Elsevier Going After Authors Sharing Their Own Papers

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."

Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that sharing these papers online is the right thing to do, but then maybe they shouldn't sign a contract giving up the right to do it?

Too desperate to get published

[icebike]

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.

Re: wait

[robot256]

The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.

Upset your suppliers, become irrelevant?

[whoever57]

I can't think of a better way to destroy your product than to annoy the people who create and deliver to you (at zero price) the basic ingredient to the product you sell.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You can't possibly infringe on copyright by sharing your own work. (At least not where I live. People in some countries may be fucked, though.)

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[mspohr]

The people who actually did the work and wrote the manual or designed the project.
Corporations are not people. Corporations cannot create any "works". People create works. People should own their creations.

Re:they've got it backwards

[interkin3tic]

Well, that's kind of the issue. Academics are already boycotting Elsevier. Thing is, academics are focused on research, not on publishing, so many aren't even aware of the boycott, others care less about their rights to host their own papers than they do in publishing in the highest impact journal they can. Plus, few papers are published with a single author. On my paper, I suggested we not submit there. My boss stifled a laugh. It's published with Elsevier. I occasionally get requests for it from researchers who don't have access to that journal. I guess I'm going to have to start worrying that they are undercover Elsevier agents.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[David Gerard]

But Alicia Wise, Director of Access & Policy at Elsevier, says that couldn't possibly have happened! [svpow.com]

I've called it to her attention. Possibly she will even respond! Who knows?

Limited period

[Runaway1956]

next_ghost gave you the essential details. Fact is, there is no benefit to society if you are permitted to keep your works secret. There is no benefit to society for "protecting" your "rights" for any extended period of time.

You are merely permitted those exclusive rights for a short period, as an incentive for you to produce more works that might benefit society. If you fail to capitalize on your ideas within five or ten years, certainly within fifteen years, then your idea really wasn't worth much.

No one in history has ever had an idea or discovered new knowledge that was worth a lifetime of luxury.

Re:Breach of contract, copyright infringement

[ultranova]

You seem to think a corporation is a sentient being or something.

In a sense, it is. A corporation is an interacting organization of information-handling units, and your brain is an interacting organization of information-handling units. The difference is that employees have much greater internal than external bandwidth, and don't exist solely in the context of the corporation; nonetheless, a corporation typically has its own culture - it's own personality - separate from any one individual.

This is true of other organizations too, and is the reason why it makes sense to be talking about "China" and "USA" like they were living things. Sure, every action they actually take is taken by someone on their behalf, but there's an entity authorizing that, dispersed in little bits and pieces into millions of humans. It could be described as a lifeform inhabiting the noosphere, and since the capacity to produce said sphere of culture is very new and unoptimized, evolutionarily speaking, the entity is pretty primitive yet. Of course, as we continue to evolve, so do our shadows, and it might be an interesting experiment to make those pieces better able to communicate and see if that might result in true self-awareness.