[snrip]

This reads as being very butt-hurt that somebody else chooses not to give away their core business. It is cool that you see profit as something obscene, but don't blame others for making a business.

Same goes for sending takedown notices. If you are technically in breach, you are in breach.

If you don't want to do business with Elsevier, that is fine. If you don't want others to do so, that is fine too. This is just being sad.

[tehwalrus]

Nope. Elsevier's core business is coordinating reviews of papers - for which submitters pay a fee and for which the participating reviewers don't get paid - and then typesetting the articles using a special sauce and hosting it behind a paywall.

A pre-print of an article typeset using LaTeX on the academic's own machine is not under their copyright, and yet they're demanding take-down notices of such pre-prints hosted on 3rd party machines.

They are overreaching, and now they're alienating universities (who pay handsomely for site-wide subscriptions).

I don't give them long, even if they do publish Physica A.

[chalst]

Elsevier does not coordinate refereeing for typical journals; this is handled by the scientific board, who are not Elsevier employees. Elsevier is in charge of copy-editing, typesetting, and distribution, and coordinates with the scientific board.

[roel_v]

"A pre-print of an article typeset using LaTeX on the academic's own machine is not under their copyright, and yet they're demanding take-down notices of such pre-prints hosted on 3rd party machines."

I have no position in this battle, but misinformation is misinformation: who has copyright on pre-prints is entirely immaterial. Authors, in order to get published in an Elsevier journal, 1) promise they didn't publish it before (with exceptions) and 2) promise not to redistribute the final paper or its preparatory versions after it has been published. They also agree to not allow anyone else to redistribute any of that in case, through whatever channel, it gets out. So this is purely a matter of Elsevier holding the author to their end of the bargain. Said author is entirely free to not enter into it in the first place, of course.

[microtonal]

Said author is entirely free to not enter into it in the first place, of course.

In some fields it's not that free. The choice between publishing in a high-impact Elsevier journal or a low-impact journal with acceptable terms is not really a choice if you want to have a career in science.

[LambdaAlmighty]

Wrong, the authors do have a choice.

Many choices, in fact. Including & not limited to: raising awareness of Elsevier's reprehensible practices, writing blogs, commenting on online forums. Lobbying various institutions. Not signing an explicit contract with Elsevier? Definitely a choice.

"Society made me do it" is always a pathetic excuse.

[camelite]

You must have missed the second part of his sentence. It begins with "if".

[Kliment]

It is not a contractual issue when Elsevier attacks the INSTITUTIONS that they have no contract with, for hosting the papers that the authors are explicitly allowed to host on their personal websites (which happen to be hosted by the university). It's just plain extortion. Your point 2) is explicitly allowed in the contract for the preparatory versions and the "author copy" which is identical to the published version save for a notice.

[zvrba]

> yet they're demanding take-down notices of such pre-prints hosted on 3rd party machines.

When you agree to the copyright form, you also agree that you won't systematically distribute preprints or submit them to a systematic distribution service.

In comparison with other publishers, Elsevier is rather generous to allow authors to post a preprint on their personal web-page (whether or not it is served by their university.)

[Luc]

Generous is an unreasonable word to use in this context. Their profit margins though, those are generous.

"Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit in 2010 for a profit margin of 36%."

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/mit-open-access/open-acc...

[res0nat0r]

Isn't this a website about startups and business? What is wrong with a healthy profit margin that is made by legal willing contracts between Elsevier and scientists?

Just because they make money and are involved with copyright they are automatically bad? If they were barely making any money and closer to broke startup founders, then they would be OK?

[jjoonathan]

40% profit margins do not exist for long in properly functioning competitive markets. Deeply entrenched companies typically run at 10%. Monopolies (example: drug companies) run at 20% (arguably in the case of drug companies this is ok because they operate with much higher risk).

If you find a 40% margin that can't be ascribed to transient behavior, you have found a market that has entered one of the (many) modes of market failure, in which the usual arguments for markets being a force for good (or least evil) go out the window. We use markets precisely because they tend to avoid situations like this; it baffles me how frequently the "market did it so it must be good" argument rears its head every time there's an exception. It's circular reasoning, at least for those of us who don't take the moral infallibility of the free-market as an article of faith.

Specifically, they are not "automatically bad" because they make money using copyright. They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research, and they're milking the shit out of it at enormous cost to taxpayers and students. Broke startup founders do not get to appropriate tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded work and hold it hostage from those who have paid for it, and if they did it would not be OK.

[res0nat0r]

> They are bad because they've found a loophole that lets them monopolize a critical distribution channel for taxpayer-funded research

There would be no monopoly if scientists didn't agree to their terms and refused to submit papers to them. They'd go out of business very quickly.

[fphhotchips]

No, they're bad because the majority of their product (that is, knowledge) isn't developed by them, or paid for by them. Instead, it's funded by universities and funding agencies. It's a parasitic relationship with very little benefit to the host.

[Luc]

It's a sign their profit is not just from the service they provide, which is really rather simple, but from a historically grown, entrenched system that is very hard to get rid of. They're basically a tax on society, and we'd be much better off if authors and their institutions made a clean break.

