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."

Comments

Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You can't possibly infringe on copyright by sharing your own work. (At least not where I live. People in some countries may be fucked, though.)

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Hatta]

Many of these journals require copyright assignment, at which point it's not your own work anymore. Just one more reason the traditional scientific publishing model needs to die a quick death.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[MickyTheIdiot]

I've said this before and I will say it again... corporations should be legally prohibited from owning copyrights. They should be legally limited to leasing copyrights from real persons. Copyrights were meant to make MORE material open, not to lock up material so that a corporate entity and gather rents without end.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Aaden42]

Leasing doesn’t fix this problem. There’s no reason Slimy Pub Corp, Inc. can’t require authors to sign an exclusive 100 year agreement to lease the copyright only to them, their successors, and assigns. Perfectly valid under (US at least) contract law, and still gives the same end result where authors can no longer self-publish or otherwise distribute their own work. They still “own” the copyright, but they’ve contracted away their rights to do anything with it.

I don’t know enough about the academic publishing situation to know why authors would agree to sign away self publishing rights, but presumably there’s some value to using Elsevier’s services, even if the “value” is only in the sense that authors are required to do it in order to be “published” and advance their careers.

Requiring copyright ownership tied to the lifetime of a single real person would help against the destruction of the public domain (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and Disney’s perpetual ownership of what’s become intwined in common US culture), but it doesn’t prevent copyright owners from being compelled to sign away their rights in situations such as this one.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[the_povinator]

I had this problem, nearly a year ago, and as a result had to move my website from pages.google.com to my self-hosted website at www.danielpovey.com (I explain the situation there).

What happened is I made available online a preprint of a paper that I had submitted to an Elsevier journal... this is explicitly allowed by the terms you agree to (the preprint is the draft version that you submit to the journal, before the reviewers suggest changes). Anyway, Elsevier's people submitted a DMCA request to Google, even though what I was doing was 100% allowed, and this caused Google to take down my whole homepage. Google restored my website about a week later, after I submitted a counter-notification or whatever they call it, but by that time I'd decided to move to self-hosting.

So yes, fuck Elsevier.

Dan

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Many of these journals require copyright assignment, at which point it's not your own work anymore.

I think this is exactly the situation for which the "void where prohibited by law" phrase was invented.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[mspohr]

The people who actually did the work and wrote the manual or designed the project.
Corporations are not people. Corporations cannot create any "works". People create works. People should own their creations.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations pretty much are equivalent to people under US law. They have many of the same rights including the right to donate to politicians....

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[davecb]

In countries like Canada, authors have "moral rights" under copyright law, specifically including the right to be be named as the author of a work, even if it is paid for by another. These cannot be waived, and in some specific cases can only be assigned.

One might declare a non-assignable moral right to make available one's work, including for purposes of showing a "portfolio" of one's work, or making scholarly works available to other scholars.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Hatta]

Everyone should be legally prohibited from owning copyrights. As in copyright should be abolished entirely. If I own an item, it's my right to do with it what I see fit. Use as intended, destroy, reverse engineer, or copy.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[trackedvehicle]

Many of these journals require copyright assignment, at which point it's not your own work anymore. Just one more reason the traditional scientific publishing model needs to die a quick death.

Many? More like... all of them! As a scientist, I am fucking sick of copyrights. Maybe they're useful for some (but certainly not all) artists, but for scientists they are nothing but a way for big media (and Elsevier, Nature Publishing etc. are big media) to wrestle control of the scientist's work away from the scientist him/herself.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[David Gerard]

But Alicia Wise, Director of Access & Policy at Elsevier, says that couldn't possibly have happened!

I've called it to her attention. Possibly she will even respond! Who knows?

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[spire3661]

You can do all those things under current copyright. What you can't do, and what copyright is truly concerned with is DISTRIBUTION to others.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[xaxa]

I don’t know enough about the academic publishing situation to know why authors would agree to sign away self publishing rights, but presumably there’s some value to using Elsevier’s services, even if the “value” is only in the sense that authors are required to do it in order to be “published” and advance their careers.

