Just As Open Competitor To Elsevier's SSRN Launches, SSRN Accused Of Copyright Crackdown

from the the-inevitable dept

A couple of months ago, we wrote about how publishing giant Elsevier had purchased the open access pre-publisher SSRN. SSRN is basically the place where lots of research that we regularly report on is published. Legal and economics academics quite frequently post their journal articles there. Of course, Elsevier has a well-known reputation for being extreme copyright maximalists in dangerous ways. Having Elsevier take over SSRN concerned a lot of academics, and even led to calls for alternatives, including many asking the famed arXiv to open a social science research operation as well.

Indeed, it appears that arXiv was paying attention, because just about a week ago, SocArXiv was announced, and it already has a temporary home hosted by Open Science Framework.

And perhaps this came just in time, because just as that happened, Stephen Henderson, a law professor, noted that SSRN took down his paper saying that they didn't think he retained the copyright to it.

When I posted a final PDF of an article for which not only do my co-author and I retain the copyright, but for which the contract also includes _explicit_ permission to post on SSRN, I received the typical happy “SSRN Revision Email” saying all was well. Only when I went to take a look, I found there was no longer any PDF to download at all—merely the abstract. So, download counts are gone, and no article. Not the former working version nor the final version. And then in the revision comments, I found this:

It appears that you do not retain copyright to the paper, and the PDF has been removed from public view. Please provide us with the copyright holder's written permission to post. Alternatively, you may replace this version with a working paper or preprint version, if you so desire. Questions and/or written permissions may be emailed to support@ssrn.com, or call 1-877-SSRNHELP (877-777-6435 toll free) or 1-585-442-8170 outside the US.

So, not only have they completely changed their model, but—at least to me—they gave no effective notice, and they pull papers without asking. Nobody bothered to _ask_ whether I had permission; they simply took down every version of the article and said nothing. Alas. And when I called customer support and someone called back, I pointed out that some profs have hundreds of articles posted for which SSRN doesn’t hold the copyright agreements. “Are you going to take all those down too?,” I asked. The answer, in essence, “Those were posted in error.” Unbelievable.

As that story started to make the rounds, SSRN insisted that it was just a technical glitch, in that it had sent the wrong email, but others aren't buying it. And now, the Authors Alliance has come out with a notice telling SSRN authors that it may be time to try something new (such as SocArXiv) because Elsevier cannot be trusted. The Alliance notes that after Elsevier purchased SSRN, it reached out to Elsevier to try to get the company to commit to some basic principles of openness, and Elsevier refused:

Since we first heard of mega-publisher Elsevier’s acquisition of SSRN, the popular social sciences pre-print and working paper repository, we have expressed concern. Elsevier is not known to be an avid supporter of the open access publishing practices favored by many of our members, and has historically taken a restrictive stance toward author control and ownership of scholarship.

In response, we reached out to Elsevier and to SSRN with a set of principles the service could adopt that would reassure authors that SSRN could continue to be a go-to resource for those looking to refine and share their work. We have since heard back from SSRN: they would not commit to adopting even one of our principles. They offered more general reassurances that their policies would continue as before. We were not satisfied, but we decided to wait and see whether our fears would be borne out.

The article notes more examples of SSRN pulling down research, even when the authors do retain the copyright, combined with a misunderstanding of how Creative Commons licenses work. It seems fairly clear that this was not just the case of one email improperly sent. And thus, for those who rely on SSRN, it's probably time to start looking for alternative ways of posting documents.

SSRN authors: you have not committed to SSRN. You can remove your papers from their service, and you can opt instead to make your work available in venues that show real commitment to the sharing, vetting, and refinement of academic work.

The Authors Alliance also points out that researchers don't need to just post their research in one place, and can often host it themselves as well. But, it appears that SSRN under Elsevier is quickly losing trust. Considering that it was basically the go to place for all legal and economics research pre-publishing, that's quite a quick turn around, thanks entirely to Elsevier.

Filed Under: academic research, copyright, open access, pre publisher, research, scoarxiv
Companies: arxiv, elsevier, socarxiv, ssrn

Disappointing: Elsevier Buys Open Access Academic Pre-Publisher SSRN

from the this-is-bad-news dept

The vast, vast majority of time when we point to new academic research, we end up linking to the research hosted on SSRN, which stands for the Social Science Research Network. SSRN has been around for a long, long time, and it's basically the go-to place to post research in the legal and economics worlds -- the two research areas we most frequently write about. At this moment, I have about 10 SSRN tabs open on interesting papers that I hope to write about at some point. Technically SSRN is what's known as a "preprint server," where academics can share papers before peer review is completed and the final papers end up in a locked up, paywalled journal. The kind of paywall run by a giant company like Elsevier.

