LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract

http://www.arl.org/news/community-updates/4264-louisiana-state-university-sues-elsevier-for-breach-of-contract

by atakan_gurkan • 9 years ago

211 56 9 years ago

arl.org

labster• 9 years ago

In the meantime, the LSU Vet school can use sci-hub.io, and get easier access to pubs than the paid version.

riffraff• 9 years ago

I wonder: how is sci-hub not been shut down yet? It does not even try to mask as a legal operation.

llukas• 9 years ago

That is the point of sci-hub? "to remove all barriers in the way of science..."

Elsevier is an artificial barrier.

vertex-four3• 9 years ago

The fact that the media companies aren't involved here should give you a hint. It's incredible how much power we've allowed them over the Internet.

mirimir4• 9 years ago

It's in Russia. And Russia's copyright law is extremely liberal about fair use.

return0• 9 years ago

No scientist ever lost any money from their paper being pirated.

It extends access to people who previously did not have it.

In fact it would be immoral to shut it down at this time.

mwnivek• 9 years ago

This is from 3 months ago (May 2, 2017), although it doesn't seem there have been any updates to the case since then.

mirimir4• 9 years ago

Well:

Elsevier has not accepted service of process for the lawsuit through the Louisiana long-arm statute nor at the Elsevier corporate office in New York City. Since Elsevier is headquartered in the Netherlands, LSU is attempting to effect service of process through the Hague Service Convention.

So Elsevier also hides from the law ;)

I wonder what's happened with that.

hycaria2• 9 years ago

Here's an amusing anecdote that happened in my own veterinary school a few years ago.

An exchange student from south america came and used our (european and valid) school licence to mass-download veterinary papers (not sure if it was for use in his school or for piracy, the story doesn't tell). Our school also got IP-banned by publishers, even though they pay the rights to access them.

This is really crazy, I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.

dpwm2• 9 years ago

When I was doing my MSc six years ago I was told by my supervisor not to download too many more papers relating to my project because the school could get IP-banned. I'd read pretty much every published paper relating to a small subfield of Physics at this point, but still no more than 50 papers in all.

I think I just laughed it off and said I'd got no plans to scrape journals. I always thought it was a bit of institutional folklore and that maybe there had been threatening letters or something. I didn't realise they actually do go ahead with the IP-banning.

hycaria2• 9 years ago

Yep, they do ! We actually learned about it in the same context "don't download too many papers, you can get us banned".

lsh• 9 years ago

I hope to see the downfall of scientific publishers during my lifetime.

whoa - all scientific publishers or just closed-access ones?

alpos3• 9 years ago

I read that as "downfall of scientific publishers [who are causing this kind of trouble]".

Still, would it be so bad?

The original purpose for html and www was to improve sharing of science papers. I can pretty easily imagine what the world would have to look like for all science papers to be self published and shared globally.

One possible alternative that seems easily viable would be to replace the network of independent publishers with a MediaWiki site that only allows posts from scientists. That could possibly also have a bot running around marking all articles with a peer review status. Talk pages would also make a great place to conduct such peer reviews.

upvotinglurker4• 9 years ago

This is quite common. The publisher's terms and conditions or site license contract probably includes language asserting a right to cut off access for "excessive" (however they define that) or software-mediated downloading. They may require the school to identify and block the offending user before restoring access.

nomercy400• 9 years ago

So LSU has a license with Elsevier, and LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine had a license with Elsevier.

How come LSU acquired two licenses in the first place? Was there a merger of LSU School of Veterinary Medicine with LSU? Has LSU SVM always been under LSU? Was the LSU license negotiated after?

bkanber• 9 years ago

The article doesn't state this explicitly, but it sounds like SVM and LSU had two independent contracts at first, then LSU's was renewed to be an umbrella contract, then SVM's independent contract expired. I'd even bet that it was planned that way, LSU would have wanted to combine the formerly independent contracts, so they negotiated for full coverage and then allowed SVM's to lapse.

