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A row has erupted between US-based open access forum Academia.edu and academic publisher Elsevier.
The controversy arose after the publisher issued ‘take down’ notices for articles it owns the copyright to, which were made available for free on the website.
One academic who posted his work on the research-sharing site, London-based Guy Leonard, has said that following the publisher’s demands, he would be “avoiding Elsevier both for publication and peer review and hopefully impressing on my colleagues to do the same".
Leonard, a research fellow at the University of Exeter’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences, was one of many of academics who received a message from Academia.edu on Friday (6th December) telling him his research paper on ‘Resolving the question of trypanosome monophyly: a comparative genomics approach using whole genome data sets with low taxon sampling’ was to be delisted from the website.
The notice said: “Academia.edu is committed to enabling the transition to a world where there is open access to academic literature. Elsevier takes a different view, and is currently upping the ante in its opposition to academics sharing their own papers online.”
The message from Academia.edu went on to encourage the author to sign a petition protesting about the publisher’s business practices, which surfaced last year.
Academia.edu’s founder Richard Price has told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an email that Elsevier had sent the company 2,800 take down notices within a couple of weeks. “Elsevier has started to send academics on Academia.edu take down notices in batches of a thousand at a time,” he said. The company usually only receives one or two individual notices from publishers a week, “but not at scale like this,” he added. The site has nearly six million registered users.
Tom Reller, vice-president and head of global corporate relations at Elsevier, said in response that the publisher issued the take down notices “from time to time” when final versions of published journal articles had been, “often inadvertently,” posted.
Reller said there were “many other good options for authors who want to share their article” with colleagues, internal teaching and training, and at conferences or meetings.
However, he said that the company issued take down notices to ensure that the final published version of an article was “readily discoverable and citable via the journal itself in order to maximise the usage metrics and credit for our authors, and to protect the quality and integrity of the scientific record.”
He added: “Any authors affected by a takedown notice who would like to self-archive and need help in doing so can contact us at universalaccess@elsevier.com. Academia.edu…made final versions of articles publicly available. We've reached out to them to ensure they were aware of our policies and to explore user-friendly options for alignment, but unfortunately they were unwilling to engage with us.”
Leonard, who was the first to tweet about the take-down notices, said in his blog today: “They say all publicity is good publicity but I really don’t think Elsevier can push a positive spin on their previous conduct nor on their recent conduct . . . 2,800 requests is 2,800 pieces of research that have now become inaccessible to the public for no good reason. If one little tweet can generate this amount of interest over a Friday and a weekend then just think how much interest and knowledge you can impart on the world by not publishing with Elsevier and making any articles that you have published with them available and free to access online.”