What I read in this is that sci-hub is only a third of the solution of cutting out the middle man. The another third is a credible place for researchers to publish to. The current publishers are trying to retain a dead model. We don't really need a publisher anymore. What they do provide that I haven't seed a good solution for is visibility among peers.
Sci-hub is great to grab a paper when you already know the DOI. If you are looking for papers in a specific field you will usually end up on a publisher's site using their search engine.
If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.
Sci-hub is great to grab a paper when you already know the DOI. If you are looking for papers in a specific field you will usually end up on a publisher's site using their search engine.
If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.