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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?
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.
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.
The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.
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!
Short explanation:
When a paper writer contributes a document to be published by Elsevier, they sign away their own rights to the document to allow them to be published.
Most of the people that write these documents also post these documents on their own websites anyway.
In this situation, Elsevier sent a take-down notice to Academia.edu who was hosting one of these documents (that he'd posted on Academia.edu). Academia.edu sent him a letter basically saying that they felt that this was a terrible thing to do, but they had no choice.
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.
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
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.
You know, this phrase "in business to make money" is getting to be said like they are words handed down by God. They're not. Not everything needs to make money to be a worthwhile venture despite what our current dogma in the U.S. says.
Maybe as a society we should be creating some institutions that are in business to make the country or the world better, or in business to increase the sum total of knowledge. There is NOTHING that says everything has to make a profit. We are not Ferengi.
Withheld payments? Hilarious. That would require these contracts to actually pay the authors...
I wonder if this is really aimed at academia.edu rather than the authors. As far as I can tell, Elsevier hasn't (yet, at least) gone after academics posting their own papers on their own website in the traditional manner, i.e. as a PDF at www.university.edu/~jsmith/papers/smith2013bigresult.pdf.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"Every-von Vould Be Better Off Publishink Else-vier"
Koans and fables for the software engineer
They are going after the final, published versions (including Elsevier formatting and all), commercial use of accepted manuscripts, systematic distribution and the like (some of which applies to academia.edu). In other words, what you said was fair game still is - you are allowed to share the accepted manuscript with others (including on your website where Google Scholar will pick it up and render it discoverable in a matter of days, so it's not like this restricts you), you (or anyone else) just can't make money off it and you can't use their typesetting.
For the accepted manuscript version, let me just quote from Elsevier's author rights:
So you can see how academia.edu falls foul of this while your right to share your work does not.
(Some of my papers are published in Elsevier journals - they are however also all open access. In case you're wondering.)
Evidently you are unaware that Elsevier pays authors nothing for their papers! Instead, there may be page fees the author must pay to get the article published (depending on journal).
Pay nothing for the research. Pay nothing to the author. And yet, the believe they can/should own the results of the research, not just the final edited, published paper.
Sounds a bit mafia (or more precisely MAFIAA) practices.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Well, that's kind of the issue. Academics are already boycotting Elsevier. Thing is, academics are focused on research, not on publishing, so many aren't even aware of the boycott, others care less about their rights to host their own papers than they do in publishing in the highest impact journal they can. Plus, few papers are published with a single author. On my paper, I suggested we not submit there. My boss stifled a laugh. It's published with Elsevier. I occasionally get requests for it from researchers who don't have access to that journal. I guess I'm going to have to start worrying that they are undercover Elsevier agents.
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).
They have.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4527505&cid=45622313
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This claim is false: they go after preprints.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4527505&cid=45622313
I have asked Alicia Wise of Elsevier for an explanation, after her claim that they never do this.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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
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
I wonder if this is really aimed at academia.edu rather than the authors. As far as I can tell, Elsevier hasn't (yet, at least) gone after academics posting their own papers on their own website in the traditional manner, i.e. as a PDF at www.university.edu/~jsmith/papers/smith2013bigresult.pdf.
Just in case you missed this post by Danial Povey, it seems that is not the case.