Sci-Hub's Creator Thinks Academic Publishers, Not Her Site, Are The Real Threat To Science, And Says: 'Any Law Against Knowledge Is Fundamentally Unjust'

from the put-up-or-shut-up dept

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about an important lawsuit in India, brought by the academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen. A couple of factors make this particular legal action different from previous attempts to shut down these sites. First, an Indian court ruled in 2016 that photocopying textbooks for educational purposes is fair use; the parallels with SciHub, which provides free access to copies of academic papers for students and researchers who might not otherwise be able to afford the high subscription fees, are clear. Secondly, the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is fighting, rather than ignoring, the case, as she has done on previous occasions.

One manifestation of her new pro-active approach is a tweet she posted recently. It included a screenshot of an email she wrote to Nature magazine, which had contacted her about a forthcoming article on the Indian court case. Following standard practice, the journalist writing the article, Holly Else, asked Elbakyan to comment on some of the accusations the academic publishers had made against Sci-Hub. Her responses are fascinating, not least because they provide Elbakyan's perspective on several important issues.

For example, according to the publishers' comments as transmitted by Else, "Pirate sites like Sci-Hub threaten the integrity of the scientific record, and the safety of university and personal data". In reply, Elbakyan points out Sci-Hub is unique, and the use of the phrase "Pirate sites like Sci-Hub" is a clever attempt to lump Sci-Hub in with quite different sites, thus prejudging the legality of its activities. Elbakyan says that it's academic publishers -- not Sci-Hub -- which threaten the progress of science:

open communication is [a] fundamental property of science and it makes scientific progress possible. Paywalled access prevents this and is a great threat to science. Also the great threat is also when the whole scientific knowledge became the private property of some corporation such as Elsevier, that has full control of it. That is the threat, not Sci-Hub.

Elbakyan points out that Sci-Hub doesn't threaten the "integrity of the scientific record", since she simply disseminates copies of the academic papers without changing them in any way. But perhaps the most interesting part of her reply concerns the accusation that Sci-Hub threatens the safety of university and personal data. Techdirt has written previously about claims that Elbakyan allegedly has links to Russian intelligence, and that Sci-Hub is some kind of security risk. According to Else, the publishers assert:

Pirate sites like Sci-Hub compromise the security of libraries and higher education institutions to gain unauthorized access to scientific databases and other proprietary intellectual property, and illegally harvest journal articles and e-books.

Sci-Hub uses stolen user credentials and phishing attack to extract copyrighted articles illegally

These are serious allegations, and ones that have been made several times in the past. Elbakyan's response is probably the first time that she has addressed them directly:

Do they have any actual case when Sci-Hub somehow compromised the security of any library or a person? Any person that complained about credentials that were 'stolen' from them? Or is it again, nothing more than empty accusations. Nobody is complaining about 'compromised security' except academic publishers.

In other words, it is time for Elbakyan's accusers to put up or shut up. She concludes by stating that "Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust", and hopes that "Nature will have enough honesty to publish my comments in full.

It didn't, of course.

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Filed Under: academic journals, academic research, alexandra elbakyan, copyright, education, holly else, india, publishers, security
Companies: nature, sci-hub

Juul Rented A Scientific Journal For a Month To Spread Glorified Marketing

from the buy-yourself-an-alternate-reality dept

One-time darling in the e-cigarette space, Juul, has witnessed an absolutely stunning collapse. The one-two punch of a rash of mysterious deaths and illnesses linked to nicotine vaping, compounded by an investigation into the company's dodgy marketing to teenagers, has resulted in the company's market share in e-cigarettes dropping from around 75 percent at its peak to 42 percent today. And depending on an upcoming FDA ruling, the company could soon see its products banned in the US entirely.

Juul is sparing no expense to try and convince the FDA to keep its products on store shelves. Buried in a New York Times report on the looming FDA decision was an interesting nugget: namely that the company had paid $51,000 for a month of favorable coverage in the American Journal of Health Behavior:

"...it paid $51,000 to have the entire May/June issue of the American Journal of Health Behavior devoted to publishing 11 studies funded by the company offering evidence that Juul products help smokers quit. (A spokesman for Juul said the editors had rejected one of the company’s submissions.) That fee included an extra $6,500 to have the subscription journal open access to everyone."

