpaid. The paid editors who coordinate the free work of others are typically very few per journal (e.g. Cell: 8 editors, Neuron: 6 editors)

- The print sales, (along with most of their sales) come from bundling everything in large subscriptions that the universities are then forced to accept. 99% of the paper they make is not used. Most people download the papers and re-print them actually. (Not saying paper doesn't cost, but that people would not normally pay for such a useless thing)

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#78

Post by refurb »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #69
lottin wrote: post #59

Academic publishers are parasitic industry. They profit from somebody else's work without contributing anything of value themselves. If they go away, everybody wins.

What the big publishers offer is prestige and most academics are addicted to that prestige. Getting into Science or Nature is like a heroin. No academic-run open access web journal offers this high. Apart from that, journal prestige also plays a key role in the distribution of funding, for example in the UK. Many researchers feel they just cannot afford to publish in more ethically correct journals because these jour…

Exactly. If these publishers weren't offering anything of value, then why would authors continue to use them when open source alternatives are available?

No one is holding a gun to their head saying "you must publish your paper in Science!"

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#79

Post by return0 »

rmchugh wrote: post #29

Comparing sci hub to napster is a bit misleading. Elseviers customers are not individual scientists, they're university libraries who pay huge sums to get massive bundles of journal licenses. I have an extremely hard time imagining university libraries cancelling their deals with Elsevier and instead telling their users to check SciHub. What it might result in is slowed growth as new customers feel less pressure from…

To add, its not like napster because none of the "artists" (scientists) will go after scihub, if anything almost everyone cheers them.

Re: Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

#80

Post by return0 »

wernercd wrote: post #36
pervycreeper wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are nonetheless economic consequences for the publishers, the end result will be the trimming of some fat.

Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know... competition. Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office? Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s) doesn't... If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, t…

Elsevier does not control the product (because they are not making it). They leech off the rents that they gained decades ago. There is no future for them.
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