Top University Of California Scientists Tell Elsevier They'll No Longer Work On Elsevier Journals

from the bye-bye dept

Last week we highlighted the ongoing dispute between academic publishing giant Elsevier and the University of California (UC) system. Earlier this year, UC cancelled its contract with Elsevier, after the publishing giant -- which gets nearly all of its content and labor for free, but charges insane prices for what is often publicly funded research -- refused to lower prices or to work with the UC system on moving to an open access approach. Last week, we covered how Elsevier had emailed a bunch of UC folks with what appeared to be outright lies about the status of negotiations between the two organizations, and UC hit back with some facts to debunk Elsevier.

Perhaps Elsevier is getting antsy because a bunch of UC scientists have sent an open letter to Elsevier, saying they will no longer do editorial work for any Elsevier publications until this dispute gets worked out.

Among the signatories of the letter are Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology, and Elizabeth Backburn, co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Once again, we're left wondering what value Elsevier even provides to the overall ecosystem any more. It doesn't fund the research. It hands off most reviewing and editing tasks to other academics. And yet, it gets to (a) keep the copyright on the research and (b) charge absolutely ridiculous sums to universities which feel they "must" have access to these publications. And, this is in the age of the internet when "publishing" is literally a button on a webpage. Why does Elsevier even still exist?

Filed Under: academic research, open access
Companies: elseivier, university of california

Big Win For Open Access, As University Of California Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions, Worth $11 Million A Year

from the academic-publishing's-emperor-has-no-clothes dept

As Techdirt has reported over the years, the move to open access, whereby anyone can read academic papers for free, is proving a long, hard journey. However, the victories are starting to build up, and here's another one that could have important wider ramifications for open access, especially in the US:

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC's key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals.

In negotiating with Elsevier, UC aimed to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by ensuring that research produced by UC's 10 campuses -- which accounts for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. publishing output -- would be immediately available to the world, without cost to the reader. Under Elsevier's proposed terms, the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university's multi-million dollar subscription, resulting in much greater cost to the university and much higher profits for Elsevier.

The problems faced by the University of California (UC) are the usual ones. The publishing giant Elsevier was willing to move to an open access model -- but only if the University of California paid even more on top of what were already "rapidly escalating costs". To its credit, the institution instead decided to walk, depriving Elsevier of around $11 million a year (pdf).

But that's not the most important aspect of this move. After all, $11 million is small change for a company whose operating profit is over a billion dollars per year. What will worry Elsevier more is that the University of California is effectively saying that the company's journals are not so indispensable that it will sign up to a bad deal. It's the academic publishing equivalent of pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

The University of California is not the first academic institution to come to this realization. National library consortiums in Germany, Hungary and Sweden have all made the same decision to cancel their subscriptions with Elsevier. Those were all important moves. But the University of California's high-profile refusal to capitulate to Elsevier is likely to be noted and emulated by other US universities now that the approach has been validated by such a large and influential institution.

As to where researchers at the University of California (and in Germany, Hungary and Sweden) will obtain copies of articles published in Elsevier titles that are no longer available to them through subscriptions -- UC retains access to older ones -- there are many other options. For example, preprints are increasingly popular, and circulate freely. Contacting the authors directly usually results in copies being made available, since academics naturally want their papers read as widely as possible.

And then, of course, there is Sci-Hub, which now claims to provide access to 70 million articles. Researchers that end up at Sci-Hub in search of a hard-to-find item may well discover how much more convenient it is than the traditional subscription services that impose strict controls on access to publications. The risk for Elsevier is that once researchers get a taste of quick, seamless access to everything, they may never want go back to the old system, however much the company slashes its prices to win back business.

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Filed Under: academic research, journal articles, open access, paywalls, scientific research
Companies: elsevier, uc berkeley, university of california

Chicago Bears Back Off GoBears Hashtag Dispute Over Trademark Concern With Cal

from the bears-win! dept

With the trademarking of hashtags now in full swing, it's about time some light was shone on exactly what type of trademarks are granted on them. The trademarking of hashtags isn't in and of itself perplexing, although it does cause this writer some mild annoyance. Locking up language in general is something that should be treated carefully, but doing so specifically with social media language in an ecosystem designed for proliferation and sharing is ripe for conflict. One need only look at how the Olympics treats hashtags to see this, or how big businesses will greedily "protect" the use of hashtags, no matter any actual concern about public confusion over the use of the marks. The point is, the same general problem with the practical application of trademarks is exacerbated by social media: trademarks too often aren't specific or identifying enough.

