OK, I did not realize faculty were sharing their logins that way. I think that is kind of stupid. (Having said that, I have been known to have my son, whose library has better holdings in my field than mine, get articles for me.)
Yes, to that end, we have to “market” our resources in order to communicate to faculty and other users that we have the things they demand and to ensure they get sufficient use to justify the cost. And when a resource gets low use, we cancel it. And then we hear it from the faculty. [1]
The problem on my campus is that to access an article I need to log into the campus network, then answer a 2-factor verification, then go to the library catalogue and see if we subscribe to the journal, then log into the journal via the library, then find the article. Alternately, I can search the pirate site using an author’s name and download the pdf. I still try whenever possible to follow the “legal” approach, but it is relatively rather painful.
Yeah, this is 100% the thing. SciHub has us beat six ways from Sunday in user experience terms. A not insignificant part of my job consists of brainstorming questions like, “How can we make our UX more like SciHub, except, you know, legal?”
I think a missing piece of the SciHub social equation is the invisible labor part. If people were cognizant of the unrealized costs of using SciHub they might have a second thought. I don’t know.
But a lot of the labor you mention above is from faculty opening your campus credentials to SciHub. That seems to be a different problem from faculty using SciHub.
It’s a fair point, but it’s also like saying, “It’s not like the people who buy the black market medicine are the ones actually hijacking the deliveries…”