So it's been quite distressing to many this morning to find out that Elsevier has now purchased SSRN. Everyone involved, of course, insists that "nothing will change" and that Elsevier will leave SSRN working as before, but perhaps with some more resources behind it (and, sure, SSRN could use some updates and upgrades). But Elsevier has such a long history of incredibly bad behavior that it's right to be concerned. Elsevier is not just a copyright maximalist (just last week at a hearing I attended involving the Copyright Office, Elsevier advocated for much more powerful takedown powers in copyright). It's not just suing those who make it easier to access academic info. It's not just charging insane amounts for journals. It also has a history of creating fake peer reviewed journals to help pharmaceutical companies make their drugs look better.

And it also has a history of lobbying heavily against open access, while similarly charging for open access research despite knowing it's not supposed to do this.

So, quite obviously, there is reason to be concerned that Elsevier may make some "changes" to SSRN that make it a lot less valuable for the sharing of academic research and papers in the near future.

Some are already suggesting it's time to build a new service (either as a nonprofit or a trust) to take over what SSRN was doing in the past. Or, alternatively, there's talk of getting other preprint servers, like the famed arXiv to start handling social sciences research as well. Another alternative might be just to see if the Internet Archive is willing to take on this kind of project itself.

Once again, though, it shows just how messed up copyright has become. Copyright is not the reason any of these papers gets written, and now copyright is seen as a weapon against the sharing of knowledge. When copyright was first put in place in the US, we were told it was to encourage the sharing of such educational resources. That may have been a lie at the time (it was designed as a tool for publishers), but if we're going to have a copyright system that claims to be about promoting science, at the very least, we should be able to live in a world where it really is easy to share academic research without fear that a copyright claim is going to destroy everything.

Filed Under: academic papers, copyright, open access, preprint server, research
Companies: elsevier, ssrn

Sci-Hub, The Repository Of 'Infringing' Academic Papers Now Available Via Telegram

from the whac-a-mole-continues dept

We've been covering the saga of Sci-Hub for a while now. It's the search engine for academic papers that includes a few tricks to access more paywalled academic papers for free, using the academic logins that have been shared with the site for the sake of retrieving more research. Academic journal publishing giant Elsevier has been waging a war with the site, first getting an injunction against its original domain back in December, only to have it quickly pop up elsewhere. Just a little while ago, we noted that the site had lost another domain, though it was still available in a few more places -- as well as directly at its IP address and at a Tor hidden site.

And now Sci-Hub has announced that it's available via the popular messaging app Telegram as well:

Now you can use Sci-Hub in Telegram @scihubot to access full-text articles pic.twitter.com/eEJDoKfm1Z

— Sci Hub (@Sci_Hub) May 14, 2016

From the looks of it, you can just send it a message with the title you want, and it sends you back a download link -- within seconds. From a researcher's standpoint, this seems like it must be quite handy, and certainly again feels a lot like the fairly standard #icanhazpdf process used on social media by academics all the time. Just a little more automated.

Now, I'm sure Elsevier won't be happy at all about this, but the ability to share academic knowledge for the purpose of learning was supposed to be something that copyright law encouraged, rather than shut down. And the more Elsevier freaks out about this, the more people become aware of the service.

Filed Under: academic papers, whac a mole
Companies: elsevier, sci-hub, telegram

Elsevier Keeps Whac'ing Moles In Trying To Take Down Repository Of Academic Papers

from the copyright-destroying-learning dept

We've written a few times now about Sci-Hub -- the website put together by Alexandra Elbakyan, an academic from Kazakhstan. It's a somewhat creative hack on the idea that many academics are more than willing to share PDFs of useful research with each other, basically building a search engine of such research, which is actually stored in a different repository (called LibGen). But the really clever part of Sci-Hub was that it also had some people sharing their login tokens to various research databases, so that if the LibGen doesn't have the document, Sci-Hub uses a login to retrieve the document, deliver it to the user who requested it and then uploads it to LibGen to make it available for anyone else. Publishing giant Elsevier has been particularly upset by all of this -- despite the fact that its argument appears to go 100% against the stated purpose of copyright law.