Recently, an example of this has emerged on Twitter in the form of a quickly-resolved dispute between the University of California and the NFL's Chicago Bears. Cal's mascot is "the Golden Bears", you see. The Chicago Bears somewhat irritatingly staked a claim to the hashtag #GoBears, such that the Chicago Bears logo appeared every time someone used the hashtag. The University of California holds a trademark on the hashtag, however, and the school's Twitter account registered its annoyance with the Chicago team in an admittedly congenial way.

Now, to be clear, what the Chicago Bears did was both dumb and irritating. Cal's response was not overly aggressive either. The end result of all of this was that the Chicago Bears backed off and the team logo no longer appears when the hashtag is used. There's no big bad villian in this story.

But we're not going to let this go without pointing out that #GoBears simply is not a source-identifying hashtag for the Cal Golden Bears. It's just not. There are a ton of teams that use some flavor of "bears" as their mascots. Here in Chicago, when someone says "go Bears!", there is no confusion as to the reference and the University of California never even enters the mind. So, instead of being a trademark designed to act as a brand identifier, instead this is simply an instance of a university locking up the term in hashtag form. It's exactly the same as what the Chicago Bears did, in other words, when it placed its logo alongside any use of the hashtag: claiming ownership and limiting the use of the term for everyone else. Given that the term is a terrible identifier of the product being discussed, it seems obvious that it never should have been granted trademark rights.

Filed Under: bears, go bears, hashtags, social media, trademark, tweets
Companies: chicago bears, uc berkeley, university of california

Napolitano Says She's Always Wanted To Talk About The Secret Surveillance She Hasn't Talked About Since Last August

from the it's-all-just-a-big,-opaque,-pitch-black,-secretive-misunderstanding! dept

A Techdirt reader has sent us a copy of former DHS head/current University of California President Janet Napolitano's official response to the outcry over the secret surveillance of UC staffers -- surveillance she personally approved.

Napolitiano's letter to UC-Berkeley employees immediately ties the secretive surveillance implementation to the UCLA Medical Center cyberattack, just in case anyone (and it's a lot of anyones) feels the effort was unwarranted.

A group of faculty members at the Berkeley campus has articulated concerns regarding some of the security measures we adopted in the wake of the UCLA cyberattack last year. The concerns focus on two primary issues: whether systemwide cyber threat detection is necessary and whether it complies with the University’s Electronic Communications Policy (ECP); and why University administrators failed to publicly share information about our response to the cyberattack.

If your privacy is being compromised, the real villains here are the people behind the cyberattack. As for the secrecy surrounding it, Napolitano seems to indicate she'd like to discuss it, but immediately abandons that line of inquiry to blame disgruntled staffers and the media for misrepresenting her snooping initiative.

The Berkeley faculty members have shared their concerns with colleagues at other campuses and with various media outlets. Unfortunately, many have been left with the impression that a secret initiative to snoop on faculty activities is underway. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Please explain.

I attach a letter from Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Nava explaining the rationale for these security measures.

Great, except that Nava's letter arrived five months after the program was implemented and two months after a university official said the program would be shut down -- a statement which itself preceded (by a month) the news that the program has actually been allowed to continue uninterrupted.

Napolitano claims there was no secrecy.

As you know, leadership at all levels, including The Regents, Academic Senate leadership, and campus leadership, has been kept apprised of these matters, including through the establishment and convening of the Cyber Risk Governance Committee (CRGC). The CRGC, comprises each campus’s Cyber Risk Responsible Executive (CRE), as well as a representative of the University’s faculty Senate, the General Counsel, and other individuals from this office with responsibility for systemwide cybersecurity initiatives.

Yes, look at all the people who were informed! And were apparently informed they could not pass this information on to anyone else!

From our earlier post on the subject -- directly from some of those on Napolitano's "approved" list.

UCOP would like these facts to remain secret. However, the tenured faculty on the JCCIT are in agreement that continued silence on our part would make us complicit in what we view as a serious violation of shared governance and a serious threat to the academic freedoms that the Berkeley campus has long cherished.

[...]

For many months UCOP required that our IT staff keep these facts secret from faculty and others on the Berkeley campus.

This assertion directly contradicts Napolitano's depiction of the events.

I have from the beginning directed my staff to make every effort to actively engage with all stakeholders and to minimize to the extent possible the amount of information that is not shared widely.

This seems highly unlikely, considering no one began publicly talking about this secret surveillance until just recently. If the information had been widely disseminated (as Napolitano's claims she directed), the backlash would have begun months ago.

And, of course, Napolitano is all about that privacy.

