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Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

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Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#31

Post by pallandt »

legutierr wrote: post #24
czr80 wrote: post #12

It's probably irrational, but Academia.edu's domain really annoys me - I dislike a company using a .edu domain. It feels deceptive, in some way. Come to think of it, implicitly calling for a boycott of another company while simultaneously trying to bootstrap a business based on violating that company's license terms feels pretty slimy too.

I'm not terribly familiar with Academia.edu and how it operates, but from reading the article and a cursory review of their website, it seems that the papers it hosts are meant to be submitted by the authors themselves. How is it slimy for Academia.edu to operate under the assumption that its contributors retain the right to publish their own work on the site? Or am I missing something about their business model?

If I remember correctly Elsevier's rules, in case the article is from a subscription-based journal (non-open access) they retain copyright to the final published peer-reviewed & formatted article. The author is allowed to share their final published paper only in a 'scholarly' context, which seems to mean anything but mass dissemination; you're allowed to share it with your peers privately, but not post it on your site for example. I've just re-checked and it seems this rule is still enforced: http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-re...

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#32

Post by steveklabnik »

legutierr wrote: post #24
czr80 wrote: post #12

It's probably irrational, but Academia.edu's domain really annoys me - I dislike a company using a .edu domain. It feels deceptive, in some way. Come to think of it, implicitly calling for a boycott of another company while simultaneously trying to bootstrap a business based on violating that company's license terms feels pretty slimy too.

I'm not terribly familiar with Academia.edu and how it operates, but from reading the article and a cursory review of their website, it seems that the papers it hosts are meant to be submitted by the authors themselves. How is it slimy for Academia.edu to operate under the assumption that its contributors retain the right to publish their own work on the site? Or am I missing something about their business model?

Normally, .edu sites are for educational institutions only. Academia.edu is different, it got grandfathered in.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#33

Post by steveklabnik »

_delirium wrote: post #20
czr80 wrote: post #12

It's probably irrational, but Academia.edu's domain really annoys me - I dislike a company using a .edu domain. It feels deceptive, in some way. Come to think of it, implicitly calling for a boycott of another company while simultaneously trying to bootstrap a business based on violating that company's license terms feels pretty slimy too.

> It feels deceptive, in some way. It does violate expectations, in part because it violates the stated rules of the .edu registrar, and therefore what people expect to find under .edu. But prior to 2001 there was no formal enforcement, and a grandfather clause applies to domains registered up through late 2001. Academia.edu seems to fall in that category, even though the company and site themselves weren't started u…

> Not sure if they bought it, or the founder was sitting on it for years.

My understanding was that it was purchased by an LLC, and then the control of the LLC was sold.

Ahhh yes: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Academia.edu-get-the-.edu-domai...

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#34

Post by _delirium »

steveklabnik wrote: post #33
_delirium wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels deceptive, in some way. It does violate expectations, in part because it violates the stated rules of the .edu registrar, and therefore what people expect to find under .edu. But prior to 2001 there was no formal enforcement, and a grandfather clause applies to domains registered up through late 2001. Academia.edu seems to fall in that category, even though the company and site themselves weren't started u…

> Not sure if they bought it, or the founder was sitting on it for years. My understanding was that it was purchased by an LLC, and then the control of the LLC was sold. Ahhh yes: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Academia.edu-get-the-.edu-domai...

Ah right, the ol' shell-company trick. If you buy control of an LLC without dissolving or merging it, that's not a "transfer" of the assets owned by the LLC. Useful for .edu domains; also useful for avoiding re-assessment of California real property under Proposition 13, among many other convenient uses.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#35

Post by nl »

rmk2 wrote: post #14
cookrn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit familiar with the current events and business practices that bring vitriol against Elsevier. Not so much for academia.edu though and I've only heard of it a few other times as I'm not in academia. What causes you to feel negatively about it?

Academia.edu bothers me on a somewhat different level: It becomes yet another of the levels were academia pretends to be more and more like the business world (with LinkedIn). The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else. One of the things we get told frequently is that we need to "expand our social media presence", i.e. to get LinkedIn and acade…

The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else.

Kinda like academic publishing, right? Pretty sure the Erdos number[1] was around well before Academia.edu.

