Elsevier Going After Authors Sharing Their Own Papers 259
David Gerard writes "Elsevier, in final desperation mode, is going after authors sharing their own papers online. Academia.edu has told several researchers that Elsevier 'is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.' This is the sounds of a boycott biting."
Re:wait (Score:5, Informative)
Short explanation:
When a paper writer contributes a document to be published by Elsevier, they sign away their own rights to the document to allow them to be published.
Most of the people that write these documents also post these documents on their own websites anyway.
In this situation, Elsevier sent a take-down notice to Academia.edu who was hosting one of these documents (that he'd posted on Academia.edu). Academia.edu sent him a letter basically saying that they felt that this was a terrible thing to do, but they had no choice.
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:5, Informative)
Publish or perish. As an academic your worth is measured (among other things) by the number of publications. In an effort to keep up the stream of publications out of one's lab, people agree to anything the publishers demand.
Of course one could also negotiate less onerous terms, but that is hard when the publisher prints my paper with absolutely no (publishing-related) cost to me.
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:5, Informative)
Why do these researchers transfer ALL copyrights, instead of just giving a non-exclusive copyright?
Because it costs $1500. I just published a paper with Elsevier and they extened their offer to publish my paper as open access.
That said, the copyright that I transfered is not that bad. I can publish a prepublication version on my personal website (that is, without the journal formatting), as well as preprint versions on the arXiv. I need to put the information on where the paper was published, which seems fair enough. Anyone looking for it can find it.
Government works aren't copyrightable.. (Score:5, Informative)
If you are a government employee and you submit a paper, instead of assigning the copyright, you send them some sort of standard form informing them that since the work was done by the government, it is not copyrightable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government [wikipedia.org]
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:5, Informative)
Because those are the terms of the journal. Don't transfer all the copyrights, don't get published.
Because that doesn't count. Research has to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (or at a peer-reviewed conference) or it doesn't exist. You don't get credit for it, it never gets cited or used by other research, it doesn't become part of the literature.
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
Many of these journals require copyright assignment, at which point it's not your own work anymore. Just one more reason the traditional scientific publishing model needs to die a quick death.
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:5, Informative)
Why do these researchers transfer ALL copyrights, instead of just giving a non-exclusive copyright?
Why not just put it on their institutional web server, and submit the link to google? I never
saw a university that didn't make such a web server available to Faculty and even Students.
A boycott can't come soon enough.
Publishing isn't just the act of getting your paper out there in research. It's the act of a review committee determining that your paper is of high enough quality to be presented through their Journal. The Journals are more or less ranked in prestige, which is related to how difficult it is to get your paper published in that Journal.
So academic publishing is part review service, and part information distribution. The way the review service has been funded in the past is that they charge quite a bit to obtain the Journal's distribution. Libraries typically fund this directly, or occasionally the individual or laboratory. A yearly subscription to a key journal might cost more than a thousand dollars.
As such, researchers are asked to give away publishing rights; otherwise, the journal could be undercut from it's revenue stream quite easily, via self-publishing or second-source publishing. This would lead to validation in the prestigious publication, and no funding going to that publication due to everyone buying access to the paper through other markets.
Typically an author knows this, and there is an informal means of working around this in academia when a person who can't reasonably afford the journal needs a copy of the paper. They contact the original author, and if you can reach them (typically not possible unless you have a connection), and they are willing, they will give you a copy of the paper.
This publication is deciding to protect it's revenue stream by going after it's authors for violating their agreements to not distribute the same material by a different means. Provided that giving away a copy of the paper is interpreted as redistribution, the original author is in the wrong; however, it is an unwise approach to punish authors, as it might tip the current balance of costs and benefits of publication in a prestigious journal to the side where other less prestigious Journals with more relaxed policies might start getting all the good papers.
It's been like this for the past 30 years, this is nothing new. Getting published in Science or Nature is a resume builder, which will get you A-listed for grant money.
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:4, Informative)
The way the review service has been funded in the past is that they charge quite a bit to obtain the Journal's distribution.
