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Elsevier Wants $15 Million In 'Piracy' Damages From Sci-Hub and Libgen (torrentfreak.com)
lbalbalba writes: Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, is demanding $15 million in damages from Sci-Hub and LibGen, who make paywalled scientific research papers freely available to the public [without permission]. A good chunk of these papers are copyrighted, many by Elsevier. Elsevier has requested a default judgment of $15 million against the defendants for their "truly egregious conduct" and "staggering" infringement. Sci-Hub's efforts are backed by many prominent scholars, who argue that tax-funded research should be accessible to everyone. Others counter that the site doesn't necessarily help the "open access" movement move forward. Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan defends her position and believes that what she does is helping millions of less privileged researchers to do their work properly by providing free access to research results.
It is due to the unfortunate tradition of basing tenure for scientists on the impact factor of the journals they publish their works in. Elsevier happens to own several high impact journals. Of course, for scientists at research universities where tenure is granted by fellow professor, a simple change of how the faculty evaluate new comers' work can eliminate most of the motivation to publish with an Elsevier journal.
It is very simple. If you want to have any career in science, you have to publish. No papers, no career. Publish or perish.
Let's say you are a researcher at a public university, you are funded by the taxpayer. You just spent one year doing research and have found out something important that you want to publish. You write a submission and send it to a publisher. Elsevier then sends your submission to a reviewer, who is typically a researcher at another university. The reviewer works for free (his payment is that he gets to read the new research before other people).
If your paper gets a positive review, then you will have to pay publication charges. Typically $ 100 to 500. Universities pay for these charges as well, they don't care much about them, because you, the taxpayer, will pick up the tab. Actually most projects come with a budget for said publication charges. honestly, when your paper gets accepted, you are so happy you wouldn't mind paying yourself. Finally your paper gets published. If you want to read a paper, you have to pay $30 for a pdf of a 2 page paper, or your university has to be a subscriber (10k/year).
You could as well upload the paper to arxiv, who will publish it for free, but free publications don't count for your publication record.
Scientific publishing is a license to print money. There is a lot of other stuff going on in the field, such as very low quality journals publishers create and then force libraries to subscribe to.
The model extends to book publications as well. If you write a research monograph (these sell for $100 to $200 each), the publisher will often pay you nothing or a few hundred dollars.
You have fundamental misunderstanding of what Elsevier does and why it does what it does. Elsevier does not pay the authors of the papers it publishes. What the authors get is access and scientific credit. For most scientists you have to publish papers to get credit and feedback from other scientists. Back before the internet Elsevier printed and bound and distributed scientific journals. They did this for papers that were approved by other scientists. Now most of this is done electronicly at a much lower cost. The editorial function of Elsevier remains. Many of the papers Elsevier publishes are actually the result government funded research. In the US government funded research papers can only be tied up for a limited time.
Similar disputes are occurring in the legal field within the US. The law can and is different in different countries. Elsevier is an expensive dinosaur which needs to change with the times.