Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Years Of Existence, With A Record 88 Million Papers Available, And A Call For Funds To Help It Add AI And Go Open Source

from the paypal-not-accepted dept

To celebrate ten years offering a large proportion of the world's academic papers for free -- against all the odds, and in the face of repeated legal action -- Sci-Hub has launched a funding drive:

Sci-Hub is run fully on donations. Instead of charging for access to information, it creates a common pool of knowledge free for anyone to access.

The donations page says that "In the next few years Sci-Hub is going to dramatically improve", and lists a number of planned developments. These include a better search engine, a mobile app, and the use of neural networks to extract ideas from papers and make inferences and new hypotheses. Perhaps the most interesting idea is for the software behind Sci-Hub to become open source. The move would address in part a problem discussed by Techdirt back in May: the fact that Sci-Hub is a centralized service, with a single point of failure. Open sourcing the code -- and sharing the papers database -- would allow multiple mirrors to be set up around the world by different groups, increasing its resilience.

Donations can only be made in cryptocurrencies -- Sci-Hub accepts most of the main ones. A short interview with Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, on the donations page explains why she moved away from PayPal:

in the past I used also PayPal account to collect donations from abroad. It worked well for a while, but when I posted a message on Sci-Hub urging people to donate, if my memory is correct it was in 2013, donations started to come at a cosmic speed... in a couple of days two or three thousands of dollars were collected. But then the account was frozen by PayPal. It turned out that Elsevier has complained to PayPal about Sci-Hub so they froze the account.

Later I tried registering another PayPal account, and use it carefully, but after some time it also got frozen. I have several frozen PayPal accounts by now.

The main Sci-Hub site claims to hold some 87,977,763 papers -- an impressive number. It's a reminder of just how much research has been funded by the public, and how much could be available for researchers across the globe to access if unjustified claims of ownership were not made by academic publishers desperate to preserve their 35-40% profit margins.

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Filed Under: academic knowledge, academic publishing, access to knowledge, decentralized, fundraising
Companies: sci-hub

Elsevier Wants To Stop Indian Medics, Students And Academics Accessing Knowledge The Only Way Most Of Them Can Afford: Via Sci-Hub And Libgen

from the copyright-is-not-an-inevitable,-divine,-or-natural-right dept

Last month Techdirt wrote about some ridiculous scaremongering from Elsevier against Sci-Hub, which the publisher claimed was a "security risk". Sci-Hub, with its 85 million academic papers, is an example of what are sometimes termed "shadow libraries". For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, such shadow libraries are very often the only way medics, students and academics can access journals whose elevated Western-level subscription prices are simply unaffordable for them. That fact makes a new attack by Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen shadow library particularly troubling. The Indian title The Wire has the details:

the publishing giants are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen be completely blocked in India through a so-called dynamic injunction. The publishers claim that they own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published, and that Sci-Hub and Libgen are engaged in violating various exclusive rights conferred on them under copyright law by providing free access to their copyrighted contents.

Techdirt readers will note the outrageous claim there: that these publishers "own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published". That's only true in the sense that most publishers force academics to hand over the copyright as a condition of being published. The publishers don't pay for that copyright, and contribute almost nothing to the final published paper save a little editing and formatting: manuscript review is carried out for free by other academics. And yet the publishers are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen should be blocked in India on this basis. Moreover, they want a "dynamic injunction":

That is, once a defendant's website is categorised as a "rogue website", the plaintiff won't have to go back to the judges to have any new domains blocked for sharing the same materials, and can simply get the injunction order extended with a request to the court's deputy registrar.

The legal action by publishers against shadow libraries is part of a broader offensive around the world, but there's a reason why they may face extra challenges in India -- over and above the fact that Sci-Hub and Libgen contain huge quantities of material that can unambiguously be shared quite legally. As Techdirt reported back in 2013, a group of Western publishers sued Delhi University over photocopied versions of academic textbooks. For many students in India, this was the only way they could afford such educational materials. In 2016, the Indian court ruled that "copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right", and that photocopying textbooks is fair use.

The parallels with the new suit against Sci-Hub and Libgen are clear. The latter are digital photocopy sites: they make available copies of educational material to students and researchers who could not otherwise afford access to this knowledge. The copies made by Sci-Hub and Libgen should be seen for what they are: fair use of material that was in any case largely created using public funds for the betterment of humanity, not to boost the bottom line of publishers with profit margins of 35-40%.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, academic research, access to knowledge, censorship, copyright, dynamic injunction, india, injunctions, publishers
Companies: american chemical society, elsevier, libgen, sci-hub, wiley

After Taming Open Access, Academic Publishing Giants Now Seek To Assimilate The World Of Preprints

from the no-place-to-run dept

As Techdirt has reported, the open access movement seeks to obtain free access to research, particularly when it is funded by taxpayers' money. Naturally, traditional academic publishers enjoying profit margins of 30 to 40% are fighting to hold on to their control. Initially, they tried to stop open access gaining a foothold among researchers; now they have moved on to the more subtle strategy of adopting it and assimilating it -- rather as Microsoft has done with open source. Some advocates of open access are disappointed that open access has not led to any significant savings in the overall cost of publishing research. That, in its turn, has led many to urge the increased use of preprints as a way of saving money, liberating knowledge, and speeding up its dissemination. One reason for this is a realization that published versions in costly academic titles add almost nothing to the freely-available preprints they are based on.

