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Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier
- res0nat0r 13y agoAre the papers being DMCA'd under copyright by Elsevir?
- 3JPLW 13y agoThat's the interesting part: Elsevier does not have copyright of these papers! The authors do. However, by publishing with Elsevier, you grant them an exclusive license for the right to publish and distribute the article.[1] Note that this even includes the author copy of the manuscript (albeit with slightly more lenient terms - the author may only post the copy to a personally operated website or their institution's website).[2] 1. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/author-agreement http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-polici... 2. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-policies/article-posting-policy http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-polici...
- res0nat0r 13y agoSounds like perfectly acceptable takedown notices then.
- 3JPLW 13y agoI'm not a lawyer, nor have I thoroughly read the DMCA; is the text broad enough to cover such licenses, over and above copyright?
- jahewson 13y agoYes, because this is a fairly standard copyright agreement. The DMCA is not adding anything new here, see my reply to darkarmani above. Copyright's rights are already divided up in such a manner by definition, it's not something that their lawyers have arbitrarily devised.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWould love to see that contested in court. Have an author put it back up on the site (send then a letter of authorization) and then Elselvier will have to sue the author to get it taken down again. I wonder if Elselvier could survive the PR of suing 1,000 scientists for publishing their own papers on a user content contributed web site.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoI don't think it is going to do too well by just removing the content they posted. People think of their profile area on a social site as theirs, the law not withstanding, and pissing around with research scientists public profiles just sounds to me about as bright for a company that depends on academia as sticking your face in a bucket of angry bees.
- gphilip 13y agoElsevier does not have copyright of these papers! The authors do. This is not true for the vast majority [1] of papers; for most articles published by Elsevier, the authors have to sign away their copyright first. What the parent says applies only to papers published "open access" by Elsevier. Both the links posted by the parent talk about Elsevier's policy for this type of publication. To publish an article as open access, authors [2] have to pay nontrivial sums to Elsevier [3]: For open access articles a fee is payable by the author, their institution or research funder to cover the costs associated with publication. Fees range from $500 - $5000 USD. Visit the individual journal homepages for specific pricing information. Elsevier uses the term "subscription articles" for "regular" articles (where one doesn't have to pay this huge fee). For these regular articles, the authors have to sign away their copyright as part of a "Journal Publishing Agreement" before Elsevier will publish. Here is some sample legalese from a recent such agreement [4]: I hereby assign to Elsevier Inc. the copyright in the manuscript identified above (government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign an exclusive publishing and distribution license) and any supplemental tables, illustrations or other information submitted therewith that are intended for publication as part of the manuscript (the "Article") in all forms and media (whether now known or hereafter developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when and if the article is accepted for publication. This transfer includes the right to provide the Article in electronic and online forms and systems. I strongly suspect that the number of articles published "open access" by Elsevier is a minuscule fraction of their total publication, just because there are not many academics who have that kind of money to spend. [1] Admittedly, by my own reckoning; I couldn't find relevant publication numbers online. [2] Or their funding agency, e.g., the institute/department/university/country where the authors work. [3] http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/sponsored-articles http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/sponsored-articles [4] http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/www/home/liangzhb/web/papers/YAIMA4483.html http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/www/home/liangzh... EDIT: Formatting.
- darkarmani 13y ago> government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign an exclusive publishing and distribution license Can you issue a DMCA based on this type of clause? I wonder if they have issued DMCAs for documents falling under this?
- ivan_ah 13y agoprevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6863064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6863064
- gjuggler 13y agoThere's nothing controversial here — Elsevier merely bumped up the rate at which they're sending Academia.edu takedown notices for obvious infringement by its users. What's more interesting to me is that ResearchGate, a site which is virtually identical to Academia.edu in its "mission" and design, has been redistributing a shockingly large number of Elsevier PDFs for a long time. Unless these google searches are misleading, there seem to be many thousands of them: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filetype:pdf+copyright+%22cell+press%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety... https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filetype:pdf+copyright+%22lancet%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety... I'm really stumped as to how ResearchGate gets away with this, but Academia.edu is getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Maybe Elsevier and other publishers haven't yet learned to reliably "find" ResearchGate's shared papers, or perhaps they've come up with some arrangement that allows them to publicly share thousands of paywalled PDFs with impunity?
- monksy 13y agoResearchGate is based in Germany, they may be protected against DMCAs.
- teh_klev 13y agoThe DMCA isn't enforceable in Germany, but there is a similar mechanism called the European Union Copyright Directive [1] which applies to at the very least to Italy, Austria, Germany and the UK. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive
- cantastoria 13y agoI wonder if it's because ResearchGate is not based in the U.S.?
- rmk2 13y agoI only see winners in this: I think both Elsevier and academia.edu are bloody plagues, and whoever loses, I'm happy. The way I see this, either people are turned off academia.edu or away from Elsevier, both of which are desirable results in my opinion. So...good job, I suppose?
- cookrn 13y agoI'm a bit familiar with the current events and business practices that bring vitriol against Elsevier. Not so much for academia.edu though and I've only heard of it a few other times as I'm not in academia. What causes you to feel negatively about it?