Three editorial board members of the journal in question resigned over the bizarre and cozy arrangement. David Dayen at the American Prospect took a deeper look and found an additional stunning revelation: of the 26 named co-authors on the 11 studies Juul funded and included in the journal, every last one was financially linked to Juul in some capacity:

"18 of the co-authors are either current full-time employees of Juul, or were full-time employees at the time they conducted the research. Five others are consultants with PinneyAssociates, working “on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs.” And the final three, who co-authored one of the 11 studies, are employees of the Centre for Substance Use Research, an “independent” consultancy that designed that study under a contract with … Juul Labs."

Granted our apathy to the steadily eroding line between expertise (journalism, academia, science) and marketing and lobbying is certainly nothing new. In this case not only were all of the authors and editors financially linked to Juul in some way, the studies were all funded by Juul, and the internal editor of the purportedly objective journal was under contract with Juul as a consultant through PinneyAssociates. Again, that only three people at the journal found this gross or disqualifying (or at least were willing to act on those beliefs) makes it very clear how normalized this sort of stuff has become.

As long as there's some form of mouse print disclosure, none of this violates existing advertising law. As Dayen notes, in academic and scientific circles, the whole thing is a perfectly normalized circle of grift, influence, and illusion:

"There are multiple rip-offs going on here at once. Academics are desperate to publish in journals to prove to their universities that they are working diligently. Corporations recognize the opportunity to underwrite research and produce independent validation of their goals. And they turn around and use that research to persuade policymakers, who presume themselves sophisticated about spotting fake research, but probably are not."

In a bit of added irony given all of the shenanigans surrounding scientific journal public access, it turned out that part of the $51,000 fee Juul paid to effectively rent this journal for a month included a $6,500 fee to unlock the entire journal for public access. The Journal's fee schedule shows how authors pay $895 per article, a fee that jumps to $1,595 should you want your article freely available to the public. Obviously that's a paradigm that harms transparency and favors those who can afford it, like, say, large corporations eager to exploit sagging US standards to impact discourse and influence policymakers.

Filed Under: academic journals, e-cigarettes, fake research, scientific research, vaping
Companies: juul

Sci-Hub Downloads Boost Article Citations -- And Help Academic Publishers

from the time-to-drop-the-legal-threats dept

Techdirt readers know that Sci-Hub is a site offering free online access to a large proportion of all the scientific research papers that have been published -- at the time of writing, it claims to hold 82,605,245 of them. It's an incredible resource, used by millions around the world. Those include students whose institutions can't afford the often pricey journal subscriptions, but also many academics in well-funded universities, who do have institutional access to the papers. The latter group often prefer Sci-Hub because it provides what traditional academic publishers don't: rapid, frictionless access to the world's knowledge. Given that Sci-Hub does the job far better than most publishers, it's no wonder that the copyright industry wants to shut down the service, for example by getting related domains blocked, or encouraging the FBI to investigate Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, for alleged links to Russian intelligence.

These legal battles are likely to continue for some time -- the copyright industry rarely gives up, even when its actions are ineffective or counterproductive. Academics don't care: ultimately what they want is for people to read -- and, crucially, to cite -- their work. So irrespective of the legal situation, an interesting question is: what effect do Sci-Hub downloads have on article citations? That's precisely what a new preprint, published on arXiv, seeks to answer. Here's the abstract:

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and their authors predicts future citations. Using data from 12 leading journals in economics, consumer research, neuroscience, and multidisciplinary research, we found that articles downloaded from Sci-hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-hub and that the number of downloads from Sci-hub was a robust predictor of future citations.

The paper explains which journals were selected, and the various analytical approaches that were applied in order to obtain this result. In all, the researchers compared 4,646 articles that were downloaded from Sci-Hub to 4,015 from the same titles that were not downloaded. Assuming that those are representative, and that the statistical calculations are correct, the end result is important. It suggests that articles that are downloaded from Sci-Hub are nearly twice as likely to be cited as those that aren't -- a big boost that will doubtless be of great interest to academics, whose careers are greatly affected by how widely they are cited. It seems to confirm that Sci-Hub does indeed help spread knowledge, not just in terms of the free downloads it offers, but also by virtue of leading to more citations for downloaded papers, and thus a wider audience for them.

