Publishers Take ResearchGate To Court, Seek Removal of Millions of Papers (sciencemag.org)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Scholarly publishing giants Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have filed a lawsuit in Germany against ResearchGate, a popular academic networking site, alleging copyright infringement on a mass scale. The move comes after a larger group of publishers became dissatisfied with ResearchGate's response to a request to alter its article-sharing practices. ResearchGate, a for-profit firm based in Berlin, Germany, which was founded in 2008, is one of the largest social networking sites aimed at the academic community. It claims more than 13 million users, who can use their personal pages to upload and share a wide range of material, including published papers, book chapters and meeting presentations.

Yesterday, a group of five publishers -- ACS, Elsevier, Brill, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer -- announced that ResearchGate had rejected the association's proposal. Instead, the group, which calls itself the "Coalition for Responsible Sharing," said in a October 5th statement that ResearchGate suggested publishers should send the company formal notices, called "takedown notices," asking it to remove content that breaches copyright. The five publishers will be sending takedown notices, according to the group. But the coalition also alleges that ResearchGate is illicitly making as many as 7 million copyrighted articles freely available, and that the company's "business model depends on the distribution of these in-copyright articles to generate traffic to its site, which is then commercialized through the sale of targeted advertising." The coalition also states that sending millions of takedown notices "is not a viable long-term solution, given the current and future scale of infringement Sending large numbers of takedown notices on an ongoing basis will prove highly disruptive to the research community." As a result, two coalition members -- ACS and Elsevier -- have opted to go to court to try to force ResearchGate's hand.

Comments

Research on the public dime

[bradley13]

Any research performed at a public university, or funded by any sort of government grant, should be public domain. Has anyone ever tried to push that through in court? It seems to me (IANAL) that it must be a valid argument, and it would invalidate the vast majority of the publisher's copyrights.

On top of that, the authors of an article should retain the copyright, rather than signing it over to the publishers. How did that ever get started, anyway?

ResearchGate is a fine enough site, but I do wish it were not commercial. It really ought to be some sort of co-operative amongst universities.

Re:Research on the public dime

[inking]

Nobody is stopping a researcher from publishing his articles in open access journals. It won't give them as much cred as publishing in Nature or another high impact factor journal though, which would obviously be against their economic interests. There is nothing to go to court over here. If anything, you could lobby to push through a legislation that would mandate that all research from public grants is published in open access journals, but good luck with that one.

Re:Research on the public dime

[biggaijin]

I agree completely. The publishers have a crappy business model. There is no reason for the public not to have free access to the results of research funded with public money.

Re:Research on the public dime

[gweihir]

I fully agree. Funding research with public money and then not publishing with free access or, worse, patenting the results is just one thing: Stealing the money from the public. Many researchers have a similar opinion, and while they are forced into the greedy and stupid publishing system, you can often find a nice technical report or the like that may just have a few more typos by just by googeling the title of a paper behind a paywall.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

In Schapper v. Foley, 667 F2d 102 (1981), the court ruled that the language of federal copyright law clearly allows "copyright in works prepared under Government contract or grant." OMB Circular A-110: "Uniform Administrative Requirements for Grants and Agreements with Institutions of Higher Education, Hospitals, and Other Non-Profit Organizations," also clearly specifies that "The recipient may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was purchased, under an award."

You might also want to look at the Bayh-Dole act. It's about patents on inventions, not copyrights on publications, but it clearly states that people who receive government grants for their research own the intellectual property that results from the research.

Authors sign over copyright to publishers because the publishers give them a choice: Sign over the copyright and publish in our journal for free, or keep the copyright and pay us $2000 to publish in our journal. Authors often feel that the copyright for their article is worth less than $2000, so they choose to hand over the copyright instead of the money.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Goldsmith]

One reason this doesn't get pushed more, legally, is that there are a lot of other terms in the grant contracts that the universities really don't want enforced. The IP generated under a grant is also supposed to be owned by the government and publicly available. The facilities and equipment funded under a grant are also supposed to be public property. We'll get to that fight eventually, but the university lobby is now larger than the defense contractor lobby, so that's going to be a difficult fight.

The kind of researcher driven co-operative websites that you're wishing for do exist. Their user interfaces are not good and they have no search engine optimization (so don't show up on the first few pages when you search for something).

