Cenk here, I’m the guy behind the site that received the cease and desist, Citationsy (https://citationsy.com).

There’s some more information in this Twitter thread, I’m trying to keep it updated as this develops: https://twitter.com/citationsy/status/1156626811398307840

I'd love to see a norm develop where the 'authoritative link' to an article is expected to be the most open. So, if there's a closed journal and an Arxiv pre-print, Arxiv gets the link, with the journal's publication status considered 'about the article', but not the thing itself.

I think it moves us towards a clearer understanding of Academic Journal publication as peer review's 'stamp of approval', rather than the explanatory event per se. And this will make easier to move towards long-term, sustainable practices for publication and science.

A couple of silly questions:

1. How did publishers like Elsevier get started?

2. Was their value proposition true back in the day? How did it change over time?

3. How did the industry evolve?

3b. What are the barriers to entry and how did those evolve?

3c. What was the business model then and what is it now? Who are the clients (universities, I presume)? How do they pay for this (taxpayer money? If so, that's a huge clue). Who is the decision-maker regarding these purchases?

4. How is it possible that they still exist? If they don't provide value anymore, then what is it? Are people habitual creatures? Are they pressuring universities? Did they somehow get a vendor lock-in effect (can people get out)?

I'm simply trying to get why it became what it became and why it isn't dying in the slightest despite researchers trying to organize themselves a bit for open access.

Personally I'd never include Scihub into my workflow in a way that shows up in a publication. But I'm happy and amused that others do. :D

Elsevier/Mendeley also encrypt your own data on disk so you can't get it back out:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/01/23/mendeleys-encrypted-repos...

Thanks for learning about citationsy.com! I don't publish with Elsevier since the Cost of Knowledge movement. I try my best to not publish with any publisher who locks the article or who asks money from the author (gold OA). But hear me well: it is useless to blame only Elsevier. Go for the academic managers who make possible this. Or the gold OA circus. Otherwise publish with arXiv or better try to make all your work available: data, programs, etc.

Elsevier: "We promote Sci-Hub for free."

> Sci-Hub is a copyright-violating site that provides infringing access to scholarly publications that are behind paywalls. Its ethics are problematic but it’s also proving very difficult to stop.

No. The ethics of sci-hub are not problematic. The ethics of Elsevier and their gang certainly are.

I'm a bit baffled why sci-hub has generated so much controversy, yet library genesis is much less frequently discussed afaics in the anglophone internet. It seems to me that sci-hub is doing something more easily defendable than libgen. (They're related right?). The scale of libgen's copyright-violating operation and vision is staggering, it's like a free amazon for books.

A parasite continues the war against it's host.

In this case I believe it is more an issue coming from the authors of that particular article. They probably used some bibliography software that recorded the sci-hub as the address for some articles cited, although published articles are peer reviewed people rarely scrutinizes all aspects of an article that finely to pick such issues.

It may be the hangover impededing my comprehension; would someone clarify what/who D.O.I. is being commented about?

> Its ethics are problematic

I think it's ethics are spot on. it's legality on the other hand...

Cant someone challenge elsevier in court for this? Is it not possible that the judge finds elsevier's claims overreaching and create a precedent?

Why has nobody filed an anti-trust lawsuit against them?

Seems like enough universities could make a really good case for it.

Wouldn't Elsevier be able to legally link to Elsevier IP on SciHub even if you can't?

The original article at https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-link... is more informative as it gives numerous actual examples.