Riled Up By Elsevier’s Take-Downs? Time To Embrace Open Access

Alex O. Holcombe | The Conversation | December 12, 2013

The publishing giant Elsevier owns much of the world’s academic knowledge, in the form of article copyright. In the past few weeks it has stepped up enforcement of its property rights, issuing “take-down notices” to Academia.edu, where many researchers post PDFs of their articles.

The articles in question were published in Elsevier-owned journals, and are legally available only by subscription, often at exorbitant prices.

Before publication, journals owned by Elsevier send academics' manuscripts to other scholars for review. Following the review process, Elsevier reformats the manuscripts into PDFs in the style of the journals, whereupon authors are required to sign away the copyright.

So Elsevier is certainly within its legal rights to not allow posting of these final article PDFs to third-party sites, whether it’s Academia.edu or an author’s personal webpage.