The simplest solution is that, if you're a scientist, you should only publish in open access journals or you should publish white papers either on something like arxiv ahead of peer review to establish copyright and an open access source before the journal publishes (they hate this, but tough for them). I am a scientist, and that is what I do. I work at a small company, so I also have a marketer who formats papers nicely and makes sure our open access white papers show up high in search rankings. My work is not publicly funded, but it's just smart to do this anyway!

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU currently pushes for this very hard, research output is to become entirely public domain and has to be made available in freely available repositories. However, local legislation of member states is behind and currently, at some places, in a limbo. France has enacted a law that essentially works against publishers in such cases, allowing researchers to make their articles available to anyone without fearing copyright infringement lawsuits. But in countries like Portugal, the situation is currently schizophrenic. We're obliged by our funding authorities to make our research available as public domain, but at the same time evaluation criteria remain classical, based on publications in major closed journals by Springer, Elsevier, de Gryuter, Oxford Journals, etc. The Portuguese state and universities currently do not protect individual researchers from legal repercussions. As a result, we currently have a choice between jeopardizing our research funding or destroying our career. Most people choose the former. However, in the long run, existing EU directives will ensure that all research conducted in the EU will be available to everyone for free - in our case under the creative commons non-commercial attribution license.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, NIH funding leads to your manuscripts being deposited in PMC where it is publicly available. The only catch is that journals have some leeway in how long they can take to upload (a year I think).

Re:Research on the public dime

[mrbester]

That might be an informative comment, but as the filing is in Germany, it is ultimately irrelevant what some court in Delaware decided 36 years ago.

Re: Research on the public dime

[Zero__Kelvin]

Oh, you and your publishing of facts where anyone can read them! Don't you know that is what caused this whole mess to begin with?! :-)

Re: Research on the public dime

[hackwrench]

Property is theft.

Re: Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this comes back to bite these anti-education leaches extremely hard and that they are charged for all costs of the defense, then sued into oblivion.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

The issues is that the journals own the copyright to the version of the research that is published. They do not own copyright on the data, results, or the paper, just the layout. Also, open access is very expensive to pay for the publication. Researchers are free to put up versions of their work that are not identical to what the publishing companies release. No one does.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, politics are being used to give grants only if they publish in the small list of certified publishers; The gouverment is giving public intelectual property to a few mafia gangs.

Re: Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

Researchers are free to put up versions of their work that are not identical to what the publishing companies release. No one does.

Almost all scientific articles are also published freely on arXiv and this has been the norm for at least fifteen years. It's usually the version people actually read.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

Research cannot be copyrighted in any case. A specific creative output can be; in most jurisdictions, that is most definitely the copyright of the author (not the publisher, not the government and not public domain -- the US is the only place that things can go immediately into the public domain, everywhere else requires the author to die).

The author then licences or assigns that copyright to the journal who turn poorly formatted, mostly illegible and broken English into something that other researchers might want to read. It is only this final version that the published has spent considerably money on that is actually copyright of the journal. The version before that is (usually) copyright of the authors and can be distribute through places like arXiv... you probably don't want to be reading the un-peer-reviewed, full-of-typos version, however,

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

"Researchers are free to put up versions of their work that are not identical to what the publishing companies release. No one does."
Yes, they do. The University that I worked with has a Preprint Service. Preprints are sort of First Drafts, meant for informal communication, before submission for Peer Review and eventual Publication. But anybody can get a written copy for the the cost of the printing, or download it free from the Servers. (Not all of the old Papers have been scanned, but pretty much everything back to 1928 is available.)
Some of the Preprints are quite detailed; it is the job of the Editors to later condense them and clear up any grammatical and spelling mistakes. And some are just Junk; the quality of the Research simply isn't good enough. But even here they serve value, as records of Experiments that went wrong, and why.
The research done there is generally Publicly Funded, and the University asserts the actual Preprint Copyrights, with a disclaimer that the results are tentative; at this point they are not in the Public Domain. It is up to the Researchers to negotiate Publishing Copyrights, almost universally assigning them to the Publishers. That's the way it works, unfortunately. But every once in a while, a bunch of Preprints are bundled up, indexed, and sent off to the Library Of Congress, and into Public Domain. This usually happens when a Senior Researcher dies... and nobody has glanced at their preprints in years. (The LOC has over 1200 Cartons of Seaborg's notes, Preprints, Papers, etc. for example. With the exception of some still Classified material, and his own published books, everything that Seaborg wrote is in the Public Domain, and it will take decades to sort it all out.)
And that is the way it should work.