Personal privacy and academic freedom are paramount in everything we do. But we cannot make good on our commitment to protect individual privacy without ensuring a sound cybersecurity infrastructure. While we have absolutely no interest in the content of any individual’s emails or browsing history, we must accept that active network monitoring is a critical element of a sound cybersecurity infrastructure and the interconnectedness of the University and all of its locations requires that such monitoring be coordinated centrally.

School officials -- at least those allowed to see email content/web browsing history -- may claim they have "no interest" in seeing it, but that doesn't change the fact that any of them can access it without fear of repercussion. Not only that, but a third party has access to this same data -- a third party Napolitano won't identify.

She closes her official "this is all fully justified because cyber" letter with the same assertion so many officials make when secret goings-on are dragged out into the sunlight: "I've always wanted to have this discussion I'm now being forced to have!"

I invite further robust discussion and debate on this topic at upcoming meetings of the CRGC and COC.

That's just disingenuous. Don't extend an invitation to a conversation you can no longer avoid.

As the TD reader who sent this over explains, they're not exactly thrilled the former DHS head is using a privacy breach to further undermine UC staffers' privacy.

This sort of thing, by the way, is exactly the reason that everyone had the "say what?" reaction when Napolitano was appointed. This is why people were concerned.

P.S. I'm one of the people whose information was compromised in the UCLA Med Center hack, and don't appreciate their screw-up then being used as an excuse to screw us over now.

Filed Under: cyber attacks, cybersecurity, dhs, janet napolitano, surveillance, transparency
Companies: university of california

Former DHS Boss Puts University Of California Employees Under Secret Surveillance

from the you-didn't-see-anything-so-you'd-better-not-say-anything dept

Former DHS boss Janet Napolitano -- who once stated she "doesn't use email" (for many reasons, but mainly to dodge accountability) -- is now showing her underlings at the University of California why they, too, might not want to "use email": someone might be reading them over their shoulders.

UC professor Christopher Newfield has the inside details of the recently-exposed monitoring system secretly deployed by the University of California (and approved by school president Napolitano) to keep tabs on the communications, web surfing and file routing of its employees. The SF Chronicle has an article on the secretly-installed spyware behind its paysieve [try this link], but Newfield has the internal communications.

The installation of the third-party monitoring software was so secretive that even the university's campus information technology committee was forbidden from discussing it with other staff. The committee has now decided to go public.

UCOP would like these facts to remain secret. However, the tenured faculty on the JCCIT are in agreement that continued silence on our part would make us complicit in what we view as a serious violation of shared governance and a serious threat to the academic freedoms that the Berkeley campus has long cherished.

Some salient facts:

- The UCOP had this hardware installed last summer.

- They did so over the objections of our campus IT and security experts.

- For many months UCOP required that our IT staff keep these facts secret from faculty and others on the Berkeley campus.

- The intrusive hardware is not under the control of local IT staff--it sends data on network activity to UCOP and to the vendor. Of what these data consists we do not know.

- The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus, and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of *all* this data ("full packet capture"). This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus.

The official excuse for the installation of intrusive spyware is "advanced persistent threats" possibly related to a cyberattack on the UCLA Medical Center last summer. How monitoring staff emails plays into the thwarting of "threats" hasn't been explained. Now that the secret's out, the university is claiming it's all good because policies prevent the university from using any intercepted information/communications for "nonsecurity purposes."

The university may have a policy forbidding this activity, but that's not really the same thing as guaranteeing abuse of this surveillance will never happen. Its belated not-an-apology offers no contrition for keeping this a secret from a majority of its staff. And the statement does not name the third party in charge of the collection and monitoring.

While it certainly isn't unusual for employers to monitor employees' use of company computers and devices, it's normally clearly stated in policy manuals, rather than installed surreptitiously and cloaked in deep secrecy.

As Newfield points out, no one was apprised of the monitoring until after it was underway. Some heard a few weeks after the monitoring was put in place (August of last year) when the university updated its security policies following the medical center breach. Many more heard nothing until the first week of December. Following the wider exposure, staffers were assured by the school's vice president that the monitoring would cease and the software would be removed.

The VP said one thing and the school did another.

On Jan. 12, 2016, The Berkeley Joint Committee on Campus Information Technology (JCCIT) met with Larry Conrad and others. The committee was informed that contrary to the Dec. 21, 2015 statements, UCOP had decided to continue the outside monitoring and not disclose any aspects of it to students or faculty.

At this point, the decision was made to go public. A letter was drafted and sent to school administration. It was also sent to the New York Times. This prompted the generation of bullshit from the Executive VP's office.