I may have misinterpreted, but that sounds like you're suggesting scientists only publish work for selfish reasons (for their own career). Publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal is part of the process which shows the research is reasonable, and -- in theory -- puts it somewhere where it can be accessed by other scientists, validated or contested, and cited. It's often a requirement of receiving a grant, including from the/a government.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Oligonicella]

The people who actually did the work and wrote the manual or designed the project.

Of course, they'll return their salaries? That's the reason they were paid, you know, to produce something for someone else. Do you also think that an artist should be able to come along later and remove a painting or sculpture because it's "theirs" because they created it? If the answer is no because someone paid them for the work, you have a problem with your original logic. .

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[ultranova]

You seem to think a corporation is a sentient being or something.

In a sense, it is. A corporation is an interacting organization of information-handling units, and your brain is an interacting organization of information-handling units. The difference is that employees have much greater internal than external bandwidth, and don't exist solely in the context of the corporation; nonetheless, a corporation typically has its own culture - it's own personality - separate from any one individual.

This is true of other organizations too, and is the reason why it makes sense to be talking about "China" and "USA" like they were living things. Sure, every action they actually take is taken by someone on their behalf, but there's an entity authorizing that, dispersed in little bits and pieces into millions of humans. It could be described as a lifeform inhabiting the noosphere, and since the capacity to produce said sphere of culture is very new and unoptimized, evolutionarily speaking, the entity is pretty primitive yet. Of course, as we continue to evolve, so do our shadows, and it might be an interesting experiment to make those pieces better able to communicate and see if that might result in true self-awareness.

Too desperate to get published

[icebike]

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.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[wuerz]

Publish or perish. As an academic your worth is measured (among other things) by the number of publications. In an effort to keep up the stream of publications out of one's lab, people agree to anything the publishers demand.

Of course one could also negotiate less onerous terms, but that is hard when the publisher prints my paper with absolutely no (publishing-related) cost to me.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do these researchers transfer ALL copyrights, instead of just giving a non-exclusive copyright?

Because it costs $1500. I just published a paper with Elsevier and they extened their offer to publish my paper as open access.

That said, the copyright that I transfered is not that bad. I can publish a prepublication version on my personal website (that is, without the journal formatting), as well as preprint versions on the arXiv. I need to put the information on where the paper was published, which seems fair enough. Anyone looking for it can find it.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Chris Mattern]

Why do these researchers transfer ALL copyrights, instead of just giving a non-exclusive copyright?

Because those are the terms of the journal. Don't transfer all the copyrights, don't get published.

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.

Because that doesn't count. Research has to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (or at a peer-reviewed conference) or it doesn't exist. You don't get credit for it, it never gets cited or used by other research, it doesn't become part of the literature.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Publishing isn't just the act of getting your paper out there in research. It's the act of a review committee determining that your paper is of high enough quality to be presented through their Journal. The Journals are more or less ranked in prestige, which is related to how difficult it is to get your paper published in that Journal.

So academic publishing is part review service, and part information distribution. The way the review service has been funded in the past is that they charge quite a bit to obtain the Journal's distribution. Libraries typically fund this directly, or occasionally the individual or laboratory. A yearly subscription to a key journal might cost more than a thousand dollars.

As such, researchers are asked to give away publishing rights; otherwise, the journal could be undercut from it's revenue stream quite easily, via self-publishing or second-source publishing. This would lead to validation in the prestigious publication, and no funding going to that publication due to everyone buying access to the paper through other markets.

Typically an author knows this, and there is an informal means of working around this in academia when a person who can't reasonably afford the journal needs a copy of the paper. They contact the original author, and if you can reach them (typically not possible unless you have a connection), and they are willing, they will give you a copy of the paper.

This publication is deciding to protect it's revenue stream by going after it's authors for violating their agreements to not distribute the same material by a different means. Provided that giving away a copy of the paper is interpreted as redistribution, the original author is in the wrong; however, it is an unwise approach to punish authors, as it might tip the current balance of costs and benefits of publication in a prestigious journal to the side where other less prestigious Journals with more relaxed policies might start getting all the good papers.

