Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Content organization is key. And different research disciplines have different practices, different artifacts related to the article, different readership.
We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv which all serve the same broad purpose, but specialised to math/physics/etc; biology; medicine. Then you have several national and institutional archives that are tailored to the needs of those groups. Etc. etc.
It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.
You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough.
My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
> But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?
Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances).
And to extend my thought from prior comment:
> Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?
Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
> I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.
There are more than 20 already (more like 2000) when you start counting national/university-level preprint servers. As I said, Google Scholar already indexes all of these sites, with many nice features.
Personally I'm very fonf of exploring the two "citation light cones" emerging from one articles - those cited by the article (past) and those citing the article (future).
> Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.
I think you're absolutely correct about this. But what I'm proposing (many repositories, indexed by search engines, together giving complete coverage) is exactly like that. A single archive, Sci-Hub style, is more like what Google is trying to do with AMP.
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