Remember, this isn't about sharing some sort of commercial music or video or anything. This is about academic research, much of which has been paid for with public tax dollars, and which Elsevier paid no money to create. Elsevier not only gets academics to submit papers for publishing, but to also hand over their copyrights to Elsevier. In some subject areas, it even makes the academics pay to submit their papers for publishing. Then Elsevier gets free editing help from other academics who do peer review for free. Some publications even have unpaid editors as well. And then Elsevier goes out and charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to universities for research it had no hand in creating, for which it paid no money, but where it gets the copyright.

And, of course, copyright had absolutely no incentive in getting this research done in the first place. It's done by academics who are pursuing the subject because of their own interests and the general requirements pushed by universities to get their faculty to publish.

In short, copyright has no role here whatsoever other than to enrich Elsevier. That seems fairly problematic.

Either way, back in December, Elsevier was able to score an injunction against Sci-Hub, such that it lost its domain. As we noted at the time, it was only starting the mole whac'ing process, as Sci-Hub immediately moved to a new domain.

And, yes, it now appears that a complaint from Elsevier has resulted in that new domain getting shut down too, though Sci-hub remains available on other domains including the .bz and .cc top level domains. Oh, and, of course its direct IP address 31.184.194.81. And the site has a Tor hidden site as well. In other words, lots more moles to whac.

In the meantime, this quixotic, and anti-knowledge, anti-education campaign by Elsevier to shut down such a useful tool has only resulted in greater and greater attention for Sci-Hub. Tons of people had never heard of the site before, but the continuing news coverage, which increases each time Elsevier gets petulant and tries to take it down again, has only served as useful advertising for a useful tool.

Elsevier management might want to reconsider its strategy here, seeing as whatever money it's wasting on its lawyers seems to actually be serving as marketing dollars for Sci-Hub.

Filed Under: alexandra elbakyan, copyright, libgen, sci-hub, whac-a-mole
Companies: elsevier, sci-hub

As Predicted, Elsevier's Attempt To Silence Sci-Hub Has Increased Public Awareness Massively

from the now,-what-do-we-call-that-again? dept

Last month, Techdirt wrote about the growing interest in Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers -- more than 47,000,000 of them at the time of writing. As Mike noted then, Elsevier's attempt to make the site go away by suing it has inevitably produced a classic Streisand Effect, whereby many more people know about it as a direct result. That was first pointed out by Mike Taylor in a short post, where he listed a few titles that had written about Sci-Hub. This week, David Rosenthal has produced a kind of update, listing many more posts on the subject that have appeared in the last month alone.

Rosenthal's list includes an article entitled "Should All Research Papers Be Free?" that was published in Sunday's edition of The New York Times. It's probably the most significant contribution to spreading the word about Sci-Hub more widely, but it doesn't really add much to the debate. By contrast, another post mentioned by Rosenthal, found on the Inside Higher Ed's site, and written by the college librarian Barbara Fister, may lack the impact of The New York Times news analysis, but does make some genuinely novel observations about what is going on here.

Fister notes that alongside people who don't have access to the articles they need because they are not affiliated with a well-funded Western library with the right subscriptions, many researchers turn to Sci-Hub because accessing articles has become a complicated and inconvenient process. As she says:

For many folks, Sci-Hub is simply a more convenient library that doesn’t make you mess around with logins and interlibrary loans. Hey, we’re busy. Paywalls are a pain.

Techdirt has written before about this aspect before, and the growing evidence that piracy greatly diminishes once good, easy-to-use legal services become available. However, as Fister rightly says, the current situation is awkward for the people who are supposed to be overseeing those unsatisfactory legal services:

Librarians are in a nasty spot. Sometimes I wonder if we can even call ourselves librarians anymore. We feel we are virtually required to provide access to whatever researchers in our local community ask for while restricting access from anyone outside that narrowly-defined community of users. Instead of curators, we're personal shoppers who moonlight as border guards. This isn’t working out well for anyone. Unaffiliated researchers have to find illegal work-arounds, and faculty who actually have access through libraries are turning to the black market for articles because it seems more efficient than contacting their personal shopper, particularly when the library itself doesn't figure in their work flow. In the meantime, all that money we spend on big bundles of articles (or on purchasing access to articles one at a time when we can't afford the bundle anymore) is just a really high annual rent. We can't preserve what we don't own, and we don't curate because our function is to get what is asked for.

Not only is lack of open access soul-destroying for librarians longing to take a more active and creative role in the provision of information to the academics they support, it comes with a hidden financial cost that has been overlooked:

It is labor -- lots of labor -- to maintain link resolvers, keep [academic journal] license agreements in order, and deal with constant changes in subscription contents. We [librarians] have to work a lot harder to be publishers' border guards than people realize.