- rmk2 13y agoAcademia.edu bothers me on a somewhat different level: It becomes yet another of the levels were academia pretends to be more and more like the business world (with LinkedIn). The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else. One of the things we get told frequently is that we need to "expand our social media presence", i.e. to get LinkedIn and academia.edu. This is essentially highly functioning hypocrasy in my opinion, because the same people who advocate it or "follow" your profile, if met directly, do not give a shit about what you are working on. I have enough of the "so...what are you working on?" question that immediately follows the exchange of names. It is almost always followed by the shortest possible description, because, really, nobody gives a shit. Often enough, even the general topic area is enough to make other people glaze over and switch off. Academia.edu etc. pretend that there is great interest where there is none, and at the same time further the already backstabby and highly disingenious environment within academia. At least, that's my take on it. [edit]: It also furthers the already widespread plague of inflating your CV with absolutely bloody everything you've ever done. Given a 15-minute talk as an introduction to a class or seminar? That's a "talk" now, apparently. Organised a club that met (perhaps once) to discuss the importance of petting animals during the exam period, and that asks for access to petting animals for everybody[1]. Onto your profile it goes. Wrote an "article" for the "journal" you and those other people you know "published", made up of your and your friends' articles? Publications! etc. [1]: I wish I were kidding. I am not. However, since posting a citation for this would reveal a bit more about me than I care to share here, I won't. Take it or leave it!
- czr80 13y agoIt's probably irrational, but Academia.edu's domain really annoys me - I dislike a company using a .edu domain. It feels deceptive, in some way. Come to think of it, implicitly calling for a boycott of another company while simultaneously trying to bootstrap a business based on violating that company's license terms feels pretty slimy too.
- moocowduckquack 13y agoIs pretty slimy to misrepresent Academia.edu's business. If they were trying to bootstrap a business based on violating Elsevier's licence terms, then why have they complied with Elsevier's requests to take down content? If their business is based on violating the licence to that content then removing that content would remove their business, and this might be true if all scientific papers had to be published through Elsevier which would mean that a service like this then would not be able to operate without violating those terms, however that is quite clearly not the case. You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services. Accordingly, you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Academia.edu the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms; and (ii) neither the Member Content nor your posting, uploading, publication, submission or transmittal of the Member Content or Academia.edu’s use of the Member Content (or any portion thereof) on, through or by means of the Site or Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation. http://www.academia.edu/terms http://www.academia.edu/terms
- czr80 13y agoI'm not sure why you're quoting standard boilerplate at me (as if any site with UGC would say the opposite of what you quoted), but I was just going by their official statement, which is rather hostile.
- sjg007 13y agoThere's actually a simple technical way around this. Don't store the paper. Store a file hash and let the user access it via approved channels. Most users here will have legitimate access via their institution, or can easily find the paper via Google. Dedupe on upload and link to approved Elsevier stores. Easy peasey.
- Osmium 13y agoSo I decided to finally fill out my Academia.edu profile recently and found there was no easy way to add papers. You could upload them or "import" them from another website, neither of which I could do due to the ambiguous copyright status of my papers, but you couldn't enter them manually. The most obvious and unambiguous way would be to enter a DOI, and have them query CrossRef for the paper metadata, but there seems to be no way to do that? So, in a sense, are Academia.edu not encouraging this behaviour (which is frequently copyright-infringing) by making it hard to add references without actively uploading the pdfs themselves?
- ISL 13y agoIf they're doing that, perhaps it's because they want to leverage the "preprint server" exceptions to copyright agreements in order to amass a corpus of otherwise-locked papers. If the author doesn't upload it, it's scraping. If the author does upload it, it's at least a grey area, and may be permissible under many agreements.
- arabellatv 13y agoThe best things in life are free. And that's the problem here. Knowledge sharing, MOOC's (massive open online courses) and open source education is awesome and gives accessibility to the best information in the world. When you have a lot of knowledge, it becomes a commodity--and a precious commodity should have a high price tag, right?But knowledge really is priceless, and like paying for love, when you pay for knowledge, you might not get what you pay. And like paying for love, sometimes pimps want to control the market. And is that necessarily wrong? Because to make knowledge profitable means to make it sustainably accessible. A friend of mine (@habib) is a product manager at Elsevier and I wonder what he thinks about this. He happens to have been recruited by the company years ago from his blog on library science, and now he works on finding up-and-coming knowledge innovations. I'm going to tweet this to him and see what he thinks.
- jval 13y agoAcademia.edu face the same problems that all players in this space do, namely that almost all content in journals is owned by parties other than the authors themselves. It is almost like starting YouTube in a pre-handheld camera era, where the only videos are those produced by studios, and then targeting actors to have them upload the films. Now that Elsevier have acquired Mendeley, they have chosen a winner from the battle between Mendeley, Academia.Edu, and ResearchGate. It is going to be fairly binary from here on in for the other two parties. Either Elsevier and other commercial publishers will try and sue them out of existence, or send them enough takedown notices to render them useless, or they will acquire them. Either way I can't see an endgame here between these three businesses that doesn't result in the academic publishing landscape remaining almost as balkanised as it was 5 years ago. I think the ultimate winner in this space won't look anything like Academia.edu, RG, or Mendeley.
- jessriedel 13y agoIt can just look like Zotero, which replicates Mendeley's functionality and is distributed free by an awesome non-profit research library. I can't recommend it enough.
- JetSpiegel 13y agoMendley even uses its reference styles and ,I would guess, quite a bit of code in the background.
- Empathenosis 13y agoSo, what the internet was for at the beginning....is not what the internet is for now?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]