The new paper notes a rather paradoxical implication of the result. Alongside Sci-Hub, which is happy to operate outside copyright law, there are alternatives like open access journals, and preprints, which are fully within it. However, as a result of Sci-Hub's ability to boost citations:

[it] may help preserve the current publishing system because the lack of access to publications, which preprints and open access journals are trying to solve, may no longer be felt so strongly to find required increasing support.

In other words, according to this latest analysis, it turns out that the copyright industry is attacking a site whose success might be seen as a reason for not changing the current academic publishing system.

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Filed Under: academic journals, citations, copyright, information sharing, research, sharing
Companies: sci-hub

Leading Open Access Supporters Ask EU To Investigate Elsevier's Alleged 'Anti-Competitive Practices'

from the are-you-listening,-Commissioner-Vestager? dept

Back in the summer, we wrote about the paleontologist Jon Tennant, who had submitted a formal complaint to the European Commission regarding the relationship between the publishing giant Elsevier and the EU's Open Science Monitor. Now Tennant has joined with another leading supporter of open access, Björn Brembs, in an even more direct attack on the company and its practices, reported here by the site Research Europe:

Two academics have demanded the European Commission investigate the academic publisher Elsevier for what they say is a breach of EU competition rules that is harming research.

Palaeontologist Jon Tennant and neuroscientist Björn Brembs, who are both advocates for making research results openly available, say the academic publishing market "is clearly not functioning well" in an official complaint about Elsevier's parent company RELX Group.

The pair claim RELX and Elsevier are in breach of EU rules both due to general problems with the academic publishing market and "abuse of a dominant position within this market".

The 22-page complaint spells out what the problem is. It makes the following important point about the unusual economics of the academic publishing market:

For research to progress, access to all available relevant sources is required, which means that there is no ability to transfer or substitute products, and there is little to no inter-brand competition from the viewpoint of consumers. If a research team requires access to knowledge contained within a journal, they must have access to that specific journal, and cannot substitute it for a similar one published by a competitor. Indeed, the entire corpus of research knowledge is built on this vital and fundamental process of building on previously published works, which drives up demand for all relevant published content. As such, publishers do not realistically compete with each other, as all their products are fundamentally unique (i.e., each publisher has a 100% market share for each journal or article), and unequivocally in high demand due to the way scholarly research works. The result of this is that consumers (i.e., research institutions and libraries) have little power to make cost-benefit evaluations to decide whether or not to purchase, and have no choice but to pay whatever price the publishers asks with little transparency over costs, which we believe is a primary factor that has contributed to more than a 300% rise in journal prices above inflation since 1986. Thus, we believe that a functional and competitive market is not currently able to form due to the practices of dominant players, like Elsevier, in this sector.

Most of the complaint is a detailed analysis of why academic publishing has become so dysfunctional, and is well-worth reading by anyone interested in understanding the background to open access and its struggles.

As to what the complaint might realistically achieve, Tennant told Techdirt that there are three main possibilities. The European Commission can simply ignore it. It can respond and say that it doesn't think there is a case to answer, in which case Tennant says he will push the Commission to explain why. Finally, in the most optimistic outcome, the EU could initiate a formal investigation of Elsevier and the wider academic publishing market. Although that might seem too much to hope for, it's worth noting that the EU Competition Authority is ultimately under the Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager. She has been very energetic in her pursuit of Internet giants like Google. It could certainly be a hugely significant moment for open access if she started to take an interest in Elsevier in the same way.

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Filed Under: academic journals, anti-competitive, antitrust, competition, eu, european commission, open access
Companies: elsevier

Research Shows That Published Versions Of Papers In Costly Academic Titles Add Almost Nothing To The Freely-Available Preprints They Are Based On

from the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold dept

The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions.

Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal:

We apply five different similarity measures to individual extracted sections from the articles' full text contents and analyze their results. We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast majority of pre-prints (90%-95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial publisher.