That's a hugely important point that I have not seen made elsewhere. Alongside all the other tasks that traditional publishers push onto the academic community -- notably, writing articles and refereeing them for free -- there is another major burden, imposed specifically on librarians, who are forced to spend much of their time acting as the publishers' hated "border guards." That's a tragic waste of their highly-specialized skills, and not what they were employed to do.

This extra cost is yet another reason to move rapidly to open access publishing for all academic work, which would not only legalize Sci-Hub, but make it superfluous.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: academia, copyright, open access, research, sci-hub, streisand effect
Companies: elsevier, sci-hub

Using Copyright To Shut Down 'The Pirate Bay' Of Scientific Research Is 100% Against The Purpose Of Copyright

from the a-copyright-travesty dept

Lots of people are aware of the Constitutional underpinnings of our copyright system. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 famously says that Congress has the following power:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

We've argued at great length over the importance of the preamble of that section, "to promote the progress," but many people are confused about the terms "science" and "useful arts." In fact, many people not well-versed in the issue often get the two backwards and think that "science" refers to inventions, and thus enables a patent system, while "useful arts" refers to "artistic works" and thus enables the copyright system. The opposite is actually the case. "Science" at the time the Constitution was written was actually synonymous with "learning" and "education" (while "useful arts" was a term meaning invention and new productivity tools).

This can be seen even more directly in the fact that our very first copyright law, the Copyright Act of 1790 was subtitled, "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." While over the centuries, many who stood to benefit from an aggressive system of copyright control have tried to rewrite, whitewash or simply ignore this history, turning the copyright system falsely into a "property" regime, the fact is that it was always intended as a system to encourage the wider dissemination of ideas for the purpose of education and learning. The (potentially misguided) intent appeared to be that by granting exclusive rights to a certain limited class of works, it would encourage the creation of those works, which would then be useful in educating the public (and within a few decades enter the public domain).

Even today, long after the original intent and concept of copyright law have been so twisted and distorted by many, at least some elements of that original intent remain. After all, the fair use standard found in 17 USC 107 makes it clear that "reproduction.... for purposes such as... teaching..., scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." It's difficult to be much more direct than that.

And yet... when it comes to how our copyright system acts in practice, things are a lot more murky. Back in December, we wrote about a rather troubling case in New York, in which (widely despised) publishing giant Elsevier (which used its copyright monopoly to help pharmaceutical companies create fake medical journals touting the benefits of drugs) was able to get an injunction against the domain of the website for Sci-Hub, run by Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher born and educated in Kazakhstan, but now living in Russia.

Sci-Hub (at its current domain) is actually fairly clever. It first searches a separate public repository of scientific research papers called Libgen. If it can't find it, it then uses credentials quietly provided by like-minded researchers who have authorized access to various paywalled collections of journal articles, and returns a copy -- and also deposits a copy with Libgen for future uses as well. The story got some news in copyright circles, such as here, but in the last week or so has started flowing into more maintream areas as well. It started first with an article at BigThink.com, alternatively titled either "Meet the Robin Hood of Science" or "A Pirate Bay for Science," which details Elbakyan's situation in quite a sympathetic manner:

The efficiency of the system is really quite astounding, working far better than the comparatively primitive modes of access given to researchers at top universities, tools that universities must fork out millions of pounds for every year. Users now don’t even have to visit the Sci-Hub website at all; instead, when faced with a journal paywall they can simply take the Sci-Hub URL and paste it into the address bar of a paywalled journal article immediately after the “.com” or “.org” part of the journal URL and before the remainder of the URL. When this happens, Sci-Hub automatically bypasses the paywall, taking the reader straight to a PDF without the user ever having to visit the Sci-Hub website itself.

If, at first pass the network fails to gain access to the paper, the system automatically tries different institutions’ credentials until it gains access. In one fell swoop, a network has been created that likely has a greater level of access to science than any individual university, or even government for that matter, anywhere in the world. Sci-Hub represents the sum of countless different universities' institutional access — literally a world of knowledge. This is important now more than ever in a world where even Harvard University can no longer afford to pay skyrocketing academic journal subscription fees, while Cornell axed many of its Elsevier subscriptions over a decade ago. For researchers outside the US' and Western Europe’s richest institutions, routine piracy has long been the only way to conduct science, but increasingly the problem of unaffordable journals is coming closer to home.