An excellent new survey of the field, "Preprints in the Spotlight", rightly notes that preprints have attained a new prominence recently thanks to COVID-19. The urgent global need for information about this novel disease has meant that traditional publishing timescales of months or more are simply too slow. Preprints allow important data and analysis to be released worldwide almost as soon as they are available. The result has been a flood of preprints dealing with coronavirus: two leading preprint servers, medRxiv and bioRxiv, have published over 4,500 preprints on COVID-19 at the time of writing.

The publishing giant Elsevier was one of the first to notice the growing popularity of preprints. Back in 2016, Elsevier acquired the leading preprint server for the social sciences, SSRN. Today, Elsevier is no longer alone in seeing preprints as a key sector. A post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog describes how all the major publishers are active in preprints:

Today, we observe that beyond preprint communities that are typically organized around a field or set of fields, in recent years all the major publishers have made their own investments in preprint platforms. Publishers are integrating preprint deposit into their manuscript submission workflows, and adopting a common strategy designed to take back control of preprints.

That emphasis on "taking back control" is key. Preprints have become an alternative not just to academic publishing as practised by giant companies like Elsevier, but also to open access publishing, which is now not so different from the traditional kind. Companies clearly want to nip that development in the bud. Here's how publishers are likely to develop their preprint divisions:

they are bringing preprints inside their publishing workflows. This will afford them an opportunity to emphasize the importance of the version of record and its integrity. And, it will allow them to maximize their control over the research workflow as a whole, including datasets, protocols, and other artifacts of the research and publishing process. If successful, over time publishers will see fewer of the preprints of their eventual publications living "in the wild" and more of them on services and in workflows that they control.

That is, as well as taming the unruly world of preprints by bringing them in-house, publishers can also use them to bolster their mainstream businesses, and further their plans to offer academics a complete, "one-stop" service that includes preprints, journals, data management and more. Turning independent preprint servers into just another cog in the mighty publishing machine would be a further loss of control and autonomy for the academic community as a whole. It should be resisted by researchers, the institutions where they work, and by the bodies that fund them.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, access to knowledge, open access, preprints
Companies: elsevier, ssrn

Just Another Day In Academic Publishing: Professor Posts His Own Article On His Own Website, Gets Takedown Notice Alleging Copyright Infringement

from the time-to-take-back-control dept

William Cunningham is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Like many academics, he posts his own articles on his own Web site to help spread knowledge and boost his standing in the academic community. You'll never guess what happened next:

Cunningham and hundreds of his colleagues were recently irked by a takedown notice he received from the American Psychological Association [APA], telling him that the articles he had published through the organization and then posted on his website were in violation of copyright law.

As Inside Higher Ed reports, this was not merely absurd and annoying, but could have serious consequences for Cunningham:

The notice triggered a chain of responses -- including a warning from his website platform, WordPress, that multiple such violations put the future of his entire website at risk. And because the APA had previously issued similar takedown notices, the threat of losing his website seemed real to Cunningham.

Fortunately, Cunningham's colleagues rallied around him. A petition was set up on Change.org, demanding a "Right to share publications"-- and warning the APA that the reviewing that scholars carry out for the organization for no fee should not be taken for granted:

We engage in practices like voluntary reviewing for APA because we feel a commitment to producing a public good that others can use to promote scientific progress. By using these profits to restrict us from sharing our own work, you have privatized a public good and made our relationship transactional. Of course, it is entirely within your rights to do so.

If you wish to make this relationship transactional, we demand that you use the profits from our work to pay us for reviewing. If we learn that you have pressured any of the signees to remove their own APA publications from their academic website, then all signees will demand that you pay us $300 per review (unless otherwise agreed upon in writing).

Faced with this threat, APA backed down and apologized to Cunningham. As the Inside Higher Ed article points out, that's all well and good, but Cunningham still has alleged and unjustified copyright infringements against his name on the WordPress platform.

This episode highlights once more what a raw deal academics receive from publishers, which are able to disseminate papers without paying for them, and draw on reviews provided by other researchers, also for no remuneration. Despite that largesse, publishers then expect to be able to police exactly what the original authors can do with their own articles -- an outrageous situation.