That is, for the papers considered, which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the final versions that appeared, mostly in journals published by Elsevier, there were rarely any important additions. That applies to titles, abstracts and the main body of the articles. The five metrics applied looked at letter-by-letter changes between the two versions, as well as more subtle semantic differences. All five agreed that the publishers made almost no changes to the initial preprint, which nearly always appeared before the published version, minimizing the possibility that the preprint merely reflected the edited version.

The authors of the paper point out a number of ways in which their research could be improved and extended. For example, the reference section of papers before and after editing was not compared, so it is possible that academic publishers add more value in this section; the researchers plan to investigate this aspect. Similarly, since the arXiv.org papers are heavily slanted towards physics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, further work will look at articles from other fields, such as economics and biology.

Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the publications of scholars applying for posts.

If it was felt that more user-friendly formats were needed than the somewhat austere preprints, it would be enough for funding organizations to pay third-party design companies to take the preprint texts as-is, and simply reformat them in a more attractive way. Given the relatively straightforward skills required, the costs of doing so would be far less than paying high page charges, which is the main model used to fund so-called "gold" open access journals, as opposed to the "green" open access based on preprints freely available from repositories.

In theory, gold open access offers "better" quality texts than green open access, which supposedly justifies the higher cost of the former. What the research shows is that when it comes to academic publishing, as in many other spheres, all that glitters is not gold: humble preprints turn out to be almost identical to the articles later published in big-name journals, but available sooner, and much more cheaply.

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Filed Under: academic journals, knowledge, open access, paywalls, pre-prints

Elsevier Continues To Build Its Monopoly Solution For All Aspects Of Scholarly Communication

from the but-can-people-be-bothered-to-support-open-alternatives? dept

Techdirt has just written about the amazing achievements of Sci-Hub, and how it now offers the vast majority of academic papers free online. One implication may be that traditional publishing, with high-cost journals hidden behind paywalls, is no longer viable. But as we noted, that doesn't mean that traditional publishers will disappear. For one thing, many are embracing open access, and finding it pretty profitable (some would say too profitable thanks to things like "double dipping".) But there's another way that academic publishers, particularly the biggest ones with deep pockets, can head off the threat to their profits from developments like Sci-Hub and open access: by diversifying.

Mike wrote about one example last year, when Elsevier bought the preprint service Social Science Research Network (SSRN), arguably the most popular repository of research in the fields of economics, law and the social sciences. Since SSRN deals in preprints, which can be freely downloaded, sites like Sci-Hub are no threat. Similarly, preprints are generally posted before submission to journals, and therefore can flourish whether or not those journals are open access. Now we have yet another significant move by Elsevier, reported here on the Scholarly Kitchen blog:

Elsevier announces its acquisition of bepress. In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing to preprints, analytics, workflow, and decision-support, Elsevier is now a major if not the foremost single player in the institutional repository landscape. If successful, and there are some risks, this acquisition will position Elsevier as an increasingly dominant player in preprints, continuing its march to adopt and coopt open access.

As that post explains, Bepress is not a publishing company, but seeks to provide key elements of the general infrastructure needed for scholarly communications. That includes things like repositories -- the stores of articles produced by researchers at an institution, or covering a specific field -- and "showcases". Bepress's product in this field is called Digital Commons. It claims to be:

the only comprehensive showcase that lets institutions publish, manage, and increase recognition for everything produced on campus -- and the only institutional repository and publishing platform that integrates with a full faculty research and impact suite.

It's a shrewd acquisition by Elsevier. It continues to move the company beyond the role of a traditional publisher into one that can offer a complete solution for the academic world, with products and services handling every aspect of scholarly work. By acquiring more and more parts of this solution, Elsevier can integrate them ever-more tightly, which will encourage users of one element to adopt others. If this process of integration can be carried out successfully, it will leave Elsevier with almost total control of the sector, beyond even today's already profitable position.