It's been like this for the past 30 years, this is nothing new. Getting published in Science or Nature is a resume builder, which will get you A-listed for grant money.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Hatta]

The way the review service has been funded in the past is that they charge quite a bit to obtain the Journal's distribution.

Peer review is done on a volunteer basis by other researchers in your field.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Bite The Pillow]

When the answer seems obvious, it's almost always wrong. More specifically, the words "Why not just..." should never be typed or said, because there is probably a good reason why not.

In this case, you have two options: publish in a reputable journal, or make it available elsewhere. For many reasons, lots of people choose the first. Then the choice is turn over all rights, or not. To be published, the "standard" form includes giving up those rights. They already decided to publish, so the decision to sign the form was made - probably as part of the submission process on condition of being accepted.

A simple solution would not resolve the complex issues of judging a paper's impact, awarding tenure, and piles of other aspects that are only mildly related to choosing where to publish, but are greatly impacted by it.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[Anonymous Coward]

How would ditching tenure help in this case? Professors with tenure are free from the absolute "publish or perish" mentality that requires them to churn out as many papers in high-impact journals as possible, regardless of ethical considerations. Elsevier has bought up lots of old, respectable ("high impact factor") journals, so they profit from the fact that professors are driven by shallow numerical metrics to publish in them. Tenure allows senior, experienced professors to escape the cycle, so they have the practical academic freedom to make scientifically ethical decisions to do things like boycott Elsevier journals, and devote effort pushing for better solutions --- something that would be career suicide for a short-term, conditionally-employed researcher to spend their efforts on.

Re:Too desperate to get published

[akozakie]

> Because that doesn't count. Research has to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (or at a peer-reviewed conference) or it doesn't exist.

Well... true.

> You don't get credit for it,

Yup.

> it never gets cited or used by other research, it doesn't become part of the literature.

Nope, not necessarily, depends on the field. I see more and more citations of even blog entries. Some have more citations than the best paper anyone I met personally wrote. Some "not-papers" become cornerstones of entire branches of research, although they tend to be later replaced by real papers by the same author (with nothing new in them). Note that not all publishers will even accept citations like that.

Still, these citations do not count - at least where I leave. You may be the author of the most influential text in the field in years. Your results may have been replicated by multiple peers and cited by almost everyone who matters, making you a real celebrity. However, it's not in a journal on the ministerial list. It is not indexed by the oficially endorsed database (mostly Web of Science here). It gets cited, but these citations do not appear in the database. So, your official parameters (like h-index) are unaffected. It is entirely possible to be - at the same time - one of the most influential researchers worldwide and a deadweight for your institution, lowering its total score. Also, grant proposals you submit will get lower scores, because you're "not influential enough", you're unlikely to produce anything worthwile.

So, you're basically right. You will swallow any restrictions imposed by the publisher if the journal is good enough and wants to publish your paper. Because your evaluation is not based on your real achievements - that's too subjective. It is based on artificial scoring, in which some peer-reviewed journals, mainly from the largest publishers, simply rule.

Re: wait

[robot256]

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.

Upset your suppliers, become irrelevant?

[whoever57]

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.

Re:wait

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Here is the problem

[joe_frisch]

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.

Government works aren't copyrightable..

[toonces33]

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

I thought this was allowed regardless.

[Zarhan]

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.

Re:I thought this was allowed regardless.

[PvtVoid]

Here are a couple of good resources for looking up details of publisher policies:

Sherpa
List of academic journals by preprint policy Elsevier's policies are particularly obscure, and vary from journal-to-journal. They are often explained so poorly that it's hard to tell what the policy even is.

Re:wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Withheld payments? Hilarious. That would require these contracts to actually pay the authors...

Re: wait

[Trepidity]

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.

Maybe they're shooting for a new slogan:

[QilessQi]

"Every-von Vould Be Better Off Publishink Else-vier"

Re: wait

[teslar]

It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions

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:

Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institutionâ(TM)s repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisherâ(TM)s policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted.

