A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor.
We should boycott all of them
Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#12Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good…
They may have all past assets, but in the absence of agreement and Elsevier's reputation for not dealing fairly, people are going elsewhere and will continue to do this in in greater numbers.
I think Elsevier can achieve temporary stalemate at best.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#13Strikes me as a lost war for Elsevier
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good…
Elsevier is an European publisher. I wonder if EU countries could choose to nationalize it.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#14I can't help but think sci-hub has something to do with their ability to walk away.
That's pretty much undeniable. That said, German academic libraries have also supposedly spent a lot of effort into making sure that accessing the content is still as painless as possible, e.g. through making Inter-library Loan easier.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#15I think this is great. Hopefully the entire academic world will switch to Open Access for all future publishing. Then by fixing copyright lengths we can just wait them out.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good…
Elsevier is an European publisher. I wonder if EU countries could choose to nationalize it.
Nationalise Elsevier? EU does not simply "nationalise" companies on a whim.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#17A lot of tech conferences in amsterdam have Elsevier as sponsor. We should boycott all of them
The most powerful boycott would be not to submit papers to Elsevier journals. But given current academic hiring practices this is hardly going to happen, at least not in my field.
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have almost all the assets. It's good trying to put pressure on them, because they've been abusing their position for too long, but if you can't access legally decades of references you and your institution have this problem that you can't work. Besides, if you get copies elsewhere you are liable and they can throw the copyright laws at you and win. This can only be solved with a new legal framework for IP (good…
IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their work as they see fit. In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students simply republi…
That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published page numbers), but what you get for papers up to more or less the 90s is scanned documents, it's unlikely that you can find other versions around. The transition to a sane model won't be frictionless nor fast, it might be cheaper to make a bid for the publishing companies outright (fees of subscriptions are simply absurd, their whole business model is a legal racket).
Re: Elsevier demands unacceptable for Germany’s academic community
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC it won't be that easy in germany. Copyright is non-transferable so Elsevier has a license. Additionally we have the Verwertungsrecht, which is part of the non-transferabl part of the copyright law and gives the author of a work the exclusive and inalienable right to publish, copy and transmit their work as they see fit. In Germany, there stands nothing in the way of all the professors and students simply republi…
That's very good news, yet I imagine the publisher can claim rights over composition, layout, typesetting and the pdfs themselves. This is quite a problem as who's going to do all that again, particularly when it comes to dead authors (ocr won't cut it). Nowadays you have your own digital version and you could simply distribute that (if we ignore keeping track of published page numbers), but what you get for papers u…
For dead authors, the inheritance regulates who gets to control the copyright. Usually inheritance works out, the state puts a lot of money into finding lost relatives if everything else fails.
The publisher to my knowledge cannot claim copyright over composition, layout, typesetting or the PDF unless they can show they had significant copyrightable work in each step. (Copyright in Germany first requires you to do some significant intellectual work, where significant changes based on what you do but science usually has a higher barrier)
If the PDF contains a trademark of theirs then that's a problem.
Generally a pre-print PDF should be available in almost all cases and could be published without Elsevier's input. If not that, Universities do archive the Tex files (or similar inputs) if possible so they could take those.