That may be great for Elsevier shareholders, but it limits choices for the academic community. Fortunately, there are ways to counter Elsevier's rise to monopoly power. Techdirt wrote about one of them last year, when a new open preprint repository for the social sciences, SocArXiv, was created soon after Elsevier bought SSRN. There are already a number of open source alternatives to Bepress products, and supporting those rather than moving to Elsevier-owned services is an obvious move for those in the academic community who wish to preserve their independence. The problem is that doing so is likely to require a certain amount of effort, and it may be that institutions, libraries and academics don't have the time or energy to do that, and they will simply sign up to Elsevier's monoculture without worrying too much about the long-term consequences.

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Filed Under: academic journals, open access
Companies: bepress, 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

DailyDirt: Peer Reviewed Publications Are Everywhere

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Peer reviewed publications have been under some additional scrutiny lately, as some of the practices of peer review aren't quite as honest and reliable as they once might have been. Fortunately, there are some solutions that create alternatives to the peer review process that involve opening up the content for more reviewers to study, question and verify results. Having reliable information more widely available to the public sounds like it can't go wrong, but it's not easy to build a reputation on a small database of preprints. However, as more and more significant results come from unlikely people, the process of peer review will need to adapt and account for unexpected authors.

• Academic journals are a multi-billion-dollar industry with a handful of dominant publishers. These paywalled systems could be disrupted by more open publishing schemes used by organizations such as PLOS, arxiv.org and academia.edu -- if the next generation of peer review turns out to be effective and economical. [url]
• PubPeer creates an anonymous forum for criticizing technical papers -- offering a kind of alternative to the traditional peer review process to help weed out unreliable publications. However, the anonymous nature of PubPeer may be threatened by a court order to reveal a commenter's identity over alleged defamation. [url]
• A scientific publication that's peer reviewed by kids (age 8-16yo) is getting children into the game of science early. Frontiers for Young Minds isn't exactly the cutting edge of science, but it's free for submissions and has no paywall. The business model probably doesn't scale too well, but nobody is likely getting tenure based on papers published before they could legally drive. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, if you have some spare change (or more) and would like to support Techdirt, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: academia.edu, academic journals, arxiv.org, frontiers for young minds, media, paywall, peer review, plos, preprints, publications, publishers, pubpeer, science

Elsevier Still Charging For Open Access Copies, Two Years After It Was Told Of The Problem

from the work-in-progress dept

For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again. Here's a good summary of what happened from Mike Taylor, whose post "If Harry Potter Was An Academic Work" appeared on Techdirt recently:

1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s "open access" articles. I showed how their open-access articles claimed "all rights reserved", and how when you use the site's facilities to ask about giving one electronic copy to a student, the price is £10.88. As I summarised at the time: "Free" means "we take the author's copyright, all rights are reserved, but you can buy downloads at a 45% discount from what they would otherwise cost." No-one from Elsevier commented.

2. Eight months ago, Peter Murray-Rust explained that Elsevier charges to read #openaccess articles. He showed how all three of the randomly selected open-access articles he looked at had download fees of $31.50. No-one from Elsevier commented (although see below).

3. A couple of days ago, Peter revisited this issue, and found that Elsevier are still charging THOUSANDS of pounds for CC-BY articles. IMMORAL, UNETHICAL , maybe even ILLEGAL. This time he picked another Elsevier OA article at random, and was quoted £8000 for permission to print 100 copies.

Stung by Murray-Rust's outraged post, the Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier, Alicia Wise, replied as follows:

As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving the clarity of our OA license labelling (eg on ScienceDirect) and metadata feeds (eg to Rightslink). This is work in progress and should be completed by summer. I am working with the internal team to get a more clear understanding of the detailed plan and key milestones, and will tweet about these in due course.

Although that sounds superficially reasonable, it's not, as Taylor points out:

First of all, either this is deliberate fraud on Elsevier's part -- charging for the use of something that is free to use -- or it's a bug. Following Hanlon’s razor, I prefer the latter explanation. But assuming it's a bug, why has it taken two years to address? And why is it still not fixed?

To put things in context:

Elsevier, remember, are a company with an annual revenue exceeding £2bn. That’s £2,000,000,000... Is it unreasonable to expect that two years should be long enough for them to fix a trivial bug?