However, the solution is not for academics to be paid for reviewing articles -- that is, making the relationship "transactional" -- as a kind of quid pro quo. The real issue is not money, but power. One solution is to publish in open access titles, which encourage the sharing of the articles they publish. Another is to release articles as preprints, and to bypass journals altogether.

Whichever route they choose, researchers should never assign copyright in their article to a publisher. That effectively cedes control of their own words to a company, and places them within its power. Instead, academics should grant a limited, non-exclusive license to publish the article, while retaining for themselves the right to do with it as they wish. Publishers have for too long taken advantage of the generosity -- and perhaps naivety -- of academics. Time for the latter to stand up for themselves and take back control of academic publishing.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, copyright, william cunningham
Companies: american psychological assocation

As Academic Publishers Fight And Subvert Open Access, Preprints Offer An Alternative Approach For Sharing Knowledge Widely

from the this-is-the-future dept

The key idea behind open access is that everyone with an Internet connection should be able to read academic papers without needing to pay for them. Or rather without needing to pay again, since most research is funded using taxpayers' money. It's hard to argue against that proposition, or that making information available in this way is likely to increase the rate at which medical and scientific discoveries are made for the benefit of all. And yet, as Techdirt has reported, academic publishers that often enjoy profit margins of 30-40% have adopted a range of approaches to undermine open access and its aims -- and with considerable success. A recent opinion column in the Canadian journal University Affairs explains how traditional publishers have managed to subvert open access for their own benefit:

An ironic twist to the open-access movement is that it has actually made the publishers richer. They've jumped on the bandwagon by offering authors the option of paying article processing charges (APCs) in order to make their articles open access, while continuing to increase subscription charges to libraries at the institutions where those authors work. So, in many cases, the publishers are being paid twice for the same content -- often charging APCs higher than purely open access journals.

Another serious problem is the rise of so-called "predatory" open access publishers that have distorted the original ideas behind the movement even more. The Guardian reported recently:

More than 175,000 scientific articles have been produced by five of the largest "predatory open-access publishers", including India-based Omics publishing group and the Turkish World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology, or Waset.

But the vast majority of those articles skip almost all of the traditional checks and balances of scientific publishing, from peer review to an editorial board. Instead, most journals run by those companies will publish anything submitted to them -- provided the required fee is paid.

These issues will be hard, if not impossible, to solve. As a result, many are now looking for a different solution to the problem of providing easy and cost-free access to academic knowledge, this time in the form of preprints. Techdirt reported earlier this year that there is evidence the published versions of papers add very little to the early, preprint version that is placed online directly by the authors. The negligible barriers to entry, the speed at which work can be published, and the extremely low costs involved have led many to see preprints as the best solution to providing open access to academic papers without needing to go through publishers at all.

Inevitably, perhaps, criticisms of the idea are starting to appear. Recently, Tom Sheldon, who is a senior press manager at the Science Media Centre in London, published a commentary in one of the leading academic journals, Nature, under the headline: "Preprints could promote confusion and distortion". As he noted, this grew out of an earlier discussion paper that he published on the Science Media Centre's blog. The Science Media Centre describes itself as "an independent press office helping to ensure that the public have access to the best scientific evidence and expertise through the news media when science hits the headlines." Its funding comes from "scientific institutions, science-based companies, charities, media organisations and government". Sheldon's concerns are not so much about preprints themselves, but their impact on how science is reported:

I am a big fan of bold and disruptive changes which can lead to fundamental culture change. My reading around work on reproducibility, open access and preprint make me proud to be part of a scientific community intent on finding ways to make science better. But I am concerned about how this change might affect the bit of science publication that we are involved with at the Science Media Centre. The bit which is all about the way scientific findings find their way to the wider public and policymakers via the mass media.

One of his concerns is the lack of embargoes for preprints. At the moment, when researchers have what they think is an important result or discovery appearing in a paper, they typically offer trusted journalists a chance to read it in advance on the understanding that they won't write about it until the paper is officially released. This has a number of advantages. It creates a level playing field for those journalists, who all get to see the paper at the same time. Crucially, it allows journalists to contact other experts to ask their opinion of the results, which helps to catch rogue papers, and also provides much-needed context. Sheldon writes:

Contrast this with preprints. As soon as research is in the public domain, there is nothing to stop a journalist writing about it, and rushing to be the first to do so. Imagine early findings that seem to show that climate change is natural or that a common vaccine is unsafe. Preprints on subjects such as those could, if they become a story that goes viral, end up misleading millions, whether or not that was the intention of the authors.

