Conversation

People used to say academic publishers were smarter than the music industry of the 90s, but sometimes you have to wonder. There's no simple personal subscription because it's not a big enough market, but they're losing more by making bootlegging the only option. 🤷

It took me a whole year to get them just to put up an email address that patients & caregivers can email - patientaccess@elsevier.com - and that's for just one publisher.

Andy Matuschak

Right—if there were a Spotify or Netflix option, I'd buy it!

Why do scientists tend to prefer PDF documents over HTML when reading scientific journals? And what...

There have been many attempts -

@readcube

@kopernio etc - but it's hard to compete with the UX of "just gimme the PDF"

quora.com

Answer (1 of 40): For me, there is one primary reason that I prefer the PDF versions of scientific documents: PDFs have less clutter They certainly don't have to, but since publishers apply the...

Phil Gooch

@Phil_Gooch

I thought Kopernio was 'just gimme the PDF'!

If you're an "entitled user". All these smart kids like

@ArtirKel

just want a legit way to read papers.

Andy Matuschak

:) I think an even better job-to-be-done mindset to adopt would be Spotify / Netflix's. Those platforms didn't win over piracy because they offer a legit way to do the thing—they're usually straight-up a better experience than pirating, even accounting for the marginal cost!

Andy Matuschak

There's lots of room on that end, I think. Dealing with Sci-Hub and juggling the PDFs extracted from it is unpleasant. Not nearly as unpleasant as Napster-ing MP3s, but unpleasant enough, I think.