Rightfully, this is being celebrated as a massive boon to science and learning, making these otherwise hidden nuggets of knowledge and science that were previously locked up and hidden away available to just about anyone. And, to be clear, this absolutely fits with the original intent of copyright law -- which was to encourage such learning. In a very large number of cases, it is not the creators of this content and knowledge who want the information to be locked up. Many researchers and academics know that their research has much more of an impact the wider it is seen, read, shared and built upon. But the gatekeepers -- such as Elsveier and other large academic publishers -- have stepped in and demanded copyright, basically for doing very little.

They do not pay the researchers for their work. Often, in fact, that work is funded by taxpayer funds. In some cases, in certain fields, the publishers actually demand that the authors of these papers pay to submit them. The journals do not pay to review the papers either. They outsource that work to other academics for "peer review" -- which again, is unpaid. Finally, these publishers profit massively, having convinced many universities that they need to subscribe, often paying many tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to journals that very few actually read.

Last fall, we noted people were using the Twitter tag "#icanhazpdf" as a sort of informal system to request other academics share paywalled research with them. As Elbakyan notes, Sci-Hub was really just an attempt to automate such a system:

Today many researchers use the #icanhazpdf hashtag on Twitter to ask other benevolent researchers to download paywalled papers for them, a practice Elbakyan describes as “very archaic,” pointing out that “especially in Russia, the Sci-Hub project started a new era in how research work is done. Now, the requests for information are solved by machines, not the hands of other researchers. Automation made the process of solving requests very effective. Before, hundreds of requests were solved per day; Sci-Hub turned these numbers into hundreds of thousands.”

Late last week, the story got even more attention when the popular ScienceAlert website wrote its own story sympathetic to Elbakyan as well. And while that article does seek to balance out viewpoints both for and against what she's doing, it does appear to be fairly sympathetic towards her actions -- which is a far cry from the way the press normally covers attempts at increasing free access to copyright-protected materials.

Both of these recent articles also point to the incredible letter penned by Elbakyan to the judge in the NY case, making the moral argument for why what she is doing should be seen as perfectly fine -- highlighting again that the actual authors don't seem to mind and that the only one complaining appears to be Elsevier which (again) is not paying the actual authors anything.

I would like to clarify the reasons behind sci-hub.org website. When I was a student in Kazakhstan university, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them. Later I found there are lots and lots of researchers (not even students, but university researchers) just like me, especially in developing countries. They created online communities (forums) to solve this problem. I was an active participant in one of such communities in Russia. Here anyone who needs research paper, but cannot pay for it, could place a request and other members who can obtain the paper will send it for free by email. I could obtain any paper by pirating it, so I solved many requests and people always were very grateful for my help. After that, I created sci-hub.org website that simply makes this process automatic and the website immediately became popular.

That is true that website collects donations, however we do not pressure anyone to send them. Elsevier, in contrast, operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?

I would also like to mention that Elsevier is not a creator of these papers. All papers on their website are written by researchers, and researchers do not receive money from what Elsevier collects. That is very different from music or movie industry, where creators receive money from each copy sold. But economics of research papers is very different. Authors of these papers do not receive money. Why would they send their work to Elsevier then? They feel pressured to do this, because Elsevier is an owner of so-called "high-impact" journals. If a researcher wants to be recognized, make a career - he or she needs to have publications in such journals.

What I written here is not just my opinion - this topic is widely discussed in research community. For example, a researcher John Willinsky wrote a book named "The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship" where he discusses this problem. The general opinion in research community is that research papers should be distributed for free (open access), not sold. And practices of such companies like Elsevier are unacceptable, because they limit distribution of knowledge. In 2012, there was an "Elsevier boycott" organized by a prominent mathematician Timothy Gowers to battle such practices:

"The Cost of Knowledge is a protest by academics against the business practices of academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests are a call for lower prices for journals and to promote increased open access to information. The main work of the project is to ask researchers to sign a statement committing not to support Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for these journals."

I would like to also mention that we never received any complaints from authors or researchers, only Elsevier is complaining about free distribution of knowledge on sci-hub.erg website.

This kind of letter clearly did not work, in that the judge still granted the injunction -- but it has to raise the question: if this kind of thing is not "promoting the progress of science" akin to what the Constitution set out as the purpose of copyright, then what better system is there? As Elbakyan notes, this particular situation may be somewhat different, as compared to the sharing of music or movies, but it does seem to highlight a clear case where copyright is being used in a way that seems so fundamentally, conceptually and morally opposed to its entire purpose.