That's certainly true, but is easy to remedy. Academics who plan to publish a preprint could offer a copy of the paper to the group of trusted journalists under embargo -- just as they would with traditional papers. One sentence describing why it would be worth reading is all that is required by way of introduction. To the extent that the system works for today's published papers, it will also work for preprints. Some authors may publish without giving journalists time to check with other experts, but that's also true for current papers. Similarly, some journalists may hanker after full press releases that spoon-feed them the results, but if they can't be bothered working it out for themselves, or contacting the researchers and asking for an explanation, they probably wouldn't write a very good article anyway.

The other concern relates to the quality of preprints. One of the key differences between a preprint and a paper published in a journal is that the latter usually goes through the process of "peer review", whereby fellow academics read and critique it. But it is widely agreed that the peer review process has serious flaws, as many have pointed out for years -- and as Sheldon himself admits.

Indeed, as defenders note, preprints allow far more scrutiny to be applied than with traditional peer review, because they are open for all to read and spot mistakes. There are some new and interesting projects to formalize this kind of open review. Sheldon rightly has particular concerns about papers on public health matters, where lives might be put at risk by erroneous or misleading results. But major preprint sites like bioRxiv (for biology) and the upcoming medRxiv (for medicine and health sciences) are already trying to reduce that problem by actively screening preprints before they are posted.

Sheldon certainly raises some valid questions about the impact of preprints on the communication of science to a general audience. None of the issues is insurmountable, but it may require journalists as well as scientists to adapt to the changed landscape. However, changing how things are done is precisely the point about preprints. The present academic publishing system does not promote general access to knowledge that is largely funded by the taxpayer. The attempt by the open access movement to make that happen has arguably been neutered by shrewd moves on the part of traditional publishers, helped by complaisant politicians. Preprints are probably the best hope we have now for achieving a more equitable and efficient way of sharing knowledge and building on it more effectively.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, culture, knowledge, open access, preprints, sharing knowledge

Publishers Association Sends Whiny Complaint Letter To Dean After Academic Librarian Discusses Sci-Hub

from the oh-grow-up dept

It's no secret that big publishing companies (especially academic publishing companies) really really dislike Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub, of course, is the quite interesting site that enables academics to access and share PDFs of published scientific research. We've written about it a bunch, including Elsevier's ridiculous legal crusade against the site, which has only served to act as a huge advertisement for the site. As we noted, using copyright to shut down Sci-Hub seemed to go entirely against the purpose of copyright, which was officially designed to promote "learning" and scientific knowledge.

Nonetheless, the publishers really, really hate it. But even so, it seems pretty ridiculous for the Association of American Publishers (AAP) to freak out so much about an academic librarian just mentioning Sci-Hub while on a panel discussion, that it would send an angry letter to that librarian's dean. But, that's exactly what AAP did, in complaining about comments by librarian Gabriel Gardner to his dean, Roman Kochan, at the University Library for California State University. The letter, signed by AAP President Thomas Allen seems to suggest that any moderately positive comment about Sci-Hub should be banished from any academic discussion:

I am disappointed to learn that a librarian from California State University, Long Beach, Gabriel Gardner, recently praised the notorious pirate site Sci-Hub and recommended that attendees at a session use the site. Mr. Gardner was a panelist at the American Library Association's session "Resource Sharing in Tomorrowland - a Panel Discussion About the Future ofinterlibrary Loan" at the association's annual conference in Orlando. On the panel he said, essentially, "Try it, you'll like it."

Sci-Hub has been enjoined from further operation as an unlawful enterprise that has committed mass theft of copyrighted material. Sci-Hub should not be equated with any legitimate interlibrary loan or open access publishing practices.

It goes on to whine about how horrible Sci-Hub is (yes, a tool for free access to scientific research and knowledge is being derided here...), and then whines about silly ideas like "academic freedom."

As a member of the California State University system it is surprising that a CSU Long Beach librarian would promote the activities of an adjudicated thief who has compromised university computer systems and databases worldwide.

Unfortunately, Sci-Hub supporters invoke academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of scientific inquiry, and encouraging universal access to the results of scientific research to justify the theft of intellectual property. Such rationalizations do not in my opinion justify providing public encouragement for unquestionably illegal activity to institutions and the scholarly communication system. I believe such public encouragement from one of your librarians is inconsistent with the university library's mission and its leadership in support of scientific research.

The recipient of the letter, Dean Roman Kochan, was, to put it mildly, not that impressed with Allen's letter, and notes that Allen seemed to be freaking out over absolutely nothing. In fact, Kochan notes that most of Gardner's comments about Sci-Hub were actually focused on its illegal nature. And, he points out, that Gardner's comments were related to an article that Gardner had co-written pointing to problems with this kind of crowdsourced research sharing.

Their article, "Fast and Furious (at Publishers): The Motivations behind Crowdsourced Research Sharing," is based on a survey of users of peer-to-peer research-sharing services on the frequency of, and the motivations behind, their use of these services. They conclude that these services "go beyond document delivery to the legal bedrock that is our current copyright and intellectual property systems." So, contrary to your allegations that the researchers provided "public encouragement" of services such as SciHub, their research points out the very real problems with this type of crowdsourcing.