Re:Research on the public dime

[Anonymous Coward]

Open-access journals require the authors to pay, the cost being usually quite high.

Shit is about to hit the fan:

[blind biker]

Basically every researcher I work with, and I, share all our articles on ResearchGate. There WILL be a backlash.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[93 Escort Wagon]

So stop publishing your papers in journals owned or controlled by Elsevier, Wiley, ACS, Brill, and Wolters Kluwer - problem solved.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Presence Eternal]

This is one of those "everyone acting rationally screws everyone over" situations which are so very common in improperly regulated capitalism. 800 researchers wanted.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

ResearchGate doesn't count as "papers published in journals" when your tenure review comes up.

That is the only thing keeping these publishers alive: archaic methods of measuring researcher/professorial efficiency.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Insanity Defense]

Presumably the researchers who created the papers own the copyright. So what standing do the PUBLISHERS of these journals to sue over copyrights they don't own?

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

You could post your papers legally on ResearchGate if you would pay the open-access fee to the publisher when you choose to publish in their journal, or you could choose to publish in a fully open-access journal.

I don't understand people who are given the choice and voluntarily sign away the right to freely distribute their work because they're too cheap to pay the open-access fee, but then act all high and mighty about their right to freely distribute the work after they signed a contract in which they explicitly promised not to do so.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[ChumpusRex2003]

It is generally a requirement of the authors to sign over the copyright to the publisher as a condition of acceptance for publication, unless you pay the "open access" fee. The authors can, of course, retain the manuscript, but in general they lose the right to distribute the manuscript or republish it. Exact terms and conditions vary, but in general, the publishers have more control over post-peer review versions of the manuscript, as technically, they have had some of the creative input.

For example, all but the strictest journals tend to permit personal redistribution of the original submission manuscript, before any recommendations from peer-review have been incorporated. Whereas the reproduction of post-peer review accepted manuscripts tends not to be permitted, except via the publisher. Some journals even go so far as to state that republication of accepted papers is strictly forbidden, and that if they discover republication (e.g. to a pre-print server, e.g. arxiv), then they reserve the right to issue a public retraction of the paper stating scientific misconduct by redundant publication.

Researchgate has been sailing pretty close to the wind. They have been advising authors of papers that their papers may be republishable, under the agreements with the journal publishers. E.g. some journals permit the authors to distribute the text and figures of the accepted manuscript (but not the final typeset document i.e. journal PDF file) on a "personal" basis such as "on an author's personal web site". RG have been actively encouraging authors to do this, on the basis that their RG profile page is a "personal web site"; every time I publish a paper, I get a ton of spam from RG begging me to upload a copy. I've always regarded this as somewhat dubious legally, as it is quite clear that the main purpose of RG is precisely to facilitate this sort of sharing. Indeed, I'm somewhat surprised that it has taken this long for the publishers to begin taking it seriously.

Journals vary in their policies towards open access. Some journals demand substantial "open access" fees, $2000-$5000 per paper. Other journals are often more progressive, and charge much smaller fees $500-750, and even if you don't pay, they release the papers under a CC license 12 months after first publication. There is also the issue of predatory new open access journals, which are quite happy to take the open access fees upfront, but offer no real peer review and will publish any nonsense.

While major funded research will often come with a condition that the papers should be open access, and there will be provision in the funding to pay the fees, not all research is done like this. I have done several projects on small grants coming from educational endowments (e.g. $2500 to pay for research materials) which is supplemented by myself and other researchers volunteering their time for free - but in such cases, there is no funding to pay the fees.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

People outside academia really need to stop upvoting these kind of ignorant comments. The academic job market and the evaluation of researchers is based entirely on the quality and number of publications in major, well-established journals based on the journals' reputations that have been built up over a hundred of years. If you publish in a few public domain journals only, your career will end very soon. We are trying to set up public domain journals, but they do not have the same reputation yet and are far outnumbered by commercial journals, and this will not change anytime soon. Elsevier and Springer have taken over and 'bought' previously independent journals for many decades.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[93 Escort Wagon]

People outside academia really need to stop upvoting these kind of ignorant comments.

I am in academia, although no longer involved with research. And you’re missing the point.