I've also seen some compare what Elbakyan is doing to what the DOJ insisted that Aaron Swartz was intending to do when he downloaded a ton of academic research from JSTOR. It was never proved that this is what Swartz intended to do -- and he never directly said one way or another if that was his plan. But the DOJ went after him with criminal charges anyway. I imagine that if he were alive today, he'd be quite happy to not only see Sci-Hub in existence, but that it appears to be getting sympathetic press coverage as well. One hopes that it can continue to be an inspiration to others as well.

If copyright law is actively being used to hinder education and learning -- and the "progress of science" -- shouldn't we be questioning what the hell it's doing and whether or not what we have is even remotely constitutional?

Meanwhile, as Mike Taylor has pointed out, prior to Elsevier suing, Sci-Hub wasn't that widely known and yet now it's getting tons of press coverage. There's a phrase for that kind of thing, isn't there?

Filed Under: alexandra elbakyan, copyright, open access, science
Companies: elsevier, sci-hub

Elsevier Granted Injunction Against Research Paper 'Pirate Site;' Which Immediately Moves To New Domain To Dodge It

from the MOLE-WHACKING-PROGRAM-DEEMED-TEMPORARY-SUCCESS! dept

The academic open access movement has gained traction over the past several years as more researchers have noticed their work disappearing behind incredibly expensive paywalls. What could be used to further the scientific world is instead being used to keep companies like Elsevier in prime financial health. Even publicly-funded research is largely unavailable, even to other researchers. Elsevier's participation in the open access movement has been to charge readers for access to open access documents. Recently, the hashtag #icanhazpdf has been used on Twitter to encourage the sharing of paywalled documents between researchers.

Not officially part of the open-access movement are repositories run by Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher born and educated in Kazakhstan. Elbakyan's first efforts to liberate documents from behind publisher paywalls were limited to fulfilling requests made by other researchers in online forums. When she saw the demand far exceeded the supply, she automated the process, stashing the documents at Sci-Hub.org.

Elsevier sued Elbakyan for copyright infringement back in June, seeking an injunction against several domains (including LibGen). A New York judge granted the publisher's request on October 28th. Not that it appears to matter much, as Quirin Shiermeier of Nature reports.

Access to the site’s web domain was suspended following the injunction. But Sci-Hub, which is advertised as a service “to remove all barriers in the way of science”, has since moved to a different domain. Its revamped site continues to provide unauthorized free access to millions of papers.

Other pirate services, including Libgen, which also allows users to freely download audiobooks, and BookFi, a free repository of more than 2 million books, have also resurfaced on different Internet domains.

Elbakyan, perhaps unsurprisingly, feels the new domain doesn't violate the injunction.

Elbakyan, who was born and educated in Kazakhstan and is now based in Russia, says she doesn’t think that reviving her site violates the New York court ruling, because Sci-Hub is not a US-based company, and she is not a US citizen or resident of New York.

As a Russian citizen, Elbakyan is free to raise dubious legal arguments. There's not much Elsevier can do other than waste its own money stamping out new domains as they emerge. Elbakyan was the only defendant to respond to Elsevier's lawsuit (via mail). Her responses were more idealistic expressions than legal arguments, due to her personal stance on the issue of paywalled information and her position as a pro se defendant.

To the extent that Elbakyan mounts a legal challenge to the motion for a preliminary injunction, it is on the public interest prong of the test. In her letter to the Court, she notes that there are "lots of researchers… especially in developing countries" who do not have access to key scientific papers owned by Elsevier and similar organizations, and who cannot afford to pay the high fees that Elsevier charges. Elbakyan states in her letter that Elsevier "operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?" Elbakyan also notes that researchers do not actually receive money in exchange for granting Elsevier a copyright. Rather, she alleges they give Elsevier ownership of their works "because Elsevier is an owner of so-called 'high-impact' journals."

All good points, but unlikely to move a US federal judge. Elbakyan's spoofing of university IP addresses to download papers free of charge does seem more aligned with the work of Aaron Swartz than the Pirate Bays of the world. But either way, the US court system -- and the government itself -- punishes people for disseminating information certain entities would rather let gather virtual dust behind expensive paywalls. (Elsevier's complaint also alleges violations of the CFAA.) The fact that many researchers can't even download copies of their own works without paying for them is completely ridiculous.

Unfortunately, none of this changes the fact that the law views it as copyright infringement. And it doesn't change the fact that anti-infringement efforts like Elsevier's will do little to curtail this sort of file sharing. What it could do is take a look at its pricing. Sometimes trimming the profit margin has more impact on copyright infringement than a fistful of federal lawsuits.

