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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
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