Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.