Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop?

from the is-it-different-this-time? dept

It's now widely recognized that the extreme demands of SOPA/PIPA catalyzed a new activism within the Net world, epitomized by the blackout effected by sites like Wikipedia on January 18. But as Techdirt has reported, SOPA and PIPA are not the only attacks by the copyright industries on the digital commons: another is the Research Works Act (RWA), which attempts to remove the public's right to read the articles written by tax-funded researchers in open access journals form.

But, like SOPA/PIPA, RWA may have been an intellectual land-grab too far. It has provoked a rebellion by academics that might provide the final push needed to move academic publishing from its current mode, dominated by hugely-profitable corporations that require payment for most of their output, to one based around open access journals, with smaller profits, but whose articles are freely available online to all.

Things started when Peter Suber, who is widely regarded as one of the unofficial leaders of the open access movement, pledged on January 7 not to work with any publisher that accepted the Association of American Publishers' position supporting RWA. But it was a blog post two weeks later by the British mathematician and Fields Medallist (think Nobel Prize of mathematics) Tim Gowers that provided the spark for the explosion of anger that followed:

I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.

He singled out the giant publisher Elsevier (disclosure: I used to work for one of its sister companies) for three main reasons. First, for its scholarly journals' high prices; secondly, for its use of "bundling" -- forcing libraries to sign up for large collections of journals, whether they wanted them all or not; and finally, because of its support for SOPA, PIPA -- and RWA.

Gower's gesture was born of personal exasperation, but one that he knew many others shared. The question was how to mobilize people so that their collective action would have an effect. He wrote:

It occurs to me that it might help if there were a website somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand if they could see that many others were already doing so, and that it would be a good way of making that stand public.

Within a couple of days, Tyler Neylon had set up just such a site, "The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier", which repeats the three main objections that Gowers raised, and invites people to refrain from working with Elsevier. At the time of writing, nearly 2,000 academics from a wide range of disciplines have pledged their support for the boycott.

This is certainly the most visible revolt in recent years against the exorbitant profits of companies like Elsevier, and their tight control of the academic publishing process, but it's not the first or the biggest. Back in 2000, right at the dawn of open access, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) was created with the same aim of making research more widely available. To achieve this, the three founders of PLoS circulated an open letter calling for "the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form", which contained the following passage:

To encourage the publishers of our journals to support this endeavor, 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

Nearly 34,000 scientists signed that letter, but only a handful of publishers committed themselves to making their articles available as the letter requested; worse, few signatories followed through with their promised boycotts of the publishers who refused. Will things be any different this time, in the post-SOPA world?

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Filed Under: academics, boycotts, journals, open access, peter suber, publishing, tim gowers
Companies: elsevier

Why Adversarial Hearings Are Important: Rulings Change When The Other Side Is Heard

from the let-them-be-heard dept

We already wrote about the judge's ruling saying that Chitika was not liable for running ads on a site that linked to some allegedly infringing material, but there was a separate point brought out by the case -- and by Eric Goldman's analysis, that I wanted to highlight. As we noted, in that case, a court said that Chitika shouldn't be liable, because it was unaware of the infringement. But, the thing is, this is the second ruling in this case. The original ruling, back in January was different. It ordered the ad networks Chitika and Clicksor to freeze all money for the site and stop serving ads. But all of that was done without Chitika's participation in the case. In other words, no adversarial hearing.

Once Chitika got involved, the ruling flipped almost entirely. Or, as Goldman summarizes:

But hold on a second. The court's January order was based on ex parte proceedings. Chitika subsequently showed up to contest the case, and surprise! The court reaches a different result after adversarial proceedings. Let's hear it for due process!!! YEAH!

We hear all the time from defenders of ICE domain seizures and SOPA/PIPA that there is due process "because there's a judge involved." But that's not due process. If one of the key parties impacted by the lawsuit is not heard from it's not due process at all. True due process means you hear from those actually impacted. And, as we see in this case, it can make a pretty big difference.

Filed Under: adversarial hearings, due process, pipa, protect ip, sopa
Companies: chitika, clicksor, elsevier, john wiley

Publishers Can't Just Blame Ad Network For Having Ads On A Site That Links To Infringing Content

from the properly-applying-liability dept

As we've seen in some cases, there is a belief among some that many of the worst provisions in SOPA already exist under US copyright law. The latest story involves publishers Elsevier and John Wiley going after ad networks Chitika and Clicksor, because their ads showed up on a site that linked to (but did not host) some content that allegedly infringed. We mentioned this case earlier in the year, but the latest ruling is at least a slight limit on this attempt at what appears to be fourth party liability, rather than third party liability. Note the distance. Someone puts up a website with some infringing content. Someone else links to that content. Someone else provides advertising on that site that links... and the copyright holder claims the advertiser is liable? Huh?