[....]

Besides the legal cautions in the C&RL article, Mr. Gardner has been quoted on #icanhazPDF, and in the 2015 Conference Proceedings of the Association of College & Research Libraries as saying that such peer-to-peer sharing is "ethically dubious" and "often violate[s) commercial database terms-of-service (ToS) and/ or copyright." Specifically, regarding the ALA annual conference panel, "Resource Sharing in Tomorrowland a Panel Discussion about the Future of Interlibrary Loan," your paraphrase of Mr. Gardner's statements is taken very much out of context. If you listen to the recording of his presentation, he says that Sci-Hub's actions are "massive piracy" and "totally illegal." To an audience of librarians, he was suggesting that librarians need to try the service to see how easily Interlibrary Loan and authentication systems can be bypassed.

In other words, not only did Allen and AAP send a really stupid letter, they picked the exact wrong target. This does not speak well of the AAP and its willingness to understand even basic nuances.

Of course, now that Kochan has the AAP's attention, he figures it's probably not worth wasting, and goes on to point out the real problem: the fact that the publishers AAP represents are basically pricing everyone out of the market:

However, the larger issue here is that the academic publishing model has become unsustainable. Like many university libraries, the library budgets at California State University Long Beach and the California State University generally cannot sustain annual price increases of 3% to 10% by many of your organization's members. Journal subscription prices are a key part of the reason that extra-legal services, such as Sci-Hub flourish. As you know, the music industry and the movie industry have faced similar challenges. One substantial difference with scholarly journal publishing, however, is that the "artists," the scholars who conduct the research and write the articles, receive no monetary compensation. As the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution states, the purpose of copyright is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Rarely do AAP members give their authors such rights.

We would hope that AAP would want to be part of the solution to unsustainable academic publishing models. Instead of fighting legislation such as Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), or criticizing researchers who are shining a light on a very real publishing dilemma, AAP could use its considerable clout to promote new scientific publishing models. After all, as AAP describes it, the organization's historic role is to "promote literacy, defend freedom of speech, advance scientific progress, and stimulate the intellectual and cultural discourse that is central to a healthy democratic society."

Bravo. Though it will almost certainly fall on deaf ears.

Still, what is it with organizations like the AAP so focused on "protecting" the way things used to be that they can't even bother to think about the way things are actually heading and how to adapt?

Filed Under: academic publishing, complaints, gabriel gardner, libraries, roman kochan, thomas allen
Companies: aap, association of american publishers, sci-hub

Respected Medical Journal Sold To Scammers Willing To Publish Anything... For A Fee

from the nice-business-if-you-can-find-it dept

We've talked in the past about the ridiculous nature of the academic publishing world these days, which involve a variety of questionable tactics mostly focused on (1) predatorily preying on those who "need" to be published, (2) enabling researchers (and sometimes large companies) to whitewash shoddy research by "publishing" it for a fee, and (3) making the "publishers" filthy stinking rich despite doing no actual work. The problem is that, while much of this is scammy, the line between fraudulent practices and more "legitimate" practices are pretty damn blurry. After all, when you have "legitimate" names like the American Psychological Association trying to charge $2,500 to "deposit" newly published papers with PubMed (as required to do for NIH funded papers) or publishing giant Elsevier having an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals paid for by giant pharmaceutical companies promoting their drugs, sometimes it's tough to tell who's legit and who's the out and out swindler.

But, there's definitely been a flood of "predatory" publishers lately, who will basically offer to publish absolutely anything for a fee. This has resulted in some amusing stories of purely gibberish papers getting published as "legit" (that link points to a paper that directly claimed in its own text that it was a fraud and also widely quoted My Cousin Vinny). There are reports of such gibberish papers flooding academia, sometimes in attempts to highlight how lax publishers are, and what a giant scam all of this is.

The Ottawa Citizen has a story highlighting yet another twist and turn in this ongoing battle of bogosity in academic research, involving sketchy people stepping in to buy a formerly respected journal and turning it into a pure pay-to-play publication willing to publish absolute gibberish (which the Ottawa Citizen tested and easily proved). The Ottawa Citizen was turned onto the story by Jeffrey Beall, author of Scholarly Open Access, a site that chronicles predatory publishing scams, and who was last mentioned on these pages after being threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit and "criminal charges" for outing a predatory publisher based in India.

In this case, the Experimental & Clinical Cardiology journal had been a widely respected publication covering research on (you guessed it) experimental and clinical cardiology. However, last year it got sold to some unknown folks who appear to have turned it into a pure gibberish publishing enterprise -- so long as you can pay the $1,200 fee. In other words, the new publishers are trading on the old reputation of the journal, now allowing it to publish junk science or nonsensical rantings. Here's how Tom Spears at the Ottawa Citizen tested it out:

To test the journal, the Citizen sent in an outrageously bad manuscript. The title is a hodgepodge of medical-sounding words adding up to nothing: “VEGF proliferation in cardiac cells contributes to vascular declension.”