upvotinglurker4• 9 years ago

Based on experience with academic libraries, this is likely, and it's plausible that Elsevier would use the existence of the former contract as an excuse to claim that veterinary students/faculty are somehow not covered under a contract covering all LSU students/faculty.

picklebutt• 9 years ago

There's been a bit of a state budget crisis in Louisiana with major cuts to funding of state universities, I'm guessing LSU decided to combine the liscenses to save money.

pmlnr2• 9 years ago

The only thing I still don't get: if there is a contract for unlimited access, why aren't unis setting up mirrors locally?

jk563• 9 years ago

Because they have unlimited access?

pmlnr2• 9 years ago

There are mirrors for many things, like linux distributions & packages, for which universities, historically, set up mirrors, to make things faster and distributed. It also makes sense not to leave the university network in my eyes.

Apparently they don't have unlimited access in reality (see the top comment), so if someone was doing this to me - "unlimited", yeah, not really - I'd set up a mirror and slowly copy the whole thing over to avoid not being able to access the documents in case I get banned and sorting it out takes time.

I'm well aware this might be a legal problem, but blocking valid access is also a legal problem.

dpwm2• 9 years ago

Not sure about countries with more sensible policy but in the UK, as an academic, you have to publish regularly to not have your research grant applications declined. This means that there are a lot of papers out there that are published for publishing's sake. It's a game you have to play for your career as a postdoc. Depending on the field, it can be hard to tell whether a paper was written for publishing's sake or to actually present a useful result from the abstract alone.

Because of effectively mandatory publishing, mirroring is quite a big effort and, from a publisher's point of view, relatively easy to spot. It is probably these countermeasures which we are talking about here wrt LSU. With research being ever more focussed and specialised, there are fields where there may only be a couple of papers and you may be the only person in your department that is interested in that particular paper in that particular year.

Now, you could cache papers as they are downloaded, but there are definitely ways of making papers cache unfriendly and the journals have probably already done this, given they really don't have a lot else to do. As others have mentioned, it is probably also a breach of contract to cache or mirror the papers.

upvotinglurker4• 9 years ago

Most likely the contract with Elsevier prohibits this. In the fine print, "unlimited access" is probably defined as something like "what we, the publisher, consider normal/reasonable reading speeds by a human using our site/server." At my academic library, for example, it's common, and apparently contractually sanctioned, for a publisher to temporarily IP-block a computer that they deem to be engaging in "excessive" or software-mediated downloading.

matt_morgan• 9 years ago

Does anyone know what's going on inside Elsevier? Publicly at least, they're acting like the music industry acted in the 90s. Are they doing anything internally to make sure they stay in business in ten years, other than fighting for every crumb of business they have now? Is there anyone there seriously looking ahead?

In a lot of ways they're in a worse position than the music industry was, or than Netflix was a few years ago, since at least those guys had the content-creation side to work on. I don't know what Elsevier can do when there's no money in distribution. The editors don't add that much.

dougmccune• 9 years ago

Elsevier is making a lot of moves to stay relevant. They're now one of the biggest open access publishers (where the revenue comes from article processing charges, not subscriptions). They've been realigning themselves as more of a data/information company than just a content company (see these products under the heading of "research intelligence": https://www.elsevier.com/research-intelligence/products-serv...). They bought Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which is one of the largest preprint repositories in the social sciences. Before that they bought Mendeley to try to get into the researcher social network/reference management/data collection game.

Say what you will about Elsevier, but they are most definitely not just sitting on their subscription content and waiting to become irrelevant.

zitterbewegung2• 9 years ago

Some people are wondering what is happening inside of Elsevier. Here is my speculation. When any large corporation sees the writing on the wall that it has a major threat to its business (Comcast, RIAA, MPAA) due to the fact that something is disrupting it they will take a really hard defensive position. This entails lowering of customer service and everything else in response.

Eventually the market kills them off and the situation changes. The large disruptor is Discrete Analysis which is a journal that has nearly no overhead. https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

pelario• 9 years ago

I think the real disruptor is Arxiv; which is where Discrete analysis will host their papers.

LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract

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