Many people here are talking about these publishers as if they add no value to the system. However, fair or not, they currently are responsible for at least some of the points a faculty member earns towards tenure. As such, it is logical they protect their brand - so preeminent journals like Nature have rules regarding what you can and cannot do with your paper if it’s been accepted for publication.

If you don’t like it, work to change the system. But don’t expect there won’t be some pain involved.

And don’t pretend that peer review isn’t important.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[UBfusion]

Copyright varies according to each publisher's T&Cs. The usual model is that the content of the paper generally remains the author's copyright, while the particular format (i.e. the typesetting done by the journals, the pagination, formatting, their logos etc.) belongs to the journals. This is not just a relic from the days the journals existed only on printed format, when even photocopying the articles was in principle an infringement. Having typeset almost 20 conference proceedings volumes myself as well as several science books, I know first hand that the work is a complete PITA and that the journals should be somehow compensated. But I strongly object against the publishing houses acting like patent trolls. The academic publishing activity is a self-sustaining system where everybody needs everybody else: without researchers' output the journals wouldn't exist, and without journals the researchers would lose the main metric of their work which ensures their academic progress. This is a circle that has reached an equilibrium almost a century ago, and has significant inertia to be changed by isolated cases of court trials.

I'm not against readers paying some reasonable fee (of course not the USD 50-100 per artice I have encountered), even if the research is publicly funded. The publishers should somehow be compensated, not just because they are businesses and employ people that have to be paid, but mainly because they coordinate the peer-reviewing process, which is vital for the progress of science, as vital as as Sourgeforge or Github is to the IT community.

Several solutions exist to ensure publishers and researchers survive the digital age. For example, the universities in my country have formed an alliance and they collectively made reasonable deals with several publishers, so that all our (public) universities, including more than a hundred thousand students have access to the most important titles. I consider it a fair deal.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Stephan Schulz]

Having typeset almost 20 conference proceedings volumes myself as well as several science books, I know first hand that the work is a complete PITA and that the journals should be somehow compensated.

That very much depends on the field and the technical expertise of the authors. In computer science, nearly all conferences and journals expect LaTeX generated PDF, often "camera ready". Some publishers want the LaTeX sources and do some minor editing, more often than not introducing errors. My impression is that this is a desperate attempt to add some value, but it rarely improves the papers. The main business propositions of publishers used to be the production of printed papers from typewritten manuscripts. At least in computer science, that model has evaporated. There is some small value in actual printing, and significant value in quality control. That, however, is mostly done by academic editors and reviewers working for free, and pissed if they then can't freely distribute their own papers.

To be fair, some publishers try to offer new kinds of value - e.g. the preparation of different formats, and long-term organised archival and indexing. And at least Springer has increasingly lenient copyright forms (and has never complained when I added exceptions to the older forms).

Re: Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

The publishers who are stealing copyrights are a problem that we as society at large and that academia needs to resolve ASAP. They are stealing from us all.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[segwonk]

"ResearchGate"
Now that even the slightest scandal gets the suffix "-gate" in the press, it's hard to take an actual company with that for a name seriously.

Re: Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice that the universities have access... Completely fucking over freelancers and small businesses who need access to research just as much. If only to see how much further we are than the universities.

Re:Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

Having typeset almost 20 conference proceedings volumes myself as well as several science books, I know first hand that the work is a complete PITA and that the journals should be somehow compensated.

Journals do very little actual typesetting on a per-article basis. They almost always require authors to submit TeX files compatible with the journal's style files, making the author do most of the work (if any) to get the manuscript in the desired form.

Re: Shit is about to hit the fan:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice that the universities have access... Completely fucking over freelancers and small businesses who need access to research just as much.

What would freelancers and small businesses do with scientific articles?

If only to see how much further we are than the universities.

Cute.

I for one welcome German ignorance.

[tlambert]

I for one welcome German ignorance.

So sure, take it down .. but only in Germany.

German courts really need to start getting their crap together as it regards copyright law; they screwed up Spotify, they screwed up YouTube.

I guess they haven't ran out of copyright law related things to screw up more on.

Re:I for one welcome German ignorance.

[bobstreo]

I for one welcome German ignorance.

So sure, take it down .. but only in Germany.

German courts really need to start getting their crap together as it regards copyright law; they screwed up Spotify, they screwed up YouTube.

I guess they haven't ran out of copyright law related things to screw up more on.