[microtonal]

In comparison with other publishers, Elsevier is rather generous to allow authors

They are absolutely not generous. In my field, the ACL is one of the largest organisations, which publishes (among other things) two journals. Nearly (or all?) publications are publicly available at:

http://aclweb.org/anthology/

Let's not forget that a substantial share of research worldwide is paid for by tax payers. It's awful to see that most of that knowledge does not become generally available to the larger public, but ends up being used to increase the profits of an oligopoly.

[scott_s]

Both the ACM and the IEEE allow authors to post the final version on their personal website, or the website of their institution.

Of course, the ACM and IEEE are professional organizations, not for-profit publishers. So they can actually move away from the pay-per-access model and still continue to exist. I don't see how for-profit publishers can.

[Fomite]

One of the problems is the number of professional organizations who use a for-profit publisher for their journal's output.

[tehwalrus]

"When you agree to the copyright form" => presumably this is different for every publisher.

My only pre-print (hosted on arXiv) was submitted there long before it was accepted for publication in a non-Elsevier journal, who have made no attempt to take it down.

There are also open access journals which explicitly allow you to host your own pre-prints.

[maccard]

>and yet they're demanding take-down notices of such pre-prints hosted on 3rd party machines. In the contract you sign, it's clearly stated you can't upload your manuscript to 3rd party distribution sites, other than arxiv. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not keen on what they're doing, but they're staying within their contracts.

[brazzy]

The thing is: Elsevier is a middle-man whose "business" (parasitism, more like) critically depends on exactly two things: scientists who want to be published in their journals, and Universities who want access to those journals. The second one of these is annoyed enough to find alternatives, there is no business.

Which makes it very, very unwise to piss off both at the same time.

Science publishers served a purpose in the past, but the cost of what they're doing has gone down dramatically and at the same time they're jacking up prices to absurd levels to extract the maximum profit from the pseudo-monopoly resulting from the non-fungibility of science results and magnified by aggregation.

And the worst thing is that they extract these profits at the expense of everyone else because it actually reduces the accessibility of scientific research and the profits are paid for from science budgets.

It's the perfect example of an entire industry whose activity is a net negative for society at large.

[hwh]

In fact, in this case they tried not to "piss off" both at the same time and in fact concentrated on the university, not the individual scientist. The university just tried to communicate its pressure to it scientists, but it's a long and hard road to get them to care (some then already do!).

[marcosdumay]

Nope, it's quite a short route. You delist Elsevier publications fromt he impact index you calculate for measuring their productivity, and they'll intantly care.

Universities are pissed off Elsevier when buying their material, but completely in love when hiring researchers, and also wondering why researchers don't seem to get what they feel about the matter.

[namespace]

Why is the use of term "butt-hurt" on increase on HN? Does this lend weight in any meaningful way and not leave a bad taste in mouth.

[aaren]

I'm not even sure what it explicitly means. I interpret it as 'miffed' or 'vindictively annoyed', but I don't really know.

[brazzy]

Here you go: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/butthurt

[Kliment]

That's bullshit though. The authors retain copyright over their work, and have always had the right to distribute their papers on their personal websites. It's part of the deal. Now the assholes are changing the deal after the fact, and trying to use threats to get the people producing actual value to play along. If, as an author, I was okay with the rest of their evildoing before this, and accepted the deal as it stood, I no longer have any reason to trust them to honor any other agreement.

[zvrba]

> had the right to distribute their papers on their personal websites

Elsevier allows you to post the preprint, but not the final published version (which includes Elsevier's typesetting, logo, etc.)

[gmac]

At least for some of their journals (e.g. Global Environmental Change), I understand the position is that they will allow you to post the exact final published content, but (a) not as formatted by the journal and (b) not in any kind of organised institutional repository.

In case of (a), I actually prefer to post my own PDFs, because one of the tasks publishers-as-middlemen generally perform is screwing up captions, misapplying 'style guides' and so on.

Regarding (b), they are clearly trying to make it more difficult to find these posted articles, and to reduce the number posted by ensuring that individual authors have to take the initiative (rather than it being a matter of institutional policies).

(Edit: reading your comment again, I see that I'm wholly agreeing with you).

[Kliment]

I'd REALLY love to see a court decide on whether adding their logo and running it through a script is a transformation substantial enough to warrant copyright as a separate work.

[roel_v]

That is entirely besides the point. This is a contractual matter, not copyright.

[Kliment]

The contract states that there is no transfer of copyright, yet the assholes attempt to enforce copyright against the authors, while acting, effectively, as their agents. See the problem?

[zvrba]

It states no such thing. In fact, the website clearly states exactly the opposite, in "normal" (i.e., not legalese) language:

"For subscription articles: These rights are determined by a copyright transfer, where authors retain scholarly rights to post and use their articles."

http://www.elsevier.com/journal-authors/author-rights-and-re...

[jahewson]

> The authors retain copyright over their work

Absolutely not. Copyright is spit into several separable rights and the authors have signed some of these away. That they still own the majority of their rights under copyright is irrelevant.

> and have always had the right to distribute their papers on their personal websites

No they haven't. This was allowed (for preprints) under Elsevier's T&Cs only a few years ago. Authors have signed away their right to publish their work, so they need explicit permission.

You may not like the agreement, but it's perfectly valid under the law.