The ruling does go against the publishers here, but only because they failed to first send a notice alerting Chitika, so the court said that Chitika didn't know that the content was infringing:

Plaintiffs do not allege facts showing that Chitika was familiar with the content of the Pharmatext website, or knew (or had reason to know) that such content was infringing. Thus, plaintiffs fail to support with plausible facts their conclusory allegations that Chitika “must have had knowledge” of the alleged infringement of plaintiffs’ books...and that Chitika “plac[ed] ads on the Pharmatext site because [it] believe[d] that Pharmatext users – in other words, people seeking to obtain pirated copies of copyrighted books – are a target audience for particular advertisers.”

Of course, as Eric Goldman notes in his analysis (linked above), this suggests that if Elsevier had sent notice, then it might have a claim... and suddenly we're back in SOPA territory, since that has a notice provision for advertisers.

There is also some discussion in the case of whether or not US jurisdiction is proper, seeing as the site was directed at users in India. Elsevier claimed that because its investigators downloaded the content in the US, that means it's proper to apply US laws, but the court isn't entirely sure of that:

While it appears that Chitika may eventually be entitled to judgment on this ground (that is, plaintiffs’ failure to allege any act of direct infringement occurring entirely within the United States), factual issues involving the structure of the Internet and the locus of the infringing activity remain (Where did the copying take place? Where are the third-party websites and servers, from which unauthorized copies of plaintiffs’ books were downloaded?). These issues preclude the granting of the motion on this ground.

Of course, even pre-SOPA, the Justice Department and ICE like to claim that any .com or .org is automatically subject to US jurisdiction. Either way, it's a reminder that even without SOPA or PIPA in place, the courts may be creating very similar caselaw anyway. That's pretty scary.

Especially when it comes to such fourth party, or tertiary liability, since it seems positively crazy to think that someone so disconnected from any law breaking might be legally liable for it. Again, as Goldman notes:

Notice that this court totally sidestepped (or missed?) the tertiary liability aspect of this case--that Chitika was a support provider to a site that only provided links to allegedly infringing files. To me, it would be entirely appropriate for the court to say that any tertiary player categorically lacks the ability to materially contribute to infringing activity. Otherwise, once we start doing a dragnet for service providers to service providers to infringers, the universe of potential defendants grows to a ridiculous size.

If anything this is why we should be creating further safe harbors for parties, not decimating them with things like SOPA and PIPA.

Filed Under: ad networks, fourth party liability, secondary liability, sopa, tertiary liability, third party liability
Companies: chitika, clicksor, elsevier, john wiley

DailyDirt: Getting A Crowd Together...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There have been a few interesting crowdfunding and crowdsourcing projects in recent years -- solving some really difficult problems or just creating cool stuff (out of stuff that didn't seem so cool). Here are just a few more examples of crowd projects that are out there (and are possibly a bit "out there" too).

• Collecting a lot of data on earthquakes requires a lot of sensors -- which can now be crowd-purchased to help create a Quake Catcher Network that will deploy seismic sensors and develop an educational game to go along with the sensor network. This project has a $4000 goal, and there's just over a month left to help fund it. [url]
• An Android phone placed inside the satellite will be shot into orbit next year, and the Space App competition has picked four apps that will run on this phone as it circles the Earth. One of the apps sounds pretty lame, though. [url]
• The Apps for Science challenge has picked a few apps that might help scientists do their work more efficiently. Unfortunately, these apps only work on Elsevier's SciVerse online portal and require a SciVerse account. [url]
• To discover more interesting business-related content, check out what the deal is on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: apps, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, earthquakes, satellites
Companies: elsevier

Academic Publishing Profits Enough To Fund Open Access To Every Research Article In Every Field

from the let's-just-do-it dept

The arguments against open access have moved on from the initial "it'll never work" to the "maybe it'll work, but it's not sustainable" stage. That raises a valid point, of course: who will pay for journals that make their content freely available online?

There are many open access business models that are being tried, and one of the most obvious ones is to charge authors a publication fee – in fact, many traditional academic journals do that as well as making readers pay a subscription fee. In practise, the fee is usually paid by the author's funding institution as part of their overall support for research.

A per-article publication fee is the approach adopted by one of the leading open access publishers, Public Library of Science (PLoS). Its announcement earlier this year that revenue now covers its operating costs is an important data point in establishing the viability of the open access approach.