Better idea, just bloxk all access from Germany to the site. Open another site just for German IP's, hosted in Sweden, for a much larger amount of money for access.

Re:I for one welcome German ignorance.

[klingens]

There is no "german ignorance". ResearchGate is a german company.
Admin Name: Ijad Madisch
Admin Organization: ResearchGATE GmbH
Admin Street: Invalidenstr. 115
Admin City: Berlin

"GmBH" meaining limited company. Those publishers have to sue to company behind the social network, which happens to be in Germany.

Re:I for one welcome German ignorance.

[tlambert]

"GmBH" meaining limited company. Those publishers have to sue to company behind the social network, which happens to be in Germany.

Sure.

And if the case looks to be going badly, they offshore it immediately, the same way we did the cryptographic work in FreeBSD in the early 1990's, when the U.S. government was trying to reclassify DES (DES, for God's sake!) as a munition under ITAR.

And then all the best cryptographic expertise moved out of the U.S., to other countries, like South Africa.

Net loss for the U.S..

If the Germans prevail in this -- it shouldn't have been allowed into court in the first place, so make no bones about it: the German courts want this as much as Elsevier, to enable copyright rent seeking on publicly funded research -- Net loss for Germany.

Re:I for one welcome German ignorance.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had read even only the summary, you would have seen that the case has just been filed. There is no ruling yet.

Re:I for one welcome German ignorance.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the Germans prevail in this -- it shouldn't have been allowed into court in the first place, so make no bones about it: the German courts want this as much as Elsevier, to enable copyright rent seeking on publicly funded research -- Net loss for Germany.

ResearchGate are 'the Germans'. The publishers who have taken ResearchGate to court are Dutch and American.

Publisher seppuku!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hundreds of thousands of researchers post their scholarship on ResearchGate, and in the day and age of the Internet, the publishers are increasingly a net burden. They make millions off of papers that, by and large, the researchers don't see a dime of, and in general those people who post papers on ResearchGate are the researchers themselves.

As a result, the people who make the things - for free - that these companies sell are being told they have no rights over their own work, in an age where those same companies have been more trouble than they're worth for over a decade now.

So, in short, it's nice to see the overpriced academic publishers commit suicide all at once. Very civic-minded of them.
.

As a researcher...

[Anonymous Coward]

These dinosaurs are a bigger impediment to research than they are a help to it. Their peer review isnt special. Down with journal publishers!

fuck you, plebs, that's why

[Reverend Green]

Publishers say: scientific knowledge is a privilege of wealth. For ordinary working people, knowledge is AGAINST DUH LAW.

Now, what law will the kourt make on this decision?

research and publishers both will lose

[e**(i pi)-1]

It is a difficult battle. The publishers see revenues drop as globally libraries start to scale down on purchasing expensive journals. On the other hand, having no access to an article because the libraries don't have them any more locally hurts research. One of the outcomes of this battle is that scientists in the western world will have less access to information. It could well be that the publishers will win a Pyrrhic victory, one which will destroy them eventually: it will drive more users to pirate sites or similar services outside the reach of the courts. There are parallels how work wages and publishing industries have got under pressure. It is of course a consequence of globalisation and the web. Regulating this through court might relieve the publishers but the battle will harm the research output. The long term effect will be that these publishers will be bypassed and eventually become obsolete. I wonder how the reputation of Elsevier will change through this court battle. There are 13 million uses of research gate. And they are mostly customers. Elsevier and ACS now their own customer base to court. Maybe, both in journalism where publicly funded information channels should be available, also in research, there should be more publicly funded outlets a la ArXiv, but where peer reviewed research appears. Having free access to news information should be "service public". Having free access to research information is important for the prosperity of research communities. But to convince the public to pay taxes to finance such things will be even harder. We don't want to pay even for crumbling bridges, health care or schools any more.

Re:research and publishers both will lose

[umafuckit]

It is a difficult battle. The publishers see revenues drop as globally libraries start to scale down on purchasing expensive journals. On the other hand, having no access to an article because the libraries don't have them any more locally hurts research. One of the outcomes of this battle is that scientists in the western world will have less access to information.