For the rest we plagiarized a study on HIV but replaced “HIV” with the word “cardiac” throughout, to make it look (sort of) like cardiology. But it wouldn’t impress anyone who knows the subject.

We submitted detailed captions for graphs — but there are no graphs.

In case you're wondering, Spears notes that "declension" is not a medical word. "It means a group of nouns in Latin that behave the same way." And, it appears that other articles in the same journal have gone through a similar level of review (i.e., none, so long as the check clears):

This is paying off spectacularly. Experimental & Clinical Cardiology published 142 articles in July alone, worth a total of $170,000 U.S. for one month. It operates online only and doesn’t bother with editing, so it has almost no costs.

The result is sloppy, or worse. Some articles are called “Enter Paper Title” — the layout instructions instead of the intended title. One is filled with visible paragraph markers (¶). Some authors’ names are missing.

The academic publishing world is already massively profitable, and with that it appears that the scammers have jumped in and are abusing the system to make money. Of course, the "legit" publishers made this quite easy in the first place, and now it appears that there are opportunities to jump in by using previously respected journal brand reputations as part of furthering these kinds of predatory practices.

Filed Under: academic publishing, experimental & clinical cardiology, gibberish research, journals, open access, pay to publish, predatory publishing

Duke Professors Looking To Make Legal Texts Affordable; Kicking Off With Intellectual Property Law

from the make-it-so dept

James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School have recognized what many people have: the academic publishing world is insane. Textbook pricing is generally insane, in part because the people who make the decision (the professors) are not the people doing the buying (the students), meaning that the buyers have little to no choice in what they buy. That enables the publishers to jack up the prices to absolutely insane rates. This even includes legal "casebooks" and "statutory supplements," which are often composed of mostly public domain material (or, legal filings where the person who put together the book had no authorship). So Boyle and Jenkins are working on an open coursebook for intellectual property, which looks like it's going to be fantastic.

To kick it off, however, they've now released an Intellectual Property Statutory Supplement, which basically has the text of various relevant laws and international agreements concerning intellectual property in the United States. A somewhat equivalent book that many law schools use will run you over $50. But the Boyle/Jenkins statutory supplement is free to download, or available for print-on-demand at cost (around $10) for law students who need paper copies and can't bring electronic copies into classrooms. As they note in the announcement about this project:

We are motivated in part by the outrageously steep cost of legal teaching materials, (and the increasing restrictions on those materials — such as the removal of the right of first sale). This book is intended for use with our forthcoming Intellectual Property casebook (coming in the Fall) but can also be used as a free or low cost supplement for basic Intellectual Property courses — at the college, law school or graduate school levels. Whether or not you buy it, the free download will at the very least gives you a statutory reference book for those times when internet access is unavailable, and you just need to scratch that intellectual property research itch. The book is also available at cost of production — about $10.50 — as a handsomely covered paperback. Most of the current Intellectual Property Statutory & Treaty Supplements are $45-$50.

As you may recall, just a few months ago, we wrote about some well-known publishers of legal casebooks trying to undermine first sale rights by requiring students to give back books they bought in exchange for access to a digital copy (which may or may not stay online). It's good to see folks like Boyle and Jenkins step in and recognize that there's more to be gained by sharing knowledge and information, rather than seeking to lock it up. I hope other professors will follow suit.

Oh, and as a bonus, you owe it to yourself to read their posting on Thomas Macaulay's famed 1841 speech about the dangers of copyright maximalism. We've quoted from it at times, and the famous line from it is usually how "the effect of [the copyright] monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad." However, the entire speech is worth reading, and here they highlight a warning against copyright maximalism, in which he notes that it will lead to less respect for the law. Remember, he was saying this in 1841. Fairly prescient, huh?

At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.

Filed Under: academic publishing, casebooks, copyright, creative commons, intellectual property, intellectual property statutory supplement, james boyle, jennifer jenkins, legal case books, patents, public domain, textbooks

Colombian Student Facing A Minimum Of Four Years In Prison For Uploading An Academic Article To Scribd

from the yeah,-nothing-excessive-about-this-sort-of-enforcement dept

Upload a document to Scribd, go to prison for at least four years. Ridiculous and more than a bit frightening, but in a case that has some obvious parallels with Aaron Swartz's prosecution, that's the reality Colombian student Diego Gomez is facing. In the course of his research, he came across a paper integral to his research. In order to ensure others could follow his line of thinking, Gomez uploaded this document for others to view.

According to Gomez, this was a common citation practice among Colombian students.