Peer review is done on a volunteer basis by other researchers in your field.
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:4, Informative)
When the answer seems obvious, it's almost always wrong. More specifically, the words "Why not just..." should never be typed or said, because there is probably a good reason why not.
In this case, you have two options: publish in a reputable journal, or make it available elsewhere. For many reasons, lots of people choose the first. Then the choice is turn over all rights, or not. To be published, the "standard" form includes giving up those rights. They already decided to publish, so the decision to sign the form was made - probably as part of the submission process on condition of being accepted.
A simple solution would not resolve the complex issues of judging a paper's impact, awarding tenure, and piles of other aspects that are only mildly related to choosing where to publish, but are greatly impacted by it.
Re:I thought this was allowed regardless. (Score:4, Informative)
Sherpa [sherpa.ac.uk]
List of academic journals by preprint policy [wikipedia.org] Elsevier's policies are particularly obscure, and vary from journal-to-journal. They are often explained so poorly that it's hard to tell what the policy even is.
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
What happened is I made available online a preprint of a paper that I had submitted to an Elsevier journal... this is explicitly allowed by the terms you agree to (the preprint is the draft version that you submit to the journal, before the reviewers suggest changes). Anyway, Elsevier's people submitted a DMCA request to Google, even though what I was doing was 100% allowed, and this caused Google to take down my whole homepage. Google restored my website about a week later, after I submitted a counter-notification or whatever they call it, but by that time I'd decided to move to self-hosting.
So yes, fuck Elsevier.
Dan
Re:Government works aren't copyrightable.. (Score:2, Informative)
If you are a government employee and you submit a paper, instead of assigning the copyright, you send them some sort of standard form informing them that since the work was done by the government, it is not copyrightable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government [wikipedia.org]
You'd think that Elsevier had heard of that already and put it at the top of their publishing agreement [elsevier.com] or something.
Re: wait (Score:5, Informative)
They are going after the final, published versions (including Elsevier formatting and all), commercial use of accepted manuscripts, systematic distribution and the like (some of which applies to academia.edu). In other words, what you said was fair game still is - you are allowed to share the accepted manuscript with others (including on your website where Google Scholar will pick it up and render it discoverable in a matter of days, so it's not like this restricts you), you (or anyone else) just can't make money off it and you can't use their typesetting.
For the accepted manuscript version, let me just quote from Elsevier's author rights [elsevier.com]:
So you can see how academia.edu falls foul of this while your right to share your work does not.
(Some of my papers are published in Elsevier journals - they are however also all open access. In case you're wondering.)
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:4, Informative)
Corporations pretty much are equivalent to people under US law. They have many of the same rights including the right to donate to politicians....
Re: wait (Score:4, Informative)
Evidently you are unaware that Elsevier pays authors nothing for their papers! Instead, there may be page fees the author must pay to get the article published (depending on journal).
Pay nothing for the research. Pay nothing to the author. And yet, the believe they can/should own the results of the research, not just the final edited, published paper.
Sounds a bit mafia (or more precisely MAFIAA) practices.
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
In countries like Canada, authors have "moral rights" under copyright law, specifically including the right to be be named as the author of a work, even if it is paid for by another. These cannot be waived, and in some specific cases can only be assigned.
One might declare a non-assignable moral right to make available one's work, including for purposes of showing a "portfolio" of one's work, or making scholarly works available to other scholars.
Article is flame bait (Score:5, Informative)
This is complete flame bait. Here is a link to what Elsevier allows authors to do with their articles: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-responsibilities#author-posting [elsevier.com] . The article asserts that posting to your own website is a violation of the agreement; note that Elsevier explicitly states that this is allowed. Posting the submitted version to preprint servers (e.g. arxiv.org) is explicitly allowed. What you can't do is post to some third party for-profit website, which is apparently how they view this academia.edu place. Given that they have an "about" page bragging about their investors, and they have a CEO, it does not seem far fetched to conclude that this academia.edu is gaining commercially from your posting the article, which is an explicit violation of the agreement with the publisher.