Filed Under: alexandra elbakayan, copyright, injunctions, research papers
Companies: elsevier, libgen, sci-hub

Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing

from the gotta-protect-that-39%-profit-margin dept

Elsevier has pretty much established itself as the most hated company in the world of academic publishing, a fact demonstrated most recently when all the editors and editorial board resigned from one of its top journals to set up their own, open access rival. A blog post by the statistician Chris H.J. Hartgerink shows that Elsevier is still an innovator when it comes to making life hard for academics. Hartgerink's work at Tilburg University in the Netherlands concerns detecting potentially problematic research that might involve data fabrication -- obviously an important issue for the academic world. A key technique he is employing is content mining -- essentially bringing together large bodies of text and data in order to extract interesting facts from them:

I am trying to extract test results, figures, tables, and other information reported in papers throughout the majority of the psychology literature. As such, I need the research papers published in psychology that I can mine for these data. To this end, I started 'bulk' downloading research papers from, for instance, [Elsevier's] Sciencedirect. I was doing this for scholarly purposes and took into account potential server load by limiting the amount of papers I downloaded per minute to 9. I had no intention to redistribute the downloaded materials, had legal access to them because my university pays a subscription, and I only wanted to extract facts from these papers.

He spread out the downloads over ten days so as not to hammer Elsevier's servers -- which in any case are doubtless pretty beefy given the 39% profit margin the company enjoys:

I downloaded approximately 30GB of data from Sciencedirect in approximately 10 days. This boils down to a server load of 35KB/s, 0.0021GB/min, 0.125GB/h, 3GB/day.

Elsevier's response to this super-considerate researcher is a classic:

Approximately two weeks after I started downloading psychology research papers, Elsevier notified my university that this was a violation of the access contract, that this could be considered stealing of content, and that they wanted it to stop. My librarian explicitly instructed me to stop downloading (which I did immediately), otherwise Elsevier would cut all access to Sciencedirect for my university.

There are clear parallels with the situation that Aaron Schwarz found himself in, but with a key difference. Elsevier is not only stopping Hartgerink from carrying out his research, but threatening to cut off all access to the company's journals and books for everyone working at Tilburg University if he tries to continue. Alicia Wise, Elsevier's Director of Access & Policy, added the following comment on Hartgerink's blog post:

We are happy for you to text mind content that we publish via the ScienceDirect API, but not via screen scraping.

When she was asked why it was necessary to use the API, rather than simply downloading articles, she replied:

The reason that we require miners to use the API is so that we can meet their needs AND ALSO the needs of our human users who can continue to read, search and download articles and not have their service interrupted in any way.

But that doesn't make any sense when Hartgerink had taken such pains to avoid any such adverse affects. Moreover, another commenter noted that Elsevier’s API often fails to work, rendering it useless for content mining. Even when it does work:

In many cases the API returns only metadata in the XML, compared to the fulltext PDF I can access on the website. Simply downloading the paper via the normal web service for readers is easy -- much easier than using the API.

What is really at stake here is control. Elsevier wants to be acknowledged as the undisputed gatekeeper for all possible uses of the research it publishes -- most of which was paid for by the public through taxes. And as far as the company is concerned, daring to use that knowledge in new ways without additional permission is simply "stealing."

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Filed Under: chris hartgerink, downloads, knowledge, research
Companies: elsevier

Not Just Academics Fed Up With Elsevier: Entire Editorial Staff Resigns En Masse To Start Open Access Journal

from the good-for-them dept

It's really somewhat astounding just how absolutely hated journal publishing giant Elsevier has become in certain academic circles. The company seems to have perfected its role of being about as evil as possible in trying to lock up knowledge and making it expensive and difficult to access. A few years ago, we noted that a bunch of academics were banding together to boycott journals published by the company, as more and more people were looking at open access journals, allowing them to more freely share their research, rather than locking it up. Elsevier's response has been to basically crack down on efforts to share knowledge. The company has been known to charge for open access research -- sometimes even buying up journals and ignoring the open licenses on the works. The company has also been demanding professors takedown copies of their own research. Because how dare anyone actually benefit from knowledge without paying Elsevier its toll. And that's not even mentioning Elsevier's history of publishing fake journals as a way to help giant pharmaceutical companies pretend their treatments were effective.

Basically on the list of companies which really are pushing to get themselves declared "evil," Elsevier has a prime spot.

And now even its employees are revolting. The editorial staff of an Elsevier journal have all resigned to go start an open access journal instead:

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier's policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors' noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.