Not a problem. Who goes to the library? It's all available on-line. Increasingly research papers are free to all via PubMed. Either because the journal they're published in is open access or because the funding body (e.g. the Wellcome Trust) mandates that all articles produced from research it funds must be open access regardless of where they are published (an extra fee is paid). For example, this randomly chosen paper is published in Nature Neuroscience (which isn't open access) but can be read by anyone. If none of that works, you generally have good odds of finding a full paper via Google just by searching for the title plus "PDF". If even that doesn't work, you can e-mail the author and they will send you the PDF.

Re:research and publishers both will lose

[bzipitidoo]

A big problem is that the law holds back libraries and tech.

Public libraries ought to be mostly digital by now. Going digital solves all kinds of issues. And it's a huge enhancement. Don't have to travel to and from a branch to get a book, just surf the website and download books. There'd be no more need to return a book, no more late fines, no having to wait because all copies are checked out. And that's the least of it. Books would be far more searchable, no need for those massive card files, Reader's Guide, and such. An entire bookshelf worth of print can fit onto one hard drive the size of a paperback book, or on a flash drive that's smaller than 2 fingers-- depending on how wastefully the information is encoded of course.

But libraries aren't allowed to really go digital, thanks to copyright law. They have websites which may offer a fraction of their catalog for downloading, and that's about it. Instead, we have to rely on ResearchGate, Sci-Hub, arXiv, figshare, dryad (datadryad), Orcid, scholar.google, and even direct contact with authors to beg for a copy, for access to current research. Weak.

Copyright law is not as valuable as fully digital public libraries. If these academic publishers push too hard and succeed, the rest of us may move faster to hugely reform or outright abolish copyright to shut them and their rent seeking schemes down permanently.

Re:research and publishers both will lose

[DanielRavenNest]

Universities just need to cut out the middlemen, and produce their own journals, using the money they now spend on expensive subscriptions. Academics already do most of the work (authoring, reviewing, editing), what's left is mostly administrative work, which library staff are able to handle.

Re:research and publishers both will lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Your randomly chosen paper illustrates part of the problem: that is the "author" version not the published version. You don't know what that paper is... is that the version *before* peer review? Is it full of mistakes? Is it so full of typos that it is painful to read (that the publisher will fix up as part of their editorial process)? The only way of knowing whether that version is legit or not is to have the version from the publisher... Catch 22.

In this particular case, there are very few differences, but I can only tell you that because I have the non-free version.

Pubic Research Results Should Be Free

[Anonymous Coward]

You do research at a publicly funded university.
You do research using government grant money.
You write a paper without getting paid for it.
You pay to go to a conference.
You referee and edit papers without getting paid for it.

Then, IEEE, Elsiver, etc.take your paper and copyright. They charge high rents to read the paper so nobody can read the paper except the privileged few.

Universities pay the highest rents to IEEE/Elsiver. What a scam.

Re:Pubic Research Results Should Be Free

[PPH]

Then, IEEE, Elsiver, etc.take your paper and copyright.

They don't actually take it. The authors sign over the copyright in order to get the paper 'published'. So they can get academic credit for it. What is this publishing? It includes peer review and all the effort required to get the paper physically published.

OK, not all peer review is that bad. Not quite. But physical publishing is pretty much a thing of the past, what with web sites and software that can automatically water mark authors' submissions with the journal's logo. Logically, the publishing business should be commoditized, reducing prices. But I imagine that there are some behind-the-scenes cash flows that keep traditional journal publication a requisite step in scholarly recognition.

Re:Pubic Research Results Should Be Free

[Anonymous Coward]

ITYM "publicly under-funded university"... and the solution to copyright lockdown of papers has been for the author to pay yet more money for an open access licence on a manuscript... yay, yet more expense for the authors, required by a bunch of people sitting off on the sidelines sniping in and who don't actually have any skin in the game beyond their high moral outrage.

The Pirate Publisher.

[Anonymous Coward]

Berne Convention

It's going to be a war in gray muddy water

[UBfusion]

The claims of the publishers (advised by their lawyers of course) are a bit exaggerated. For those not familiar with ResearchGate (RG), it is primarily a database for academics a researchers and not a general purpose social media site like e.g. Google+ or LinkedIn. Each member can enter a profile, their domains of expertise, links to their published papers, and upload published and non-published papers.

Researchers having the slightest clue about what copyright is according to journals, and the legal trouble they might get into, take special care and upload versions of their paper which are not copyrighted (usually meaning not the versions typeset by the journals and containing their logos), like the pdf export of their WinWord or LaTeX manuscripts. Of course, most researchers prefer the easy way and upload the pdf versions as distributed by the publishers to their digital journal subscribers, an action which can be considered and probably is a copyright infringement. So the whole case has similarities with the war against torrent sites, the difference being that the allegedly infringing materials are uploaded by their respective authors.