On Jan. 19, 2016, UCOP Exec. VP and COO Rachael Nava sent a letter to those who signed the Jan. 15, 2016 letter. The original version was marked "CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE" and invoked "Attorney-Client privilege". After several recipients responded to her via email questioning who is the client and why her letter must be kept secret, a revised version of the letter was sent the next day removing that language, stating: "All: Please accept my apologies with regard to the confusion on the attorney client privilege language on the letter. It was a clerical error and was not intentional. Please find a revised version of the letter with the language removed."

The full letter contains some truly incredible statements.

With respect to privacy, the letter and structure of the University’s Electronic Communications Policy (ECP) reflect the principle that privacy perishes in the absence of security. While the ECP establishes an expectation of privacy in an individual’s electronic communications transmitted using University systems, it tempers this expectation with the recognition that privacy requires a reasonable level of security to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access.

Privacy does not "perish" in the absence of security. This conflation of the two is ridiculous. If a malicious party accesses private communications, that's a security issue. If an employer accesses these communications, that a privacy issue. Claiming to value privacy while secretly installing monitoring software (and then lying about removing said software) only serves to show the university cares for neither. By adding a third party to the monitoring process, the university has diminished the privacy protections of its staff and added an attack vector for "advanced persistent threats." It has effectively harmed both privacy and security and, yet, still hopes to claim it was necessary to sacrifice one for the other.

The other statement, tucked away as a footnote, absurdly and obnoxiously claims the real threat to privacy isn't the school, but people making public records requests.

Public Records Act requesters may seek far more intrusive access to the content of faculty or staff records than what the ECP permits for network security monitoring. The limits on the University’s own access to electronic communications under the ECP do not apply to Public Records Act requests.

Meanwhile, the school's tech committee has pointed out its IT staff is more than capable of handling the privacy and security of the network and, quite obviously, would show more respect for their colleagues' privacy while handling both ends of the privacy/security equation.

It's perfectly acceptable for entities to monitor employees' use of communications equipment. But you can't do it this way. You can't install the software secretly, swear certain employees to secrecy, not tell anyone else until the secret is out in the open, promise to roll it back and then secretly decide to do the opposite, etc. And when challenged, you can't play fast and loose with "security" and "privacy" as if they were both the same word spelled two different ways.

[Update: a TD reader has given us a copy of Janet Napolitano's response to the outcry over the school's secret surveillance efforts. A new post on that letter is on the way. If you'd like a head start, it's embedded below.]

Filed Under: deep packet inspection, dhs, janet napolitano, surveillance
Companies: university of california

University Of California Gives Big Boost To Open Access, Still Confused About Sharing Knowledge

from the make-up-your-mind dept

Techdirt has been monitoring for a while the inexorable rise of open access in the academic world. But even against a background of major wins, this latest news from the University of California (UC) is still big, not least because it seems to represent a major shift there:

The Academic Senate of the University of California has passed an Open Access Policy, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. "The Academic Council's adoption of this policy on July 24, 2013, came after a six-year process culminating in two years of formal review and revision," said Robert Powell, chair of the Academic Council. "Council's intent is to make these articles widely -- and freely -- available in order to advance research everywhere." Articles will be available to the public without charge via eScholarship (UC's open access repository) in tandem with their publication in scholarly journals.

So just how big? This big:

The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty at all 10 campuses of the University of California, and as many as 40,000 publications a year. It follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar so-called "green" open access policies

Or put another way:

UC is the largest public research university in the world and its faculty members receive roughly 8% of all research funding in the U.S.

As the associated FAQ spells out, this new policy mandates "green" open access -- that is, depositing articles in a university repository, where they can be published under a range of CC licenses, chosen by the authors. This move represents a big boost to the store of information freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. It's hugely welcome both for itself, and for the likely knock-on effects it will have on other institutions around the world.

However, there's something a little odd here. On the one hand, we have the University of California generously making available at no cost the fruits of its academic work "in order to advance research everywhere." On the other, we have the University of California aggressively using patents to enclose knowledge, and to extract rents from it, which is likely to discourage research because of the risk that UC might see it as infringing on its patents. Confused much?

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Filed Under: copyright, knowledge, learning, open access, patents, research
Companies: university of california

After A Decade Of Trolling, Eolas Has Its Dubious Patents On 'Web Interactivity' Invalidated

from the one-down,-way-too-many-still-to-go dept

The world's longest running patent trolling sideshow has finally been shut down. Eolas, a company with no products on the market, claimed to have invented "interactivity on the Web," based solely on a program created by Michael Doyle back in 1993, as the director of the computer lab at UC San Francisco. This program allowed doctors to view embryos online and was patented in 1994.