So to me, this is a non-story. Disclosure: I have no love for Elsevier, but I have published with them in the past and will again in the future (we junior faculty don't have the luxury of taking principled stands).
Re:Wide Dissemination vs LockBox (Score:5, Informative)
Researchers agree these terms because they have no other choice. Ok, seems nobody outside the academic gets the sense of publish or perish.
Let me tell you why I continue to send my works to Elsevier (or the others) journals, whatever they are asking in the terms and conditions.
In my country (France), to get a research position you first have to get a "qualification" which involves a threshold on the number of journal papers you have. The higher the impact factor of the journal, the better it counts. Once you have this "qualification", you can try to get a position - the system is competition based, and most of the time it is based on the number of high impact factor journal papers you have. So yeah, basically, if you try to play the cowboy before you have the position, you'll never get one.
Now, I do have such position and I could put all my stuff on arxiv. But I also have PhD students, and they want to work in the academic. if I tell them to go the open access way, they'll never get the "qualification" and the position. Thus, we chase these "important" journals (read significant impact factor), and send the articles there. As long as articles in these journals is mandatory to get a position, we have no other choice than publishing there for the students.
To my mind, the solution lies not in the hands of the researchers, by is rather a political one. If the government dictates specific recommendations that positions should be awarded to people with open bibliography, the stupid behavior of Elsevier will die. As long as no political action is taken, it will continue as it was.
Re: wait (Score:4, Informative)
They have.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4527505&cid=45622313 [slashdot.org]
Re:Too desperate to get published (Score:5, Informative)
> Because that doesn't count. Research has to be published in a peer-reviewed journal (or at a peer-reviewed conference) or it doesn't exist.
Well... true.
> You don't get credit for it,
Yup.
> it never gets cited or used by other research, it doesn't become part of the literature.
Nope, not necessarily, depends on the field. I see more and more citations of even blog entries. Some have more citations than the best paper anyone I met personally wrote. Some "not-papers" become cornerstones of entire branches of research, although they tend to be later replaced by real papers by the same author (with nothing new in them). Note that not all publishers will even accept citations like that.
Still, these citations do not count - at least where I leave. You may be the author of the most influential text in the field in years. Your results may have been replicated by multiple peers and cited by almost everyone who matters, making you a real celebrity. However, it's not in a journal on the ministerial list. It is not indexed by the oficially endorsed database (mostly Web of Science here). It gets cited, but these citations do not appear in the database. So, your official parameters (like h-index) are unaffected. It is entirely possible to be - at the same time - one of the most influential researchers worldwide and a deadweight for your institution, lowering its total score. Also, grant proposals you submit will get lower scores, because you're "not influential enough", you're unlikely to produce anything worthwile.
So, you're basically right. You will swallow any restrictions imposed by the publisher if the journal is good enough and wants to publish your paper. Because your evaluation is not based on your real achievements - that's too subjective. It is based on artificial scoring, in which some peer-reviewed journals, mainly from the largest publishers, simply rule.
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement (Score:5, Informative)
I don’t know enough about the academic publishing situation to know why authors would agree to sign away self publishing rights, but presumably there’s some value to using Elsevier’s services, even if the “value” is only in the sense that authors are required to do it in order to be “published” and advance their careers.
I may have misinterpreted, but that sounds like you're suggesting scientists only publish work for selfish reasons (for their own career). Publishing work in a peer-reviewed journal is part of the process which shows the research is reasonable, and -- in theory -- puts it somewhere where it can be accessed by other scientists, validated or contested, and cited. It's often a requirement of receiving a grant, including from the/a government.
Re: wait (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if this is really aimed at academia.edu rather than the authors. As far as I can tell, Elsevier hasn't (yet, at least) gone after academics posting their own papers on their own website in the traditional manner, i.e. as a PDF at www.university.edu/~jsmith/papers/smith2013bigresult.pdf.
Just in case you missed this post [slashdot.org] by Danial Povey [slashdot.org], it seems that is not the case.