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Sci-Hub 'Pirate Bay For Scientists' Sued by American Chemical Society Over Cloned Site (ibtimes.co.uk)
The American Chemistry Society (ACS) is now suing Sci-Hub, the so-called "Pirate Bay for Scientists," over copyright infringement and counterfeiting, and is asking the courts to grant an injunction against the website in the US. From a report: Following the news that academic publisher Elsevier won a legal judgement of $15m in damages against Sci-Hub for allowing people to illegally download peer-reviewed academic papers for free, the world's largest scientific society ACS has filed its own lawsuit in the state of Virginia against the website. ACS is complaining that in addition to making hundreds of thousands of research papers owned by the society freely available, Sci-Hub has also cloned its website and is infringing its trademarks by operating two almost-identical replicas of the ACS website at pubs.acs.org.sci-hub.cc and acs.org.secure.sci-hub.cc.
There are absolutely a lot of reforms that need to happen with scientific journals. However, in the case of scientific publications, a significant amount of that information may be available freely in other places, such as conference proceedings that are freely available online. Preprints and even recorded presentations are often posted online and made freely available. At least one professional society I know of makes all publications freely available from closed access journals after three years.
The bigger issue, IMO, is the Bayh-Dole Act, which I find far more outrageous. This allows universities to patent research from federally-funded research, with the only requirement that the federal government be free to use the work without paying royalties. These patents may then be auctioned off by the universities and bought up by patent trolls.
I'd definitely like to see some requirement that closed access journals only remain closed for a limited amount of time. If federal awards require that published papers be open access after a certain amount of time, journals will change their policies rather than lose those papers altogether. However, this should also be done alongside a repeal of the Bayh-Dole Act.
It isn't.
At least, for the American research papers. Most of those are produced in part or in whole by academics who are at academic institutions that are funded by the government. Works by the government automatically go into the public domain except for certain, very specific circumstances (e.g. they're born classified). They are typically published along with their claimed academic affiliation and produced as part of their work obligations (professors are expected to do three things: teaching, research, and service, and this is research). Therefore, these are the works of public employees, and by extension government employees, and should be put in the public domain.
This of course does not get into the gross problems of copyright law in general, including (but far from limited to) the fact that, as-is, it's stealing en masse from the public by choking off the public domain. This is a blatant violation of the spirit of the Constitutional basis for intellectual property, to an extent so gross it that the "stealing" done by copyright infringement is basically chump change, no matter how much they whine about the "thieves," who are in fact legally not thieves of any kind. But research papers, at least those produced by most American academics, are an especially egregious example.
How many researchers are going to drop ACS membership because of this?