At that point, innovation ceased and the lawsuits began.

Doyle took the patent and created a company he called "Eolas," the Irish word for knowledge. Eolas never made a marketable product, but it ultimately launched a patent war that made Doyle a rich man. In 1999, he filed a lawsuit saying that Microsoft's Internet Explorer violated his patent on "interactive" features on the web; the suit resulted in a $540 million jury verdict. Appeals ensued but were inconclusive; the case ultimately settled out for more than $100 million, with just over $30 million going to Eolas' co-plaintiff, the University of California.

Meanwhile, Eolas' original patent was getting serious attention. It was actually denounced by the web's global standard-setting body in 2003. That resulted in an unusual director-ordered reexamination at the US Patent Office, but Eolas somehow emerged unscathed.

Eolas got a second patent similar to its first in 2009. By then, the business of "patent trolling" had matured and become fantastically lucrative. The company relocated to East Texas before filing suit against 20 big companies, including Apple, Perot Systems, Blockbuster, eBay, Adobe, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. Court documents show the company was seeking more than $600 million in January 2012, a damage demand that likely had inflated to more than $1 billion by the time of trial.

This activity culminated in a very unlikely event: the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, making his first appearance in a courtroom (East Texas, obviously) to testify against Eolas and its baseless claims about controlling key aspects of the Web. This reprised a personal effort Berners-Lee had made nearly a decade earlier when he sent a long letter to the USPTO detailing prior art and asking for the patents to be invalidated.

Fortunately, this East Texas jury went against the grain and found Eolas' patents invalid. Eolas, of course, appealed this decision (and filed an infringement lawsuit against Facebook, Disney and Wal-Mart -- presumably a reflexive action at this point). The appeal went just as badly for Eolas as its East Texas battle.

Now Eolas appears to be gone for good. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught; this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury's verdict without comment.

With its key patents shut down, Eolas has voluntarily stayed its current lawsuits. But its decade-long string of legal activity paved the way for the many trolls that have followed in its footsteps. The good new is that courts are finding their activities (and their patents) more than a little dubious. With added heat coming from FTC and the administration, there's hope that future patent trolls will find the usual road to riches -- threats and settlements -- a bit more uphill and obstacle-laden.

Other efforts in the private sector, like Newegg's refusal to back down when threatened by patent trolls and various prior art tools being utilized to sink lousy patent apps before they can be approved, should help minimize the damage done by non-practicing entities. In lieu of TRUE patent reform, this is the best companies and individuals can do to protect against entities that stunt true innovation and enrich themselves with the efforts of others.

Filed Under: interactive, patent trolling, patents
Companies: eolas, university of california

University Of California Won't Give Up: Sues Facebook Over Already Rejected Patents

from the they-won't-give-up dept

We've been writing about the patent troll Eolas for about a decade at this point. It's a trolling operation connected to the University of California, and used to take some ridiculously broad patents and try to shake down companies who actually innovated and did incredibly obvious things on the internet. Eolas' various lawsuits had gone back and forth over the years, and finally, earlier this year, a jury in East Texas (surprisingly) invalidated some of the key patents.

This summer, the judge in the case agreed that the key patents were invalid. Eolas had ridiculously tried to argue that the fact that some other companies had previously licensed the patents should have been shared with the jury to prove the "validity" of the patents. Of course, that's ridiculous on its face as trolls often convince companies to license bogus patents because it's cheaper to settle and license than to fight a bad patent lawsuit (even if you win). Of course, the judge blasted Eolas over this desire... because earlier in the case, Eolas had specifically argued that the jury shouldn't be allowed to know of Eolas' previous "business success or failure." Basically, Eolas didn't want the jury to know it was a troll without any real business. However, as the judge realized, Eolas can't hide that bit of info and then want the jury to have this other bit of info from its past.

Thus, for all intents and purposes it seemed that those two key patents -- 5,838,906 and 7,599,985 -- were effectively dead.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find out that Eolas/University of California has now sued Facebook, Disney and Wal-mart over those same patents (and a couple others). Apparently, Cal and Eolas figure that if they just keep suing, maybe one of these times they'll win.

What's really amazing is that this scorched earth, anti-innovation effort hasn't created more backlash for the University of California, and Berkeley in particular, given its proximity to Silicon Valley. You'd think that alums of the University who work at the various innovative tech companies that keep getting sued would speak out against their alma mater. It's pretty sad to see the University of California trying to set up a tollbooth on innovation by using such ridiculous patents.

Filed Under: internet, invalid, patents
Companies: disney, eolas, facebook, university of california, walmart