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.
Is pretty slimy to misrepresent Academia.edu's business.
If they were trying to bootstrap a business based on violating Elsevier's licence terms, then why have they complied with Elsevier's requests to take down content?
If their business is based on violating the licence to that content then removing that content would remove their business, and this might be true if all scientific papers had to be published through Elsevier which would mean that a service like this then would not be able to operate without violating those terms, however that is quite clearly not the case.
You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services. Accordingly, you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Academia.edu the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms; and (ii) neither the Member Content nor your posting, uploading, publication, submission or transmittal of the Member Content or Academia.edu’s use of the Member Content (or any portion thereof) on, through or by means of the Site or Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.
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 until after the rule change. Presumably someone was sitting on the domain for a future use. Not sure if they bought it, or the founder was sitting on it for years. Since 2006, transferring grandfathered .edu domains is also prohibited, but it could've been sold in the 2001-06 window.
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?
There's nothing controversial here — Elsevier merely bumped up the rate at which they're sending Academia.edu takedown notices for obvious infringement by its users.
What's more interesting to me is that ResearchGate, a site which is virtually identical to Academia.edu in its "mission" and design, has been redistributing a shockingly large number of Elsevier PDFs for a long time. Unless these google searches are misleading, there seem to be many thousands of them:
I'm really stumped as to how ResearchGate gets away with this, but Academia.edu is getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Maybe Elsevier and other publishers haven't yet learned to reliably "find" ResearchGate's shared papers, or perhaps they've come up with some arrangement that allows them to publicly share thousands of paywalled PDFs with impunity?
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.
It can just look like Zotero, which replicates Mendeley's functionality and is distributed free by an awesome non-profit research library. I can't recommend it enough.
So I decided to finally fill out my Academia.edu profile recently and found there was no easy way to add papers. You could upload them or "import" them from another website, neither of which I could do due to the ambiguous copyright status of my papers, but you couldn't enter them manually. The most obvious and unambiguous way would be to enter a DOI, and have them query CrossRef for the paper metadata, but there seems to be no way to do that?
So, in a sense, are Academia.edu not encouraging this behaviour (which is frequently copyright-infringing) by making it hard to add references without actively uploading the pdfs themselves?
If they're doing that, perhaps it's because they want to leverage the "preprint server" exceptions to copyright agreements in order to amass a corpus of otherwise-locked papers. If the author doesn't upload it, it's scraping. If the author does upload it, it's at least a grey area, and may be permissible under many agreements.
I only see winners in this: I think both Elsevier and academia.edu are bloody plagues, and whoever loses, I'm happy. The way I see this, either people are turned off academia.edu or away from Elsevier, both of which are desirable results in my opinion. So...good job, I suppose?
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?
There's actually a simple technical way around this. Don't store the paper. Store a file hash and let the user access it via approved channels. Most users here will have legitimate access via their institution, or can easily find the paper via Google. Dedupe on upload and link to approved Elsevier stores. Easy peasey.
That's the interesting part: Elsevier does not have copyright of these papers! The authors do. However, by publishing with Elsevier, you grant them an exclusive license for the right to publish and distribute the article.[1]
Note that this even includes the author copy of the manuscript (albeit with slightly more lenient terms - the author may only post the copy to a personally operated website or their institution's website).[2]
The best things in life are free. And that's the problem here. Knowledge sharing, MOOC's (massive open online courses) and open source education is awesome and gives accessibility to the best information in the world. When you have a lot of knowledge, it becomes a commodity--and a precious commodity should have a high price tag, right?But knowledge really is priceless, and like paying for love, when you pay for knowledge, you might not get what you pay. And like paying for love, sometimes pimps want to control the market. And is that necessarily wrong? Because to make knowledge profitable means to make it sustainably accessible. A friend of mine (@habib) is a product manager at Elsevier and I wonder what he thinks about this. He happens to have been recruited by the company years ago from his blog on library science, and now he works on finding up-and-coming knowledge innovations. I'm going to tweet this to him and see what he thinks.
[+] [-] czr80|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] moocowduckquack|12 years ago|reply
If they were trying to bootstrap a business based on violating Elsevier's licence terms, then why have they complied with Elsevier's requests to take down content?
If their business is based on violating the licence to that content then removing that content would remove their business, and this might be true if all scientific papers had to be published through Elsevier which would mean that a service like this then would not be able to operate without violating those terms, however that is quite clearly not the case.
You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services. Accordingly, you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site or Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Academia.edu the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms; and (ii) neither the Member Content nor your posting, uploading, publication, submission or transmittal of the Member Content or Academia.edu’s use of the Member Content (or any portion thereof) on, through or by means of the Site or Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation.
http://www.academia.edu/terms
[+] [-] _delirium|12 years ago|reply
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 until after the rule change. Presumably someone was sitting on the domain for a future use. Not sure if they bought it, or the founder was sitting on it for years. Since 2006, transferring grandfathered .edu domains is also prohibited, but it could've been sold in the 2001-06 window.
[+] [-] legutierr|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] gjuggler|12 years ago|reply
What's more interesting to me is that ResearchGate, a site which is virtually identical to Academia.edu in its "mission" and design, has been redistributing a shockingly large number of Elsevier PDFs for a long time. Unless these google searches are misleading, there seem to be many thousands of them:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety...
I'm really stumped as to how ResearchGate gets away with this, but Academia.edu is getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Maybe Elsevier and other publishers haven't yet learned to reliably "find" ResearchGate's shared papers, or perhaps they've come up with some arrangement that allows them to publicly share thousands of paywalled PDFs with impunity?
[+] [-] monksy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantastoria|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jval|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jessriedel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Osmium|12 years ago|reply
So, in a sense, are Academia.edu not encouraging this behaviour (which is frequently copyright-infringing) by making it hard to add references without actively uploading the pdfs themselves?
[+] [-] ISL|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmk2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookrn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] res0nat0r|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3JPLW|12 years ago|reply
Note that this even includes the author copy of the manuscript (albeit with slightly more lenient terms - the author may only post the copy to a personally operated website or their institution's website).[2]
1. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-polici...
2. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-polici...
[+] [-] ivansavz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] arabellatv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Empathenosis|12 years ago|reply