I wouldn't count on that, could lead to the reverse, Elsevier coming to terms with the threat and getting serious. If the worlds best (and wealthiest biggest-spending) research institutions are willing to go this route, Elsevier is gonna be thinking, uh oh we're in trouble, better bring out the big guns.
The tricky thing is that it's often _authors themselves_ who willingly share their stuff on "pirate" sites, and Elsevier wants to avoid at all costs the academic authors realizing they have different interests and goals than Elsevier.
Elsevier is in a tough spot in the long-term, despite their crazy profit-margins today -- and we all want it to keep getting tougher and tougher. But if they think they're going down, they're going to start lashing out...
Finally, sci-hub is accessible via .onion through Tor. Maybe that's not a viable access method for the general public, but the sort of people who read a lot of research articles can jump through the hoop of setting up Tor Browser if that's what they need to keep using sci-hub.
Have you done or read much UX analysis with academics? They do _not_ tend to be adepts at things like tor browser. Not even in "hard-science" disciplines. Some are, some aren't.
They don't want to jump through any hoops at all, they see getting/finding articles as a necessary evil, mostly to get citations to put in papers. They are busy, and have no time for any extra hoops, and aren't really interested in learning new tools for accessing articles. In fact that's WHY they are using sci-hub, simply because it's the quickest lowest barrier way to get the stuff, without having to learn any special tools.
I'm not sure either what bigger guns Elsevier has, but they'll try to figure it out. They have not yet tried to go against _authors_ for sharing the articles they wrote, but Elsevier has copyright or exclusive license to distribute. Or against individual academics for consuming pirated articles. (You know the emails/letters you get if you're torrenting a movie from piratebay without a VPN or what have you? Nobody has ever sent one to an academic for sharing or downloading an article... yet).
I can see that applying to sites like researchgate, but AFAICT there's no way for an individual (author or not) to upload a missing paper to sci-hub. If the paper isn't there already, looking for it triggers an automatic retrieval-and-storage process that relies on contributed institutional logins. You can't just choose as an individual to upload a currently-missing paper. The watermarking on various papers could tie them back to institutions -- and in some cases to individuals, with the institution's cooperation -- but even the watermarking would be easy enough to strip out from the PDF if sci-hub needed to. I've done it before.
Elsevier won't know whether individuals downloaded anything from sci-hub without network operator cooperation. Since it's not P2P there's no public traffic that third parties can use to tie individuals to the site.
That is surely a violation of several different usage agreements.
> Elsevier won't know whether individuals downloaded anything from sci-hub without network operator cooperation.
Per perhaps _institutional_ cooperation, from the institutions that those logins belong to. Elsevier could try to compel that as part of those institutions contracts.
Certainly. Institutions don't hate this as much as publishers, but it endangers institutions' access to publisher content and there are some who will work with publishers to find violators.
That said, it may still be pretty hard to track if sci-hub's backend retrieval process that uses institutional accounts was written with care.
I think that sci-hub may already be removing watermarks from papers now. I know that I've seen watermarked papers there before ("Downloaded from XYZ University at yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss"). I just tried retrieving several recent papers in Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley journals from sci-hub. None of them showed watermarks.
If I understand correctly, Elsevier only has (shared) copyright and the exclusive license on the published version of the paper, not on the pre-review version.
I wonder if the entire UC system going offline from Elsevier access is enough to stop other researchers from submitting to their journals. Probably not initially, but I know that many of my colleagues avoid submitting to journals that they know their peers don't read.
They can and presumably will keep submitting to Elsevier journals. UC just won't pay for licenses to access those journals.
If UC tried to tell faculty which journals they were or were not allowed to submit to, that would be a LOT more controversial to them. I mean, this _could_ have been controversial too, but that would be even more so. If this actual decision wasn't controversial among faculty, my guess is it's because they're all using sci-hub anyway.
The policy which resulted in it—UC’s push for open access for public-funded research, and Elsevier’s unwillingness to allow open access on terms UC was willing to accept—implies that, should the breach not be healed, there will eventually be a problem for at least some subset of UC researchers publishing in Elsevier journals.
What sort of a problem, what do you mean?
Someone else pointed out that a UC Office of Scholarly Communication page from while negotiations were ongoing reassured faculty that:
> No matter what happens, UC authors retain the right to publish in the journal of their choice.
> By providing article processing charge (APC) support through the UC Libraries as well as an opt-out option, UC is working hard to ensure that authors have maximum flexibility in determining where and how they want to publish.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190209202821/https://osc.unive...
If they try to start telling faculty where they can or can't publish, faculty are gonna be really mad. I think UC is trying to figure out how to advance their financial and business agenda here _without_ making faculty mad, which is why they were reassuring faculty that these negotiations would not impact their right to publish in the journals of their choice.
In general, professors trying to get tenure will publish wherever they can the quickest to give them the most prestige, it's a minority (or well-established professors with tenure) who are going to take any moral or political considerations into account. "publish or perish" is for real, these folks are scrambling for it.
It is not an oversight that the particular announcement in the OP doesn't even _mention_ publishing.
But sure, UCLA even asking professors to consider that is a good step, and probably scares Elsevier. I'm in favor of it. I just wouldn't count on it quickly having an immediate effect on it's own. It could be part of a slow trend though.
Now, if UC takes the money they're saving from not paying Elseiver, and spends it on organizing and setting up and supporting some open access journals, figuring out how to get the right people involved to get the new journals prestige, that could help the trend...
UC already have an OA journal publishing platform: escholarship.org
UC Press have an open access books program, Luminos: https://www.ucpress.edu/openaccess
UC Davis & LA participate in the TOME open access books project: https://www.arl.org/focus-areas/scholarly-communication/towa...
finally there's the UC open access policies for published research articles from 2013/2015 to be made open access on escholarship.org: http://uc-oa.info
What is also needed is for more journals to be founded or defect. Elsevier's big subscribers can exert some leverage, but Elsevier's strategy has been to lock down their control of publishing in entire fields, meaning that you may not have much alternative.
Even if it is, it's nowhere near as good as scihub.
For a hard-to-find article not really available anywhere else, that's pretty neat.
For something you could just get on sci-hub? Nah.