All that's necessary is to change the "All rights reserved" message and the "Get rights and content" link to say "This is an open-access article, and is free to re-use". We know that the necessary metadata is there because of the "Open Access" caption at the top of the article. So speaking from my perspective as a professional software developer of more than thirty years' standing, this seems like a ten-line fix that should take maybe a man-hour; at most a man-day. A man-day of programmer time would cost Elsevier maybe £500

Once more, Elsevier does not come out of this well. It was told two years ago that there was a problem with the way it presented open access articles, since the impression was given -- for whatever reason -- that you had to pay for things that were actually freely available. As Taylor points out, even under the most generous interpretation, it is simply not acceptable for a multi-billion dollar publishing company to ignore this problem for so long. Until it fixes this throughout its portfolio of journals -- and maybe offers some refunds for the fees it has taken without any justification -- the academic community is bound to feel that despite the boycott and bad publicity surrounding its aggressive actions against scholars, Elsevier has learnt nothing and cares less.

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Filed Under: academic journals, open access
Companies: elsevier

Elsevier Continues Its Efforts To Stifle The Sharing Of Knowledge To Pump Up Its Own Profits

from the anti-science dept

In the academic publishing world, I'm not sure if there's any company quite as hated as Elsevier. You may recall the big campaign by academics to boycott Elsevier over its opposition to rules that would make federally funded research publicly available at some time period (six months to a year) after the original publication. Or the time they removed free access to journals in Bangladesh (until academics made enough noise and Elsevier brought them back). Or, how about the fact that Elsevier had an entire division devoted to publishing fake medical journals that were used by big pharmaceutical companies to write ad copy which they could then pretend was from a prestigious medical journal that was really just junk science made to look nice. Oh, and then there was the time Elsevier was caught publishing ghostwritten articles by the pharmaceutical industry that were supposed to be "reviews" of all the research about certain treatments, but which instead played down the negative research and played up the positive kinds.

And then there's just the general concept of the way Elsevier and a number of academic journals work in general. They don't pay their writers, the academics who submit articles (for some journals in some fields, academics actually have to pay significant sums to submit articles), they don't have to pay the peer reviewers who do such reviews for free. So they get content and a certain type of editing entirely for free. Then, they charge obscene sums of money to universities for subscriptions and try to block off all kinds of other access to research if people don't pay up -- which is especially troubling when the research is federally funded. Oh yeah, they also claim the copyright on any research submitted. A professor I know, who was trying to do followup research on some initially published research, actually had to recreate the original results, because the journal that published the original work wouldn't let him reuse the results of his original study, claiming that it was covered by copyright. In other words, they use copyright to make it that much harder to share knowledge and build on the works of others.

The one "crack" in this kind of academic publishing is that many academic journals would "look the other way" if an academic decided to post a pdf of their own research. At least some journals were even willing to put into their contracts that the authors can post a pdf to their own website, or to public collections of journal articles like SSRN.

However, it appears that Elsevier has started cracking down on this practice as well. Bijan Sabet alerts us to the news that Elsevier has suddenly started demanding that copies of research posted to Academia.edu get taken down. Here's one example from bioinformatician Guy Leonard, who posted a copy of his letter from Academia.edu, who clearly isn't happy about this turn of events either: Here's the full text of the letter:

Hi Guy

Unfortunately, we had to remove your paper, Resolving the question of trypanosome monophyly: a comparative genomics approach using whole genome data sets with low taxon sampling, due to a take-down notice from Elsevier.

Academia.edu is committed to enabling the transition to a world where there is open access to academic literature. Elsevier takes a different view, and is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.

Over the last year, more than 13,000 professors have signed a petition voicing displeasure at Elsevier’s business practices at www.thecostofknowledge.com. If you have any comments or thoughts, we would be glad to hear them.

The Academia.edu Team

Mike Taylor's writeup of this situation (linked above) notes that many academics are pissed off about this and are complaining about it on Twitter. He also notes that there are some good folks at Elsevier who seem to recognize the importance of access to information and who, themselves, are probably pissed off about this. But, really, it seems that it's in Elsevier's general DNA to try to privatize knowledge, research and understanding. What a shameful company.

Filed Under: academic journals, knowledge, research, sharing
Companies: academia.edu, elsevier