I work at a small academic database as a developer. We charge a pittance compared to what a lot of the larger players in this market do. And I'm conflicted.

We are a registered non profit, and are actively losing money. Developer costs, of which there are only two. Building costs--I also shovel snow!, marketing costs, hosting costs, and much more. We have the workload where we would benefit from a staff 3 times the size. Currently we are at 12. Years ago we had a fully functional publishing operation too.

But here is the thing. These open access places often are pay to publish. This is built into many grants today. Publishing costs. But not so much in the field I'm in. The social sciences. So sure, the result of that work should be open access. I just cannot help thinking this takes away from what you could be paying one more lab or research assistant.

a lot of these pay walled sites are struggling to survive as library budgets dwindle. Maybe there isn't much room left for the little players. Many are bought up or have folded over the last 20 years.

This is a social sciences problem, not a large player vs small player problem. At Sage, which is one of the largest social science publishers, we also lose money on social science OA publishing. We've tried for years experimenting with different APC prices and have struggled to figure out how author pays will work in the social sciences. Shoot me an email (details in profile) if you want to chat about this stuff more. It's rare to find someone with experience doing social science OA publishing on HN!

What is the unique value proposition in having your two developer team building another database?

I'm struggling to think for a good reason to have journals or databases be anything other than a PDF dump, and peer review already happens on other platforms.

Where are all those hundreds of millions of dollars going, from university subscriptions??

Simply by doing this, she has become one of the greatest single contributors to science as a whole in our era. Heroic.

She? Is there someone publicly affiliated with the project?

Yes, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

>Despite seizure of the websites as ordered by a New York district court on October 28, 2015, the site is still accessible through alternative domains as of December 2015.

So a court in the United States could seize a site just because the plaintiff was based there?

Or because the .org domain registry (PIR) is based in the US?

A little bit of both. A US citizen can sue foreign nationals in US courts, but a judgement can't be enforced unless the foreign national steps foot in the US or has a US based asset. In this case, the .org domain is controlled on US soil, so that's about all the court can do unless some crazy extradition arrangement is made or she accidentally forgets and comes to the US for a conference or something.

The US says it can seize all domains whose registrars are based in the US, so .com, .org, .net, etc are all vulnerable.

It's amazing that retaliations following this initiative would make it close to impossible to do for anyone in the United States. Kudos to her.

Yes, Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan.

Kazakh.

Actually, the surname seems to be Armenian. :-)

Attributing the correct ethnicity seems to matter a lot more outside of the US, Canada, and Commonwealth.

I got an earful (screenful?) for calling a historical ethnic Russian painter Ukrainian, just because he was born in current-day Ukraine. This all predates the current conflict, and was from someone I'd consider educated, too.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Nikola_Tesla/Nationality_...

In my experience US, Canada and Commonwealth are the ones obsessed with (positively or negatively) ethnicity and race.

Race, yes, but nobody born here asks me "where are you from?" upon first meeting, whereas I get this a lot from europeans and people from more tribal societies.

I'm an American, and I get asked "where are you from?" almost every time I meet a new person here (in America). I look very non-American and have an accent most people find hard to pin down, so I'm thinking that the question is just not posed to people who look and 'speak' very American.

Well, I'm Canadian, so we can't really compare. I look brown, but have a basically Toronto / SF accent.

Ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan.