Slashdot Mirror
Elsevier Going After Authors Sharing Their Own Papers
David Gerard writes "Elsevier, in final desperation mode, is going after authors sharing their own papers online. Academia.edu has told several researchers that Elsevier 'is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.' This is the sounds of a boycott biting."
I agree that sharing these papers online is the right thing to do, but then maybe they shouldn't sign a contract giving up the right to do it?
the authors are trying to do what now? it isn't clear at all.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Let the SOPA supporting scumbag organization die a quick death. It could not have been sooner.
Why do these researchers transfer ALL copyrights, instead of just giving a non-exclusive copyright?
Why not just put it on their institutional web server, and submit the link to google? I never
saw a university that didn't make such a web server available to Faculty and even Students.
A boycott can't come soon enough.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
From the article:
Do scholarly publishers really need to be reminded that “publish” means “make public”? Yes. Yes, they do.
You need to be reminded that all publishers got into the business to make money. That's why they call it a business. Their sole reason for existing is to charge you for the "privilege" of taking your ideas and selling them on paper (or online, these days) for you. It is endemic to their particular set of services.
Can the global economy survive without publishers of any kind? I don't know. Does it need to learn to do so? Absolutely.
I'm surprised authors would agree to terms not allowing them to share articles with others in their field and journalists.
Once upon a time, scientific print magazines were the only way to "get the word out." That died over a decade back.
Either those publishers get a new business model which adds value to the papers they "print" or they will die, just like Kodak no more 'paper' prints.
A new business model could easily be searching and retrieving all the world's scientific or medical or whatever literature and providing that as a service.
These academics are eager to obtain the status that publication in a journal is seen to convey. It is good for their career, and they make valuable social connections with influential gatekeepers. We are told that publication in a journal means that a competent authority has verified or at least pondered the research.
Turns out that this is all bullshit, and that the only people who benefit are the publishing houses and the gatekeepers. Academics are spineless or they would have eschewed this worthless system years ago. They simply don't want to risk their careers by rebelling against the journals, because often times the people on the tenure review boards are also working for the journals.
Ironically, the very purpose of these journals (vetting and verifying) seems broken as people get fake, non-reproducible research published and therefor accepted as fact all the time.
Something smells in the ivory tower. It started smelling decades ago, when supra-geniuses suggested that schools be run more like businesses. Deliberate subversion or just lots of stupid brilliant academics in a circle jerk, blinded by each others' jizz?
I can't think of a better way to destroy your product than to annoy the people who create and deliver to you (at zero price) the basic ingredient to the product you sell.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I work at a big national laboratory that is funded by the US government.
Naturally the government needs to allocate limited funds among their various laboratories, each of which has more ideas for things to do than there is funding.
In order to avoid corruption / favoritism (remember total we are talking billions of dollars), the government wants a quantifiable way to evaluate the performance of the laboratories in order to help determine how to best distribute the available funds.
One of the metrics they have picked is number of publications in "high impact" journals. (its not easy to think of better quantifiable metrics).
Most of the high impact journals are the old private journals like Physical Review, or Nature.
So, if the scientists refuse to publish in these journals, the laboratory looks worse, and will tend to lose funds. This will direct money away from the best labs.
Of course publishing in high impact journals also helps the scientists' careers - and the same sort of arguments apply.
The journals of course are businesses and quite reasonably want to stay in business and make a profit.
Sadly I don't have a good idea for a solution.
"...You Might Have to Take It Down." http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865
If you are a government employee and you submit a paper, instead of assigning the copyright, you send them some sort of standard form informing them that since the work was done by the government, it is not copyrightable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government
What is an academic journal without any papers? Academics should have Elsevier over the barrel begging for some lube but its the other way around?
Scientific publication is how science proceeds. It's how scientists communicate. Some countries and organizations encourage that better than others. When I find a paper that's paywalled, I know there's a good chance I may be able to find a similar paper from the UK or elsewhere where "publication" is seen as a means for scientists to communicate, rather than to get rich selling their papers. Scientists who publish in paywalled-only journals may find they aren't communicating as well as those who are able to be more open with their results. This could negatively impact their careers. This is not the same as the mechanism of nonscientific publications where making money from the reader for the author is the primary goal. There's a conflict of interest here and I'm afraid it doesn't bode well for the scientific journals. They are no longer the most effective and lowest cost means od disseminating scientific information. The observation of the "Kodak moment" is an apt one.
I have published a paper through Elsevier when I was working on my PhD. At least the contract I signed with them states that I retain the right to distribute the papers if I so choose, for example, on my own website.
Of course, if the distrubution happens through a third party...that might be a different matter.
I work in an area where most of the top journals are owned by Elsevier. Also most of my publications are with Elsevier and I'm on several editorial boards for Elsevier journals.. I've been thinking of resigning from editorial boards on Elsevier journals and starting new arxiv based journals because of the cost of journals. This breaks the camel's back. Elsevier can bite me.
cartoon of ELSEVIER SHOOTING ITSELF IN THE FACE wearing King Caunute clothing.
http://kmccready.wordpress.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-shoots-itself-in-the-face-again/
work in progress
Authors are still allowed to post their own work. They are only not allowed to publish the final version that has been edited by Elsevier. Publishing anything short of the final version is completely acceptable. Most authors simply post the pre-print version of their work and this is close enough that you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the final version and the preprint.
This policy is the same as the one offered by Springer and ACM and does not limit the authors or the spread of science in any way.
Elsevier does issue takedown notices from time to time when the final version of the published journal articles has been, often inadvertently, posted.
There are many other good options for authors who want to share their article. They can share the final published version of the article with colleagues, use it for internal teaching and training, and at conferences or meetings. Any author who publishes in an Elsevier journal can also post and share other versions of their article, following some simple guidelines that vary by the version of the article to be shared. And of course the final published journal article can be shared whenever an author publishes open access with us.
There are plenty of other reasons to boycott Elsevier and other publishers, but this is definitely not one of the reasons.
How about this for a possible solution? 1) The researchers should publish everything on a website and make it freely available. 2) The website should allow anyone to read, comment and rate the papers - however they must use their real identities to comment. The comments and ratings would be weighted based on the reputation of the commenter which would be calcuated from previous comments and the ratings of their papers. The journals could still have a business because they could review the papers themselves. They could select papers which they that think are interesting and timely. They could then purchase the right to print the research off the researchers and publish them in a nicely laid out magazine complete with editors comments which they could sell to Universities. It would be in their interest to have good quality and interesting papers. Grants could be given based on the ratings / comments that your work receives and also which journal selects and publishs your work. This system would have benefits over the existing journal system by: 1) Allow complete transparency 2) Allow papers to be retracted or corrected. 3) Allow "you might also like" functionality. 4) Encourage public discuss of papers. Personally, I think it is really said that the acedemics can't sort this out.
"Every-von Vould Be Better Off Publishink Else-vier"
Koans and fables for the software engineer
One thing I was unable to ascertain from the article was whether Elsevier was going after authors who share the preprint version of their paper, or the one that is typeset by Elsevier. I have published in Elsevier journals before, and I send the preprint to arxiv.org where it will be permanently available for free. Then, after they accept it for publication, they send a PDF of the article typeset as it will appear in the journal, which is the same content, but laid out more professionally. When signing over the copyright, I signed a non-exclusive right to Elsevier, meaning I retained the right to distribute the preprint version of the paper. (This is required as the research was funded by the U.S. government.) I do not have the right, however, to publicly redistribute the Elsevier version of the paper. (Although I don't think they mind my sharing it privately with colleagues).
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Or the Chronicle, at least: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/posting-your-latest-article-you-might-have-to-take-it-down/48865
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This is the fault of the Schools. The Schools pressure academics to publish, and the only publishing outlet is often Elsevier.
The Schools need to bind all of their academics to these contractual terms:
(1) The School reserves the right to openly publish all work of its author-professors for no money.
(2) The School designates the author-professor of the work as its agent for such open publishing.
(3) The School will never ever second guess any decision made by the agent/author-professor's regarding any open publishing decisions that the agent/author-professor makes.
(4) This agreement does not limit the author-professor's ability to profit from his or her work in any way whatsoever.
This would solve the problem.
Why wouldn't this work?
This is complete flame bait. Here is a link to what Elsevier allows authors to do with their articles: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-responsibilities#author-posting . The article asserts that posting to your own website is a violation of the agreement; note that Elsevier explicitly states that this is allowed. Posting the submitted version to preprint servers (e.g. arxiv.org) is explicitly allowed. What you can't do is post to some third party for-profit website, which is apparently how they view this academia.edu place. Given that they have an "about" page bragging about their investors, and they have a CEO, it does not seem far fetched to conclude that this academia.edu is gaining commercially from your posting the article, which is an explicit violation of the agreement with the publisher.
So to me, this is a non-story. Disclosure: I have no love for Elsevier, but I have published with them in the past and will again in the future (we junior faculty don't have the luxury of taking principled stands).
I guess we'll just have to publish Elsevier! (I'll see myself out)
When a corporation is executed for causing the deaths of real people, then we might talk about corporate personhood.
In fact, when a corporation causes the deaths of hundreds, or even thousands of people, the corporation is protected.
Union Carbide seems to be doing quite well, despite major disasters such as this one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
next_ghost gave you the essential details. Fact is, there is no benefit to society if you are permitted to keep your works secret. There is no benefit to society for "protecting" your "rights" for any extended period of time.
You are merely permitted those exclusive rights for a short period, as an incentive for you to produce more works that might benefit society. If you fail to capitalize on your ideas within five or ten years, certainly within fifteen years, then your idea really wasn't worth much.
No one in history has ever had an idea or discovered new knowledge that was worth a lifetime of luxury.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
See the following. This isn't the only case of this, or the first but a representative case of things to come I hope:
http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2001/sigirFall01Letters.html
Many journals (Elsevier even) now have an "open publication model" if you're willing to pay them $2-$3K up front to cover costs. Some other open journals have a similar model. The cost for libraries to subscribe to journals as an institution is massive. If funds were instead allocated to paying basic fees for editing in lieu of subscription costs, this would be circumvented. One problem is older stuff stuck behind paywalls.
In any case, the tide will turn. Publishing companies must evolve if they hope to avoid being a tiny footnote in history 50 years from now. (Assuming there's space in the margin)
I'm assuming that with a name like Anonymous Coward, you may not even be human. It CERTAINLY doesn't sound like a French name!
You do state that your research is funded by corporations. But, what about your education? Which corporations paid for your education? Or, like the rest of us, did you suck at the public teat while being educated?
Your holier-than-thou attitude has the credibility of a priest caught in the act with a naked little boy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
If you really want to fix the copyright mess, the only way is to get rid of copyright completely and replace it with [compulsory licensing].
This is already the law for a few specific uses of works, such as recording cover versions of musical works.
And of course zero revenue means zero cut to be paid.
And therein lies the difference: producers of "premium" works would BAWW that distribution without charge "cheapens" their works.
What "short period"? The Supreme Court ruled in Eldred v. Ashcroft that a bill widely denounced as "perpetual copyright on the installment plan" did not violate "for limited Times" in the Copyright Clause.
Mr. Rockefeller,
Our paramount concern is indeed to maintain the quality and integrity of the scientific record. Today's journals act as central
gatekeepers, but they are just one component in a holographic network of control. We have many other means apart from t
he journals to channel scientific research and activity into acceptable avenues of endeavor. When the situation warrants it,
we can easily withdraw tenure and escalate with a number of measures to bring about marginalization and elimination. It would
very well be feasible to maintain control over research even in the case of a decentralized scenario. Wikipedia is a great
success and validates the patterns of control we would then establish. While we are not critically threatened by this situation
I suggest we put a stop to these developments immediately. Just because our controls are resilient does not mean we would be
wise to ignore when they are attacked.
The most compelling reason to intercede and is that we are facing an bottom to top culture change initiated by a few rebellious
characters in the community. Today they are only lashing out against the journals but if this is allowed to succeed what if further
controls are neutralized? I strongly suggest to dissuade the responsible parties from continuing to agitate further before they gain
further traction.
Mr. Cog
Physical Review is published by the APS http://www.aps.org/about/ which "is a non-profit membership organization". I feel much better about such publishers than I feel about Elsevier.
mic key mou se
In 2002 Elsevier published a fake peer-reviewed journal, "The Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine," as a means of hawking products for Merck & Co. It was published sporadically for three years.
Last year they lobbied to revoke the NIH guidelines which require publicly-funded research to be made freely available after some delay.
Not only are they greedy, they are unprincipled. They have lost my faith and my sympathy.
This seems like a really good opportunity for Google. They should start running their own journals. They make the rules of the game fair. They would likely get massive support if they did it. They would just need a large PR campaign.
When the spokesman had this question put to him he pretty much dropped the ball.
Ok. I get why people submit articles to these journals.
But what I don't get is why people edit and review for these journals for free.
Many mathematicians are refusing to do it for Elsevier, in the Boycott Elsevier movement, and it has been having an impact.
I see this perspective - 'no one forced you to publish with them' etc - voiced in some comments here. I appreciate that many of us need such fantasies of individual sovereignty to even get out of bed in the morning, this doesn't apply to academia. Most people have no choice practically of where the top journals in their fields are. They could theoretically publish elsewhere, only not to be read the very few peers there are to begin with, or lose a chance at tenure, placement, etc.
I work at a big national laboratory that is funded by the US government.
[...]
Sadly I don't have a good idea for a solution.
Socialism.