To make it clear - I think a lot of Academia.edu's practices are annoying - login wall for papers etc. But academia would be well served if it took better advantage of some of the possibilities online collaboration brought (think of the Polymath projects). CiteULike/arxiv cannot be the high point of online academic publishing.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#36

Post by jval »

Academia.edu face the same problems that all players in this space do, namely that almost all content in journals is owned by parties other than the authors themselves. It is almost like starting YouTube in a pre-handheld camera era, where the only videos are those produced by studios, and then targeting actors to have them upload the films.

Now that Elsevier have acquired Mendeley, they have chosen a winner from the battle between Mendeley, Academia.Edu, and ResearchGate. It is going to be fairly binary from here on in for the other two parties. Either Elsevier and other commercial publishers will try and sue them out of existence, or send them enough takedown notices to render them useless, or they will acquire them. Either way I can't see an endgame here between these three businesses that doesn't result in the academic publishing landscape remaining almost as balkanised as it was 5 years ago.

I think the ultimate winner in this space won't look anything like Academia.edu, RG, or Mendeley.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#37

Post by jahewson »

darkarmani wrote: post #26
gphilip wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elsevier does not have copyright of these papers! The authors do. This is not true for the vast majority [1] of papers; for most articles published by Elsevier, the authors have to sign away their copyright first. What the parent says applies only to papers published "open access" by Elsevier. Both the links posted by the parent talk about Elsevier's policy for this type of publication. To publish an article as open…

> government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign an exclusive publishing and distribution license Can you issue a DMCA based on this type of clause? I wonder if they have issued DMCAs for documents falling under this?

Yes, copyright consists of five main rights which can be transferred or licensed separately. These are:

- to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell them

- to create derivative works

- to perform or display the work publicly

- to sell or assign these rights to others

- to transmit or display by radio or video

So assigning Elsevier your right to (only) publish the work is legitimate.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#38

Post by jahewson »

3JPLW wrote: post #6
res0nat0r wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like perfectly acceptable takedown notices then.

I'm not a lawyer, nor have I thoroughly read the DMCA; is the text broad enough to cover such licenses, over and above copyright?

Yes, because this is a fairly standard copyright agreement. The DMCA is not adding anything new here, see my reply to darkarmani above. Copyright's rights are already divided up in such a manner by definition, it's not something that their lawyers have arbitrarily devised.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#39

Post by rmk2 »

nl wrote: post #35
rmk2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia.edu bothers me on a somewhat different level: It becomes yet another of the levels were academia pretends to be more and more like the business world (with LinkedIn). The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else. One of the things we get told frequently is that we need to "expand our social media presence", i.e. to get LinkedIn and acade…

The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else. Kinda like academic publishing, right? Pretty sure the Erdos number[1] was around well before Academia.edu. To make it clear - I think a lot of Academia.edu's practices are annoying - login wall for papers etc. But academia would be well served if it took better advantage of some of the possibilities…

The thing is, not all strands of academia have collaboration even as a central focus. I don't see it very often in the humanities that articles or books have multiple collaborators. The normal thing is either the article or monograph written by an individual. The other option are journals or collections made up of these kinds of articles. Sure, it's not unheard of that people collaborate, but even bigger projects usually follow the idea that what you publish is yours, so you are more likely to see a publication series with individual volumes by different people, or the above mentioned collections, where (maybe!) introductions or overviews are written collaboratively.

This has partly to do with the dreadful "tooling" in many cases, i.e. in most cases Word with handwritten citations. If you are lucky, people use Endnote or Zotero. If you are really lucky, you might encounter somebody who knows what (Open|Libre) Office is. Your options for collaborations are thus: Google Docs (if people can manage the technical complexity) or mailing around Word files.

Re: Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from Elsevier

#40

Post by [deleted] »

steveklabnik wrote: post #33
_delirium wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels deceptive, in some way. It does violate expectations, in part because it violates the stated rules of the .edu registrar, and therefore what people expect to find under .edu. But prior to 2001 there was no formal enforcement, and a grandfather clause applies to domains registered up through late 2001. Academia.edu seems to fall in that category, even though the company and site themselves weren't started u…

> Not sure if they bought it, or the founder was sitting on it for years. My understanding was that it was purchased by an LLC, and then the control of the LLC was sold. Ahhh yes: http://www.quora.com/How-did-Academia.edu-get-the-.edu-domai...

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