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.

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.

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.
.

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.