The important thing is to make a correct citation, attributing researchers’ work by indicating their name and year of publication and, of course, not claiming the work of another researcher, but to recognize it and value it. Therefore, what we usually do is to reference the findings and make them available to those who need them.

The paper's author obviously disagreed and sued Gomez. But unlike civil lawsuits in the US, copyright-related lawsuits in Columbia carry with them the threat of imprisonment.

Under the allegations of this lawsuit, Gomez could be sent to prison for up to eight years and face crippling monetary fines.

To be clear, Gomez did not try to profit from the paper. He also wasn't acting as some sort of indiscriminate distributor of infringing works. But under Colombian law, none of that matters. But to really see who's to blame here for this ridiculous level of rights enforcement, you have to look past the local laws, past the paper's author and directly at the US government.

[Gomez] is being sued under a criminal law that was reformed in 2006, following the conclusion of a free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. The new law was meant to fulfill the trade agreement's restrictive copyright standards, and it expanded criminal penalties for copyright infringement, increasing possible prison sentences and monetary fines.

More details on the awfulness of Colombia's law (spurred on by US special interests) are available in the EFF's earlier coverage. Colombia gave the US copyright industry everything it wanted in order to secure this free trade agreement… and then it just kept going.

Colombia passed a criminal reform bill in 2006 that enacted many of these provisions, but Bill 201 goes even further. Under it, copyright infringers could face harsh criminal penalties, whether or not the individual is aware of committing infringement. It sets up severe penalty provisions including a minimum prison sentence of four years and significant monetary fines.

This 2012 bill compounded problems existent in the 2006 free-trade agreement.

Like previous US FTAs, it misleadingly defines “commercial scale” to include non-commercially motivated infringement, forcing US trading partners to adopt the US legal standard.

This bill was hastily passed as a welcoming gift for President Obama, shoved through the legislative process in order to get out ahead of the administration's appearance at a Colombia-hosted conference. This deference to the US government could cost Gomez at least four years of his life.

While Colombia seemed very eager to take the worst parts of US copyright law (and make them even more terrible), it was less inclined to take any of the good.

Colombia does not have flexible fair use system like in the United States. It has a closed list of exceptions and limitations to the rights of authors (derecho de autor). This list was issued more than 20 years ago and are narrowly tailored to some specific situations that are not at all applicable to the digital age. Therefore none of these will apply directly to his case even if it was done for educational purposes.

The only silver lining here is that the court still needs to consider two aspects before making its decision: mens rea and whether there was any actual economic harm to the author. On the first factor, it seems pretty clear Gomez didn't upload the document to purposefully "rob" the author of his earnings. On the latter, Gomez never made a cent from his infringing upload and actually took it down when he discovered Scribd was planning to charge unregistered users to download papers.

Beneath all of this lies the ugly reality of the academic research market. Just as in the US, plenty of useful information is locked up and inaccessible to anyone unable to afford the frequently exorbitant fees charged by various gatekeepers. Copyright's original intent -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- isn't served by this behavior. Instead, it's deployed to further separate a large percentage of the population from knowledge. And in Colombia, it's being used to imprison someone actively "promoting the progress of science."

Filed Under: academic publishing, academics, colombia, copyright, criminal, diego gomez, fair use, free trade, free trade agreement, international obligations, knowledge, sharing

Academic Publisher Fights Publication Of Paper Criticizing Publishers' Price Increases And Profits

from the the-first-rule-of-price-gouging... dept

The world of academic publishing is highly profitable -- and, apparently, highly sustainable. There's no shortage of content seeking publication as researchers, professors, etc. seek to have their work published and cited. Handing even more power over to publishers by linking publication with tenure, universities have sabotaged their own interests by giving academic publishers every reason to increase subscription rates.

It's not as though this has gone unnoticed. Backlash against exorbitant access fees withholding publicly-funded research from the public led to a boycott of Elsevier unless it withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, which sought to lock up even more academic works. Though more than 30,000 scientists joined the boycott (and Elsevier withdrew its support of the Act), little has changed in the academic publishing world.

A group of UK academics tried to bring this debate to the publishers last year via a proposition paper that criticized the steadily increasing prices of publications, only to have it stonewalled and censored by academic publisher Taylor & Francis.

A journal's editorial board has been left on the brink of resignation after an eight-month standoff with its publisher Taylor & Francis over the publication of a debate on academic publishing and the profits made by major firms.

The debate, in the journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, was due to appear last September, but was delayed by Taylor & Francis and published only at the end of last month.

Its “proposition” paper, “Publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road”, by four academics from the University of Leicester's School of Management, criticises the large profits made by commercial publishers on the back of academics' labours, and the failure of the Finch report on open access to address them.

The full paper is embedded below and, as you can see, Taylor & Francis have helpfully time-stamped it with my IP address.