In addition, the papers are not "freely available" as claimed, but accessible only to members of RG. This detail of course may not be important from a legal standpoint, since theoretically anybody can become a member. However, the common meaning of "freely available" is free as in Slashdot, where all content is available to everybody, no subscription required.

Finally, I have not seen any advertisement in any of the 1-2 emails per week I get from RG and I don't see any browsing their website. Just go to their front page https://www.researchgate.net/ and you will see no ads, only quotes by newspapers and magazines praising their work. Can this be considered as advertisement? Not unless ResearchGate is actually being paid by Forbes, New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters or Science Magazine to use their quotes.

It's going to be a long legal battle involving all the known and unknown legal gray areas and precedents, and unfortunately RG is probably going to be treated worse than Kim DotCom. Sad days for Science and more generally, the human quest for knowledge. Let's hope the Universities, Colleges and Research Centers worldwide (who do profit from the free publicity from RG) will take a side and not prefer to stay neutral.

Re:It's going to be a war in gray muddy water

[blind biker]

Excellent post. In fact, the best in the whole thread, so far. Just one comment:

Let's hope the Universities, Colleges and Research Centers worldwide (who do profit from the free publicity from RG) will take a side and not prefer to stay neutral.

I have little hope this would happen, though it should.

Elsevier hunh

[HiThere]

If Elsevier is on one side, justice is probably on the other.
Actually, if Elsevier is on one side, truth is also likely to be on the other. It has had a fine line of "company journals", where researchers chosen by the company acted as the reviewers for all articles..without that being stated.

Re:Elsevier hunh

[Anonymous Coward]

Elsevier is the bad guy, huh? Hey, why don't you do it? For free of course. I wonder how many of these "oh (whine, whine) it should be free" comments were written by someone who has actually started a (successful and thriving) company and employed more than themselves, their mom and a couple of stoned-out buddies on the sofa in the basement of their parents house? I'd bet zero. Fewer and fewer peers are willing to peer review. More and more PhDs are being dumped out into an already saturated market (Oh! we need more women in science! I mean really?) (does awful working conditions, awful pay, awful benefits, awful hours, and zero job security sound good to you?) More and more junk journals, more requirements (both regulatory and statistical), and less time to do the work. The question isn't, it seems to me, whether the system will survive (it won't), the question is whether Science will survive the creative destruction we're seeing. It's not a given.

Re:Elsevier hunh

[Anonymous Coward]

Fewer and fewer peers are willing to work for free for evil parasitic publishers.

FTFY

Tit for Tat

[magusxxx]

"The coalition also states that sending millions of takedown notices "is not a viable long-term solution, given the current and future scale of infringement Sending large numbers of takedown notices on an ongoing basis will prove highly disruptive to the research community."

But as an individual if my research is stolen it's okay if I have to do it?

You're in a lab...grow a pair.

Sci-Hub Thank You

[Anonymous Coward]

Sci-Hub lead the way good or bad.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's properly called "The Coalition for Greedy, Overpriced" access to useful Research from Uncompensated Authors, who's work they pay pennies for and charge large sums to other researchers.

Translation from the spin-ese:

[thomst]

TFS quotes the "Coalition for Responsible Sharing" thusly:

Sending large numbers of takedown notices on an ongoing basis will prove highly disruptive to the research community.

Translation: "If we have to send takedown notices directly to all the AUTHORS of these papers to which we claim copyright, we risk making them so resentful of us that they'll finally be sufficiently motivated to stop letting us publish their work. We can't risk killing our golden geese, so we want the courts to close down the site they're using to share their own papers, instead.

Because, profit ...

ResearchGate? Sounds interesting! I'll check it ou

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya heerd 'bout this lady cald Bar-bruh Straysand? Aparantly she done gave some pick-a-shures of 'ers a lot mor exsposhure after she tried to hide 'em by goin to court!
Na, dey were of 'er private residence, whyya ask?

If ya don't know wat im talking bout, google[verb] duh Streisand Effect.

Irony...

[Anonymous Coward]

A coalition of predatory corporations claiming to be suing a "predatory corporation."