Meanwhile, on the traditional publishing side, Heather Morrison has been analysing the profits of the major academic publisher Elsevier (disclosure: I worked in one of Reed-Elsevier's divisions a few decades ago) on her splendidly-named blog "The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics":

If the total profit from Elsevier and Lexis-Nexis is added together and converted to U.S. dollars, the total is $2,075m. Divided by the estimated worldwide scholarly article output of 1.5 million articles per year (Björk et al, 2008), this comes out to $1,383 U.S.

That figure is very close to the $1350 article fee charged by PLoS for its biggest title, PLoS ONE, which means:

the profits of this one company alone could fund a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system, at a rate of $1,383 U.S. per article.

A comment on a post on another blog with a fantastic name - "Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week" (what is it about open access advocates and their blogs?) - pointed out that this calculation was incorrect, and that the actual figure was more like $730 per article. But adding in the profits of another major academic publisher, Springer, would bring the overall profit per article published back up to the PLoS ONE level.

But those are just details; what really matters is the fact that collectively the top two or maybe three publishers take out of the academic world enough profits to pay for every research article in every discipline to be made freely available online for everyone to access using PLoS's publishing fee approach.

As Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week's Mike Taylor explains, that would mean:

Dentists would be able to keep up with the relevant literature. Small businesses would be able to make plans with full information. The Climate Code Foundation would have a sounder and more up-to-date scientific basis for its work. Patient groups would be able to understand their diseases and give informed consent for treatment. Medical charities, amateur palaeontologists, ornithologists and so many more would have access to the information they need. Researchers in third-world countries could have the information they need to cope with life-threatening issues of health, food and water.

We can have all that for our $2.075 billion per year. Or we can keep giving it to Elsevier’s [+Springer's] shareholders. Giving it, remember: not buying something with it. Don’t forget, this is not the money that Elsevier absorbs as its costs: salaries, rent, connectivity, what have you. This is their profit. It’s pure profit. This is the money that is taken out of the system.

So, yes, open access is cheaper. Stupidly cheaper. Absurdly, ridiculously, appallingly cheaper.

It's an intriguing thought: to provide global access to all current academic research we just need to flip from one system – the present one, where a few giant corporations make billions of dollars a year – to one where open access publishers break even, and where academic institutions save money. So what are we waiting for?

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Filed Under: academic research, open access, plos, research
Companies: elsevier

Publishers Remove 2500 Journals From Free Access In Bangladesh; Put Them Back When People Notice

from the gotta-pay-to-do-research dept

We've discussed in the past some of the more ethically dubious moves by the big academic journal publishers, and the more you look, the worse it seems to get. Glyn Moody has the story about how a bunch of publishers all agreed to remove free access to thousands of journals in Bangladesh. Apparently they had previously allowed such free access, noting that Bangladesh was a developing nation, but now they claim they've seen enough sales to pull the plug on the free access. Among the journals removed:

From 4 January Elsevier Journals withdrew access in Bangladesh to 1610 of its publications, including the Lancet stable of journals, which had been available through the World Health Organization’s Health Inter-Network for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme. HINARI was set up in 2002 to enable not for profit institutions in developing countries to gain access online to more than 7000 biomedical and health titles either free or at very low cost.

Springer has withdrawn 588 of its journals from the programme in Bangladesh and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins 299 journals. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Society for Animal Science have withdrawn access to, respectively, two and three of their journals.

And this resulted in the bizarre situation in which some researchers in the country no longer had access to their own research:

Tracey Koehlmoos, head of the health and family planning systems programme at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, said, "We are a little less than 300 scientists eking out world class research on a shoestring budget without the purchasing power capacity of a big university in the West. HINARI has been our lifeline. My colleagues publish in many of these journals, and now we won’t even have access to our own papers."

Access to knowledge is important for creating new knowledge. Blocking off such access to these scientists and researchers is a really unfortunate move.

Thankfully, as I was finishing up writing this piece, I saw the news that, given the outcry of protests about this, the publishers backed down (pdf). However, it seems troubling that it should take a public outcry for these publishers to realize this was a bad idea.

Filed Under: access to knowledge, bangladesh, journals, research
Companies: elsevier

Elsevier Caught Again: Published Ghost Written, Industry Supporting Articles As Scientific Resesarch

from the credibility? dept

Earlier this year, it was revealed that publishing giant Elsevier had allowed pharma king Merck to create a fake peer reviewed journal that hyped up certain Merck products, such that doctors would think that there was some serious science behind them. It later came out that Elsevier actually had a whole division which specialized in publishing such fake journals, made to appear real, and given the Elsevier stamp of approval (which hopefully is now becoming worthless). But, it appears things keep getting worse. Coral Hess notes yet another scandal, once again involving Elsevier's (now) fake stamp of approval. This time, it involved people hired by certain pharma companies ghostwriting scientific "review" articles that were supposed to give an overview of all the research on certain treatments, but... "emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks" of those treatments. And people wonder why we're so skeptical about allowing pharma companies to dictate both our healthcare plans and our patent laws...

