
Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier - alecco
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/06/academia-edu-slammed-with-takedown-notices-from-journal-publisher-elsevier/
======
czr80
It'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.

~~~
legutierr
I'm not terribly familiar with Academia.edu and how it operates, but from
reading the article and a cursory review of their website, it seems that the
papers it hosts are meant to be submitted by the authors themselves.

How is it slimy for Academia.edu to operate under the assumption that its
contributors retain the right to publish their own work on the site? Or am I
missing something about their business model?

~~~
pallandt
If I remember correctly Elsevier's rules, in case the article is from a
subscription-based journal (non-open access) they retain copyright to the
final published peer-reviewed & formatted article. The author is allowed to
share their final published paper only in a 'scholarly' context, which seems
to mean anything but mass dissemination; you're allowed to share it with your
peers privately, but not post it on your site for example. I've just re-
checked and it seems this rule is still enforced:
[http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-
re...](http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-
responsibilities#author-posting)

~~~
legutierr
OK, but to be fair, this seems to be slimy behavior on the part of Elsevier,
not Academia.edu. Why should academics give up self-publishing rights just to
go through peer review and get published?

~~~
maccard
Because, before the internet was widespread and used for distribution, the
only way to get your research out was to be published in journals. Part of
this deal involves handing over the rights to your paper to the publishers.
This is pretty standard procedure: JK Rowling isn't going to be going giving
rights to penguin books for the Harry potter books while she has a contract
whereby Bloomberg publish the books currently, it's a similar idea.
Additionaly, the measure of an academics success is based on his (or her)
citations, and if your citations are from "website of some guy", nobody is
going to take you seriously. It's a vicious circle, and the whole system needs
reforming, however the thing is, conferences such as SIGGRAPH, FOCS, INFOCOM
etc etc all play an important role, that they offer peer reviewing, and you
can guarantee quality (if something is published in SIGGRAPH, then you can
normally rely on it). Until there are viable alternatives, which are accepted
and can ensure that the quality of the articles appearing is of a high enough
quality, this isn't going to change.

------
gjuggler
There'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+filety...](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)

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
ResearchGate is based in Germany, they may be protected against DMCAs.

~~~
teh_klev
The 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)

------
jval
Academia.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
It 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
Mendley even uses its reference styles and ,I would guess, quite a bit of code
in the background.

------
Osmium
So 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
If 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.

------
rmk2
I 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
I'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
Academia.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!

~~~
nl
_The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding
subtle peer-pressure to everybody else._

Kinda like academic publishing, right? Pretty sure the Erdos number[1] was
around well before Academia.edu.

To make it clear - I think a lot of Academia.edu's practices are annoying -
login wall for papers etc. But academia would be well served if it took better
advantage of some of the possibilities online collaboration brought (think of
the Polymath projects). CiteULike/arxiv cannot be the high point of online
academic publishing.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number)

~~~
rmk2
The thing is, not all strands of academia have collaboration even as a central
focus. I don't see it very often in the humanities that articles or books have
multiple collaborators. The normal thing is either the article or monograph
written by an individual. The other option are journals or collections made up
of these kinds of articles. Sure, it's not unheard of that people collaborate,
but even bigger projects usually follow the idea that what you publish is
yours, so you are more likely to see a publication series with individual
volumes by different people, or the above mentioned collections, where
(maybe!) introductions or overviews are written collaboratively.

This has partly to do with the dreadful "tooling" in many cases, i.e. in most
cases Word with handwritten citations. If you are lucky, people use Endnote or
Zotero. If you are _really_ lucky, you might encounter somebody who knows what
(Open|Libre) Office is. Your options for collaborations are thus: Google Docs
(if people can manage the technical complexity) or mailing around Word files.

------
sjg007
There'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.

------
res0nat0r
Are the papers being DMCA'd under copyright by Elsevir?

~~~
3JPLW
That'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-
polici...](http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-
policies/author-agreement)

2\. [http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-
polici...](http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-
policies/article-posting-policy)

~~~
gphilip
_Elsevier 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/liangzh...](http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/www/home/liangzhb/web/papers/YAIMA4483.html)

EDIT: Formatting.

~~~
darkarmani
> 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?

~~~
jahewson
Yes, copyright consists of five main rights which can be transferred or
licensed separately. These are:

\- to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell them

\- to create derivative works

\- to perform or display the work publicly

\- to sell or assign these rights to others

\- to transmit or display by radio or video

So assigning Elsevier your right to (only) publish the work is legitimate.

------
ivan_ah
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6863064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6863064)

------
arabellatv
The 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.

------
Empathenosis
So, what the internet was for at the beginning....is not what the internet is
for now?