The paper compares publishers with the music industry, noting that the latter saw surging sales once it began pricing its offerings more realistically. It also posits that less strenuous infringement countermeasures could help push prices down. But most damningly, it examines the rates charged by publishers, comparing those of for-profit entities with those of non-profits.

What has been characterised as rampant price inflation is one characteristic of the market in academic journals – or at least those journals published by commercial publishers – with several studies since 2000 indicating rapidly increasing prices charged by for-profit publishers (Bergstrom, 2001; Bergstrom and Bergstrom, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007; Harvie et al., 2012). Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2004) suggest that a journal page published by a for-profit publisher is between three and five times more expensive than one published by a not-for-profit publisher. One factor driving increasing prices is journal reputation (Bergstrom, 2001) – but this leads to increasing profit margins (McCabe, 2004). In short, widely-cited journals are perceived to be higher quality, which allows for-profit publishers to charge higher prices for such journals; if widely-cited and more highly-priced journals also enjoy higher circulation (because they are widely-cited), then publishers also benefit through lower average production costs (McCabe, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007).

The more widely-cited a journal is, the more likely it is to be published on a larger-scale (reducing costs) and the more desirable it is as a destination for submissions (lowering costs yet again). With this desirability comes the privilege of increasing prices, something for-profit publishers aren't exactly shy about doing.

But this generates expenses for other entities who aren't part of this self-sustaining feedback loop, often causing them to cannibalize related services to the detriment of the schools themselves.

Since 1999, spending on books has fallen by almost a fifth in real terms, and from almost 12 per cent of libraries' total spending to just over 8 per cent. Expenditure on serials, on the other hand, has increased sharply: from just under £70 million to over £130 million. In real terms this represents an increase of 63 per cent; journals' share of total library spending rose from 16 per cent to almost 20 per cent. (Harvie et al., 2012, p.910)

Needless to say, Taylor & Francis wasn't interested in publishing a critique of its business model. So, it stalled the publication of this article for several months. (It was originally due to be published September 2013.)

The journal's general editor, Stuart Macdonald, a visiting professor of economics at Aalto University in Finland, said the non-appearance of the journal in September was followed, two months later, by a letter from a senior manager at Taylor & Francis demanding that more than half of the proposition article be cut.

“They never said why. They just said they didn't want this debate to take place,” Professor Macdonald said. “They also said I should have got their approval before inviting debate papers, but I have never done that before and it seems quite improper.”

He said matters came to a head at a “very unpleasant” meeting in January, when the journal’s editorial board threatened to resign en masse unless Taylor & Francis backed down.

This threat forced a half-assed capitulation from Taylor & Francis. It agreed to publish the paper but imposed several limitations. First, it stripped publishers' names from the paper and the four responses. Then, when it finally cleared it to run, it appended this footnote to the first page.

Disclaimer: Opinions and views expressed in this article (the Proposition) are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the content of this article. Any opinions and views expressed in this article are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the article should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.

An editorial published alongside the paper further highlights the questionable activity surrounding the (eventual) publication of the piece.

The academic publishing industry, as in the Prometheus debate on open access, has previously been happy to throw itself into the fray. Not so on this occasion. Many, many individuals working in the industry were invited to respond to the Proposition paper; not a one felt able to accept. It was made all too clear that the industry was in no mood for this debate. Indeed, at one time the editors were asked to excise the major part of the Proposition paper. Our refusal and ensuing negotiations explain why this debate was not published as intended in September 2013, and why no issue of Prometheus has appeared since.

The editorial, written by Professor Stuart Macdonald, also calls into question the publisher's decision to act as an editor.

But are academic publishers intruding in the editorial role? For example, without reference to any editor, the names of all academic publishers have been expunged from the Response papers in this issue. Institutional anonymity is already a custom in management studies, one that has done little for the standing of the subject. It would be unfortunate were it to spread throughout the social sciences, driving academic research from the empirical to the theoretical and abstract.

This isn't the first time an academic publisher has blocked publication because of subject matter, but this is usually due to outside forces, like the demands of corporations. In this case, however, it was an inside job. Not only did Taylor & Francis do all it could to prevent a discussion about its practices, but it also had a detrimental affect on other submissions. As MacDonald notes, he withheld other issues of the journal that were awaiting publication because he believed Taylor & Francis would give those preference over the problematic proposition paper. This has resulted in a backlog of papers awaiting publication, one that doesn't look to be eased any time soon.

With the trust between the publisher and the editors effectively destroyed by Taylor & Francis' actions, other options are being explored, including branching off into self-publishing. Unfortunately, any other routes taken will do very little to impact the publisher, or make it reconsider further transparently self-interested moves in the future.

Filed Under: academic publishing, copyright, open access, publishing
Companies: taylor and francis