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