Hacker News Reader

Comment by tony_cannistra | Hacker News Reader

They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy.

The article states that MIT pays $300,000 annually for individual request fees, far less than the prior contract amount.

View on HN

>They are using a service called Article Galaxy, which is just a proxy that pays for per-article access when individual users request it. MIT Libraries get the bill from Article Galaxy.

I'm surprised services like these haven't been shut down yet. IANAL, but what they're doing (ie. acting as a proxy between end-users and the publishers) seems similar to what Aereo was doing[1], which the supreme court ruled was copyright infringement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_In....

Your link is broken, should be:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_....

You missed the final period

Your link is broken too – they didn't miss anything, HN removes the final period. Solution is to %-escape it as %2E for a working link:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Cos.,_...

Why would Article Galaxy be shut down? It makes it easier for Elsevier's articles to generate revenue:

https://www.researchsolutions.com/

As other commenters have mentioned, MIT paying for articles a la carte worked out cheaper than getting all-access subscription from Elsevier. Presumably Elsevier would want to stem this sales channel so institutions would be forced to pay more.

Large corporations use Article Galaxy to manage their access to digital copies of journal articles. Such organizations don't have a history of large libraries which subscribe to every issue of a journal. Their employees won't pay for access themselves. They can't raise purchase orders which require multiple department signoffs for a $25 paper. The corporations don't want to pay hundreds of times for the same article, nor do they want to infringe and face legal risks. So they need the brokers to work the system for them.

Any individual publisher which restricted access via these brokers would face a sudden loss of revenue and a knock on effect to the prestige of their journals. If they allowed some customers to use these services but not others, the predatory nature of the model would stick out a mile to institutes and regulators.

Article Galaxy contracts with publishers to allow them to resell papers[1], they aren't depending on a shaky interpretation of copyright law to resell digital goods. Which makes it even easier for the big publishers to cut them off, or raise their rates if enough universities try to switch to pay-per-article.

[1]https://www.researchsolutions.com/about/publishers

Reply on news.ycombinator.com