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.)

Re: wait

[crunchygranola]

...But this sounds like the authors made contracts with Elsevier, part of those contracts said NOT to undermine Elsevier's business partly in exchange for getting paid, and the authors violated said contract ....

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.

Re:they've got it backwards

[interkin3tic]

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.

Article is flame bait

[siwelwerd]

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).

Re:Wide Dissemination vs LockBox

[spasm]

It's not about just 'getting your work out' - it's about the fact that the university who decides whether you get tenure or post-tenure promotions still does so partially on the basis of how many publications you have in peer-reviewed journals, and how high the impact factor of those journals is. My institution literally has a tenure requirements document that says "at least 3 papers published in journals from this list of high-impact journals, or at least 5 in this other list of lower-impact journals'. So it's publish in those journals or lose your job when you fail to get tenure. So you sign whatever the journal wants you to sign if you get a paper accepted there, no matter how stupid the terms. What needs to change is universities removing journals who abuse everyone from those magic lists, so we can all safely ignore them.

Re:Wide Dissemination vs LockBox

[lorinc]

Researchers agree these terms because they have no other choice. Ok, seems nobody outside the academic gets the sense of publish or perish.
Let me tell you why I continue to send my works to Elsevier (or the others) journals, whatever they are asking in the terms and conditions.

In my country (France), to get a research position you first have to get a "qualification" which involves a threshold on the number of journal papers you have. The higher the impact factor of the journal, the better it counts. Once you have this "qualification", you can try to get a position - the system is competition based, and most of the time it is based on the number of high impact factor journal papers you have. So yeah, basically, if you try to play the cowboy before you have the position, you'll never get one.

Now, I do have such position and I could put all my stuff on arxiv. But I also have PhD students, and they want to work in the academic. if I tell them to go the open access way, they'll never get the "qualification" and the position. Thus, we chase these "important" journals (read significant impact factor), and send the articles there. As long as articles in these journals is mandatory to get a position, we have no other choice than publishing there for the students.

To my mind, the solution lies not in the hands of the researchers, by is rather a political one. If the government dictates specific recommendations that positions should be awarded to people with open bibliography, the stupid behavior of Elsevier will die. As long as no political action is taken, it will continue as it was.

Re: wait

[David Gerard]

They have.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4527505&cid=45622313

The law is wrong

[Runaway1956]

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

Re:The law is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad argument, but nice try at getting the conservative talking point across. GM would have gone bankrupt anyway. The federal government became a majority investor in the company, and part of that deal involved certain conditions. A private entity could have, and should have, done something similar but none were willing.

Part of the reason for that is that the corporate sector saw the "death" of GM as a good thing, since auto makers typically deal with unions and they saw this as a great way to get rid of more organized labor. Unfortunately, by sitting back and doing nothing, the banks and corporate sector opened themselves up to having a different kind of investor come in. This one insisted on bankruptcy, that is making capitalists lose on the risks they took investing in the company, while not screwing over labor so much in the process.

That is why conservatives hated the GM deal. It showed that investing in a company actually has risk that on occasion one has to deal with, and it didn't screw over workers as much as normal deals do. The investor class perhaps got more screwed than they might have in a private takeover, since those tend to be sweetheart deals that reward the useless as much as possible. The government tried to get private industry to do the takeover themselves and for political reasons they didn't want to and their bluff got called. Sucks to be them. GM is profitable and, as promised, the government is now getting out of that business. They really hate it when something actually works because it flies in the face of the "government is broken and everything it ever touches is a hopeless mess all the time always and forever" meme they've got going on.

This had absolutely nothing to do with an "execution" for misdeeds and is a terrible example except to get some more anti-Obama propaganda out there. If you want to criticize the man, I can think of a whole lot better and more worthy examples of doing so. Covering up the treasonous crimes of the previous administration, continuing a lot of them including NSA spying, continuing to negotiate "free trade" deals like the TPP, etc.--the list goes on.

Limited period

[Runaway1956]

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.

Re: wait

[Maow]

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.