It all seems so innocuous: authors research attitudes toward Sci-Hub, authors write article, authors submit article to well-respected journal, journal accepts article, journal posts early preprint of article, authors discuss article at major professional conference. So far, so perfectly normal. Then the Association for American Publishers got involved, touching off a descent into phantasmagorical bizarrerie.

No, really, the Loon is having significant difficulty cudgeling her birdbrain into some vague understanding of this Streisand-Effect–inviting gaffe.

The basic story is simple enough even for the Loon’s birdbrain: AAP sent one author’s library dean (the top of the author’s workplace reporting chain) a letter objecting to the author’s purported remarks at the conference session. To his everlasting credit, library dean Roman Kochan fired back a delightfully intransigent reply, and there the matter remains for now.

The Loon has so many questions about why the AAP thought this was a good idea. So many!

1. Why did the AAP decide to twist its collective knickers about something as ephemeral as an offhand conference remark?
2. Why did the AAP think it could successfully muzzle a librarian over an offhand conference remark?
3. Why did the AAP think its behavior would not go public? If it did think its behavior would go public and simply didn’t care, why didn’t it care?
4. In what world do the risks entailed by one librarian’s offhand conference remark outbalance the Streisand-related risks of an attempted silencing?
5. What is the AAP so afraid of?

Answers the Loon has none. Hypotheses, perhaps one or two.

Questions two and three appear related. The tattle-to-the-big-boss tactic is an ancient well-honed anti-librarian silencing tool in the content-vendor toolbox; the Loon has both dealt with it herself and heard any number of instances from other librarians. This is such an old, well-used tool that the Loon must surmise that it has been known to work. All the more credit to Kochan that it did not work this time! Library administrators, kindly take note of Kochan’s strategy here: you properly defend your people from the tattle-to-the-big-boss tactic by shutting it right down, in public whenever possible.

Also worth noting with respect to the danger of public disclosure of the attempted silencing: few librarians can expect their local faculty and administrators to defend them in any way whatever. This contributes no little to why tattle-to-the-big-boss tends to work. Faculty and higher-education administrators: defend your librarians, please; you do no one any favors by throwing them to the vendor wolves.

The best answer the Loon has to the first and fifth questions derives from the one conference remark the AAP saw fit to quote directly: “Try it [Sci-Hub], you’ll like it.” The Loon must guess from this that the AAP greatly fears the remark is true, for values of “you” that include academic librarians but go well beyond them.

The Loon, not herself a Sci-Hub user (nor is her Boring Alter Ego, in case anyone cares) ergo not possessed of a good sense of Sci-Hub’s usability (especially in its largely-underground state), cannot judge the aptness of such a fear. She does believe that Sci-Hub will have to be quite remarkably usable to achieve significant userbase gains—“cross/leap the chasm,” in innovation-speak—among United States academe, much of which is not especially tech- or identifier-savvy. (Possibly-useful study: how much of academe knows what a DOI is and how to find one for a given article? The Loon cynically hypothesizes a rather large knowledge gap outside the hard sciences.)

Why might the AAP fear librarians specifically? Because academic librarians have a quiet but not at all minor impact on the literature-related research tools academe uses. Academic librarians teach, demonstrate, recommend, even sometimes advocate for research tools—and since much of this work is even more face-to-face and ephemeral than offhand conference remarks tend to be in these days of conference video, the only impact AAP can realistically have on it is making Sci-Hub feel too radioactive for librarians to mention. The Loon does not think the djinn can be stuffed back in its bottle this way, but at this early date, she supposes she understands why the AAP might think so.

(The Loon can neither confirm nor deny that librarians use or recommend Sci-Hub. Indeed, not being a reference or instruction librarian herself, she would not witness such behavior.)

Another concern AAP might have involves the effect of Sci-Hub on usage of library-licensed content. Significant drops in usage via libraries could both spur and justify library cancellations, or decisions not to purchase. Neither the AAP nor libraries would be on solid ground recommending or performing analysis of local Sci-Hub data to justify collection-development decisions. For the AAP, this would appear to legitimize its much-loathed enemy. For libraries, it would acknowledge dubiously-legal behavior among the library’s patron base, inviting ugly lawsuits against the larger institution and potentially some of its faculty. No self-respecting library would want to throw faculty to the content-vendor wolves.

Question four? That the Loon simply cannot fathom. If the AAP’s goal is keeping the Sci-Hub djinn in its bottle, why on earth invoke Streisand?

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