

Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org? - da-bacon
http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=5948

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ak217
There are plenty of real reasons to dislike Elsevier. Making up hypothetical
ones only discredits the OP and adds noise.

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gwillen
I would love to see Elsevier try to shut down the arXiv. That might be the one
thing they could do to really turn the academic community against them. They'd
be dead in a week.

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mutagen
Perhaps the most important part of that article is the last two paragraphs
mentioning the White House's request for comments on the question of public
access to federally-funded scientific research. Links provided:

[http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/11-1117.s...](http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/11-1117.shtml)

[http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-11-04/html/2011-28623.h...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-11-04/html/2011-28623.htm)

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pm90
this should have been ideally brought to the notice of the public
earlier...I'm at a well known US research university and my research is funded
by NSF yet my advisor had no idea about this...

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johnobrien102
Couple of other things. Elsevier is $3 billion in revenue, not $10 billion
(the author must be thinking of Reed Elsevier here, Elsevier's parent
company.) So really they only have something like $3 billion reasons to not
let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero.

And to be clear, so far as I can tell, SOPA has almost nothing to do with
arxiv.org, because arxiv.org publishes the manuscript, not the final version
of the article. Elsevier's stated position is that publishing the manuscript
version is not copyright infringement.

Even if SOPA passed, sure, it would be easier for Elsevier to shut down
arxiv.org. But if arxiv.org started publishing the final version of articles
for which Elsevier had obtained worldwide exclusive copyright, that would be
copyright infringement anyway. So the key (it would seem to me) is whether
arxiv.org publishes the final version of articles or not (they curenttly
don't), not whether SOPA passes, that determines whether arxiv.org is to get
shutdown.

And so if they did, the answer to the question "Could Elsevier shut down
arxiv.org?" would be "Yes."

Right now, the answer is "No."

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jessriedel
> Elsevier's stated position is that publishing the manuscript version is not
> copyright infringement.

Do you have a link to a place where Elsevier states this explicitly?

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johnobrien102
[http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/preprin...](http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/preprints)

"Elsevier is liberal with respect to authors and electronic preprints. Unlike
some publishers, we do not consider that a preprint of an article (including a
prior version as a thesis) prior to its submission to Elsevier for
consideration amounts to prior publication, which would disqualify the work
from consideration for re-publication in a journal. We also do not require
authors to remove electronic preprints from publicly accessible servers
(including the author's own home page) once an article has been accepted for
publication."

manuscript ~= preprint more or less in publishing speak