Filed Under: ghostwriting, marketing, scientific research
Companies: elsevier

Elsevier Reveals More Details About Its Fake Journal Division

from the that-would-be-an-oops dept

Remember how Elsevier and Merck were caught putting out a fake journal that had articles favoring Merck drugs, implying peer reviewed articles that weren't? Soon afterwards, it came out that Elsevier had a whole division for such things. However, following an internal investigation, it looks like Elsevier is backtracking a bit and saying that, while the group's practices were problematic, most weren't as egregious as the "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (AJBJM)" that was created by Merck and Elsevier. Instead, most of the others were sponsored by multiple companies, rather than just one. Still, the company admits that it never should have called the custom publications "journals" and is changing its publication rules -- having editors from its real journals create the guidelines for any custom publication offerings. Either way, this whole episode is a serious black mark on Elsevier and the reputation of any of its journals -- real or "fake."

Filed Under: fake journals, medical journals
Companies: elsevier, merck

Elsevier Had A Whole Division Publishing Fake Medical Journals

from the doesn't-that-make-you-feel-safe? dept

Remember a week ago when we wrote about pharma giant Merck and publishing giant Elsevier working together to publish a fake journal that talked up various Merck drugs and was used by doctors to show that the drugs were safe and useful? Well, you knew the story wouldn't end there, right? Slashdot points us to the discovery that there is actually a whole division at Elsevier that would publish such journals and tried to duck this fact before sort of (but not fully) admitting it:

In a statement to The Scientist magazine, Elsevier at first said the company "does not today consider a compilation of reprinted articles a 'journal'". I would like to expand on this ­statement: It was a collection of academic journal articles, published by the academic journal publisher Elsevier, in an academic ­journal-shaped package. Perhaps if it wasn't an academic journal they could have made this clearer in the title which, I should have mentioned, was named: The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

Things have deteriorated since. It turns out that Elsevier put out six such journals, sponsored by industry. The Elsevier chief executive, Michael Hansen, has now admitted that they were made to look like journals, and lacked proper disclosure. "This was an unacceptable practice and we regret that it took place," he said.

The pharmaceutical industry, and publishers, as we have repeatedly seen, have serious difficulties in living up to the high standards needed in this field, and bad information in the medical literature leads doctors to make irrational prescribing decisions, which ultimately can cost lives, and cause unnecessary suffering, not to mention the expense.

Doesn't that make you feel safe about the drugs you take?

Filed Under: advertorial, medical journals
Companies: elsevier, merck

Merck And Elsevier Exposed For Creating Fake Peer Review Journal

from the wow dept

I know I've mentioned for a while that I've been spending a lot of time looking into the healthcare industry -- particularly pharmaceutical companies, but haven't written that much about them yet because I haven't had the time to put everything together. However, the one thing that seems pretty consistent is how incredibly untrustworthy some of these companies are. The claims that it costs $800 million to make a pill are totally unsubstantiated. The idea that patents are necessary to create drugs is also entirely unsubstantiated. The more you look at it, the more you realize that patents have actually allowed the pharma industry to slow down many potential life-saving innovations in favor of a drug-based solution that isn't always the best. That isn't to say that there aren't some valuable pharmaceuticals, but the industry has a long history of deception and convincing the public and politicians that they need a lot more protection and money than they really do -- and that their drugs are more effective than they really are.

Even so, I was still somewhat stunned to read (via Clay Shirky) that Merck supposedly created a fake peer-reviewed journal to publish data that made its drugs look good. It also got Elsevier to publish the journal to make it look legit (Elsevier being one of the bigger publishers of -- of course -- proprietary medical journals). Two companies with a history of locking up information and data teaming up to mislead doctors and the public? What a shock...

Of course, this is exactly the sort of thing that you can do when everything is locked up and proprietary, rather than open. There's almost no way to confirm or check the data or information to make sure it's legit, so people tend to assume it is. In that regard, perhaps it's no surprise that the two companies eventually went down this road, but it does highlight one of the problems with the way the system works today. As Shirky later points out this is hardly unique for a firm like Elsevier, which has faced some serious ethical questions regarding its publications in the past as well.

Filed Under: closed source, journals, peer review, pharmaceuticals, proprietary, scams
Companies: elsevier, merck, reed elsevier