
LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract - atakan_gurkan
http://www.arl.org/news/community-updates/4264-louisiana-state-university-sues-elsevier-for-breach-of-contract
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hycaria
Here's an amusing anecdote that happened in my own veterinary school a few
years ago.

An exchange student from south america came and used our (european and valid)
school licence to mass-download veterinary papers (not sure if it was for use
in his school or for piracy, the story doesn't tell). Our school also got IP-
banned by publishers, even though they pay the rights to access them.

This is really crazy, I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers
during my lifetime.

~~~
dpwm
When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to
download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could
get IP-banned. I'd read pretty much every published paper relating to a small
subfield of Physics at this point, but still no more than 50 papers in all.

I think I just laughed it off and said I'd got no plans to scrape journals. I
always thought it was a bit of institutional folklore and that maybe there had
been threatening letters or something. I didn't realise they actually do go
ahead with the IP-banning.

~~~
hycaria
Yep, they do ! We actually learned about it in the same context "don't
download too many papers, you can get us banned".

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labster
In the meantime, the LSU Vet school can use sci-hub.io, and get easier access
to pubs than the paid version.

~~~
riffraff
I wonder: how is sci-hub not been shut down yet? It does not even try to mask
as a legal operation.

~~~
vertex-four
The fact that the media companies aren't involved here should give you a hint.
It's incredible how much power we've allowed them over the Internet.

~~~
a3_nm
There is also an important difference: media piracy can have a somewhat
negative image in the eyes of the public, but pirating scientific papers does
not. If academic publishers attract too much attention with a lawsuit, and
more people understand their revenue model, I doubt that the public would be
on their side. So maybe this encourages them to be more cautious.

In fact, Sci-Hub is not a real threat to academic publishers as long as
universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it. Of course, many
universities probably won't want to tell their researchers to just use Sci-Hub
(because of legal concerns, and because it could disappear the next day). So
leaving Sci-Hub mostly alone may well be a deliberate decision from academic
publishers.

~~~
arianvanp
My university blocks scihub and I'm every angry about it.

~~~
kronos29296
Use tor to access the onion domain for scihub (they have one) if you don't
already do so.

~~~
mirimir
Maybe
[https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link](https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link)
will work.

Or install Tor browser, and use
[http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion](http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion)

------
zitterbewegung
Some people are wondering what is happening inside of Elsevier. Here is my
speculation. When any large corporation sees the writing on the wall that it
has a major threat to its business (Comcast, RIAA, MPAA) due to the fact that
something is disrupting it they will take a really hard defensive position.
This entails lowering of customer service and everything else in response.

Eventually the market kills them off and the situation changes. The large
disruptor is Discrete Analysis which is a journal that has nearly no overhead.
[https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-
an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-
overlay-journal/)

~~~
pelario
I think the real disruptor is Arxiv; which is where Discrete analysis will
host their papers.

------
nomercy400
So LSU has a license with Elsevier, and LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine
had a license with Elsevier.

How come LSU acquired two licenses in the first place? Was there a merger of
LSU School of Veterinary Medicine with LSU? Has LSU SVM always been under LSU?
Was the LSU license negotiated after?

~~~
bkanber
The article doesn't state this explicitly, but it sounds like SVM and LSU had
two independent contracts at first, then LSU's was renewed to be an umbrella
contract, then SVM's independent contract expired. I'd even bet that it was
planned that way, LSU would have wanted to combine the formerly independent
contracts, so they negotiated for full coverage and then allowed SVM's to
lapse.

~~~
upvotinglurker
Based on experience with academic libraries, this is likely, and it's
plausible that Elsevier would use the existence of the former contract as an
excuse to claim that veterinary students/faculty are somehow not covered under
a contract covering all LSU students/faculty.

------
mwnivek
This is from 3 months ago (May 2, 2017), although it doesn't seem there have
been any updates to the case since then.

~~~
mirimir
Well:

> Elsevier has not accepted service of process for the lawsuit through the
> Louisiana long-arm statute nor at the Elsevier corporate office in New York
> City. Since Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands, LSU is attempting
> to effect service of process through the Hague Service Convention.

So Elsevier also hides from the law ;)

I wonder what's happened with that.

------
pmlnr
The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access,
why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

~~~
jk563
Because they have unlimited access?

~~~
pmlnr
There are mirrors for many things, like linux distributions & packages, for
which universities, historically, set up mirrors, to make things faster and
distributed. It also makes sense not to leave the university network in my
eyes.

Apparently they don't have unlimited access in reality (see the top comment),
so if someone was doing this to me - "unlimited", yeah, not really - I'd set
up a mirror and slowly copy the whole thing over to avoid not being able to
access the documents in case I get banned and sorting it out takes time.

I'm well aware this might be a legal problem, but blocking valid access is
also a legal problem.

------
matt_morgan
Does anyone know what's going on inside Elsevier? Publicly at least, they're
acting like the music industry acted in the 90s. Are they doing anything
internally to make sure they stay in business in ten years, other than
fighting for every crumb of business they have now? Is there anyone there
seriously looking ahead?

In a lot of ways they're in a worse position than the music industry was, or
than Netflix was a few years ago, since at least those guys had the content-
creation side to work on. I don't know what Elsevier can do when there's no
money in distribution. The editors don't add that much.

~~~
dougmccune
Elsevier is making a lot of moves to stay relevant. They're now one of the
biggest open access publishers (where the revenue comes from article
processing charges, not subscriptions). They've been realigning themselves as
more of a data/information company than just a content company (see these
products under the heading of "research intelligence":
[https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/products-
serv...](https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/products-services)).
They bought Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which is one of the
largest preprint repositories in the social sciences. Before that they bought
Mendeley to try to get into the researcher social network/reference
management/data collection game.

Say what you will about Elsevier, but they are most definitely not just
sitting on their subscription content and waiting to become irrelevant.