Given the number of papers written by just US government funded researchers, it seems that there would be sufficient numbers to easily fill up government funded journals in all the major research areas. (Phys, chem, geo, bio/med, psych/soc, and a bunch for engineering.) Since the govt holds the purse-strings, they can, with the stroke of a pen, require that all government funded research papers are published first in the official govt run journals. Publish those journals for free electronically, with paper copies at cost of materials/distribution. And scientists/depts/agencies/etc can then still distribute their own material as they see fit in addition.
Given the number of government funded researchers in the world, would expand nicely into best-of "International" versions of these journals. And universities should quickly opt in, especially when so much research in major universities comes from government funding, so will be bound by the new rule anyway. And once you've got all the world's government and university researchers... Elsevier and co are already dead.
["Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds.
The expropriators are expropriated." - Das Capital]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Authors want to get paid
Authors want to make sure their research gets read
Pick one or the other. Or self publish.
This thread is hilarious if you use GreaseMonkey to change each instance of Elsevier to Elrentier.
If you dont and read it straight, then its very sad that the rentier business model (IP trolling, patent trolling, etc) is such viscous immorality.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
I think this needs updating.
That was the point of my first response.
Actually, you're the one that's full of crap. Depends on the field to a certain extent but most scientists who publish in pay journals these days are greasy pole climbers and chances are they're not particularly good scientists. A good scientist wants to communicate and publishing in anything paywalled these days is going to be worse communication than publishing in an open access journal.
The extensive anonymous shilling that's going on with this story is just one more example of Elseviers' lack of ethics. They can die in a fire.
I was at the recent Elsevier Epidemics 4 conference (a good conference by the way, they've discussed many important things and highlighted a lot of important work), and they noted that despite growing attendance over the last few years, they've received fewer and fewer submissions to their Epidemics journal, despite it being Open Access. I suspect the boycott is indeed starting to bite.
Does the author own the rights in the first place? In most places the funding body owns copywright for your work.
I understand that some governments have those open access terms for things they pay for but that still doesnt answer the question of who owns the copywright.
I've signed a document saying that the university owns the rights to my research (I guess its the same for US funded research) and that means when I publish I sign those rights away to some private company.
Do I have the right to give the intellectual property of my funding body (Govt, NSF, NIH, CNRS, University or whatever) away to the publisher?
Does that mean that every time a researcher publishes something the funding body gives his/her work away to the publisher?
They retract the Seralini study for being "inconclusive" even though that is NOT grounds for retraction. The 3 reasons to retract a study were not met so they did it for the study being "inconclusive"? Since when has that been a criteria for retraction?
Not that I agree with the results of that study but the line in the retraction statement "the results presented (while not incorrect) are inconclusive" is TOTAL BS!
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2187010/scientists_pledge_to_boycott_elsevier.html
“This arbitrary, groundless retraction of a published, thoroughly peer-reviewed paper is without precedent in the history of scientific publishing, and raises grave concerns over the integrity and impartiality of science,” more than 100 signatories wrote in a petition to Elsevier. The group said it will no longer publish, purchase, or review articles in Elsevier publications unless the retraction is reversed.
...opening up their research to the public BEFORE submitting it for publication to a publisher like Elsevier? I know this is a naive question, and I'm not posing it to make a point.
As I understand it, study authors generally don't make a profit from selling the results of their studies (they've been paid for their time in doing the research), so it seems to me they would have nothing to lose from making those results publicly available for free (i.e. public domain) prior to journal publication. In this way, an author would render the "copyright transfer" mentioned in this article meaningless, since the work is no longer copyrightable; as such, they could subsequently re-post it wherever they liked. No?
Subscribe to Slashdot for full access:
$199
[Subscribe]
ReadCube Access*
preview pdf
*printing and sharing restrictions apply
Purchase comment full text and PDF:
$32
[Buy Now]
Already a subscriber? Log in now or Register for online access.
Additional access options:
Use a document delivery service | Login via Athens | Purchase a site license | Institutional access
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Elsevier may have enough clout with take-down notices to 3rd-party service providers (and might be able to weather the backlash blizzard that will follow) -- but not with institutions self-archiving their own research output. I take this as yet another cue to push 100% for immediate institutional deposit mandates and the Button from all institutions and funders. Since 2004 Elsevier formally recognizes their authors' right to do immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving on their institutional website. And even if they ever do try to rescind that, closed-access deposit is immune to take-down notices. (But I don't think Elsevier will dare arouse that global backlash by rescinding its 9-year policy of endorsing unembargoed Green OA -- they will instead try to hope that they can either bluff authors off with their empty-double-talk about "systematicity" and "voluntariness" or buy their institutions off by sweetening their publication deal on condition they don't mandate Green OA) See: http://j.mp/OAngelic
Seems that according to the law this falls right onto racketeering... will be nice to see what happens when the FBI gets inside Elseviers pants...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racket_%28crime%29