The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn't even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy.

One of the editors who quit notes that he'd "be better off going to flip burgers" in the time he spent working for the journal, rather than accepting the tiny amount Elsevier pays him.

While this may seem like a specific kind of dispute focused in the academic world, what's incredible is it shows just how far copyright has moved from its original purpose and intent. The original copyright laws were officially focused on this kind of research. The US's first copyright law was specific that it was an act for "the encouragement of learning." And the use of "science" in the Constitutional copyright clause actually meant "learning" at the time it was written. Copyright was supposed to be about encouraging people to share information for educational/learning purposes.

And now it's being used for exactly the opposite. And in these cases it's certainly not (at all) about compensating content creators. Academic authors don't get paid for their research papers -- and in some areas they even have to pay to submit it to these journals. And companies like Elsevier get tons of free or cheap labor as well. Peer review is generally done for free. The article notes that the executive editor of the journal is paid only $5,000 per year. And yet the company wants to charge libraries thousands of dollars to access it?

It's a total scam.

And, worse, it's a scam where all of us are the victims. The sharing of knowledge and the ability to learn from others and to build on their works is a core aspect of how learning, science and education advance. And Elsevier has rejected all of that in favor of fat profits -- something it can only do because of our totally screwed up copyright laws. Having the editorial staff here resign is a really strong public message that hopefully people take notice of.

In the meantime, however, Elsevier should be Exhibit A in how copyright is abused to stifle learning which is completely opposed to its Constitutional purpose.

Filed Under: copyright, education, glossa, journals, learning, lingua, literary journal, open access
Companies: elsevier

New Boycott In Support Of Open Access: Third Time Lucky?

from the idea-whose-time-has-come dept

Over three years ago, we wrote about a fast-growing boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, organised in protest at that company's high prices, its "bundling" of journals into larger collections, and its support for SOPA. Even though over 15,000 people eventually pledged not to work with Elsevier, the company is still going strong, making huge profits from the work of academics, and putting paywalls between the public and knowledge. Perhaps we should have guessed it would end like that. As we noted then, this was not the first or biggest boycott in the history of open access. In 2000, 34,000 scientists from 180 nations signed up to the following:

we pledge that, beginning in September 2001, we will publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.

The failure by many of them to follow through on that promise did have one positive effect: it led to the creation of what remains perhaps the most influential open access publisher, the Public Library of Science, which is still around today, and flourishing. Both of these unsuccessful attempts to use boycotts to push forward open access are mentioned in a post by Dr Danny Kingsley on the Unlocking Research blog, which reports on yet another attempt to use this approach:

A long running dispute between Dutch universities and Elsevier has taken an interesting turn. Yesterday Koen Becking, chairman of the Executive Board of Tilburg University who has been negotiating with scientific publishers about an open access policy on behalf of Dutch universities with his colleague Gerard Meijer, announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier.

As a first step in boycotting the publisher, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) has asked all scientists that are editor in chief of a journal published by Elsevier to give up their post. If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.

And here's why Kingsley thinks this time the boycott might work:

Typically negotiations with publishers occur at an institutional level and with representatives from the university libraries. This makes sense as libraries have long standing relationships with publishers and understand the minutiae of the licencing processes . However the Dutch negotiations have been led by the Vice Chancellors of the universities. It is a country-wide negotiation at the highest level. And Vice Chancellors have the ability to request behaviour change of their research communities.

That exposes what went wrong with the previous boycotts: they were carried out by the researchers, who have very little clout individually or even collectively when it comes to putting pressure on huge companies like Elsevier. But the Vice Chancellors have real power, based on the ability to instruct their respective institutions how they should -- or shouldn't -- act, including, presumably, how they spend their money on journal subscriptions.

The Dutch seem to be serious about making open access the norm in their country. A recent amendment to the country's copyright act means that authors are now entitled by law to make the results of their research available under open access licenses. As a short notice on the University of Utrecht site explains:

This means that university staff no longer have to lay down the right to publish open access in agreements with publishers. After the amendment of the law they have and keep this right automatically. With the publisher they only have to reach an agreement on the length of 'a reasonable period of time'.

Even without the boycott, then, Elsevier will be obliged to agree to release research that is completely or partly paid for by the Dutch government as open access after that "reasonable period of time." All-in-all, now might be a good moment for the company to take a more accommodating approach to open access than it has in the past.

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Filed Under: academic journals, boycott, journals, open access
Companies: elsevier