LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract | Hacker News Reader

LSU Sues Elsevier for Breach of Contract

arl.org

211 pointsatakan_gurkan56 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more it seems like this could be a good open-source project.

The idea would be to translate everything on Sci-Hub from PDF to MediaWiki and convert all of the references to links. That could be tough, probably loaded with edge cases. If it works though, not only would Sci-Hub be hosting all the papers but this site could make them all easy to find/navigate. Seems like it'd be super fun to go spelunking through a network of related science papers in a similar way to diving Wikipedia.

As an open-source project, it would also be possible for anyone to re-host the site in case it gets blocked.

Yea, it would last about as long as a DMCA notice would be filed against you.

So don't distribute the actual papers? Even a complete citation graph with basic info (title, authors, abstract, doi) and a link to the publisher's canonical version would be a very useful tool.

Are there torrents or similar available of SciHub's collection?

The problem of replacing publishers isn't the CMS. It's the established review processes, the institutional knowledge and contacts, and the paid editors. Plus the self-perpetuing value of brands such as Nature and Science.

So incorporate public peer review into the public domain papers site, and have universities base tenure on number of 4/5-rated reviews of other's published work, and number of independent replications of published papers, rather than number of original papers published?

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

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

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.

There is also an important difference: media piracy can have a somewhat negative image in the eyes of the public, but pirating scientific papers does not. If academic publishers attract too much attention with a lawsuit, and more people understand their revenue model, I doubt that the public would be on their side. So maybe this encourages them to be more cautious.

In fact, Sci-Hub is not a real threat to academic publishers as long as universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it. Of course, many universities probably won't want to tell their researchers to just use Sci-Hub (because of legal concerns, and because it could disappear the next day). So leaving Sci-Hub mostly alone may well be a deliberate decision from academic publishers.

Nah, they are totally suing (http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i27/Lawsuits-progress-against...). I think part of the reason they are not shut down yet is because Russia. Also, scihub is a huge threat to their business -- they have close to 100% of Elseviers content stored, and greater than 2/3rds of the overall scientific corpus (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/sci-hub-s-cache-pirat...).

> as long as universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it

I think parties like Elsevier really don't like sci-hub, I can imagine some people / organizations will opt to not pay for Elsevier because of it. Just like how people would opt to not go to the cinema because they've pirated the movie already.

The main thing IMO is that more people will agree to "knowledge should be free" than "movies should be free", the former is human advancement, the latter is entertainment.

> "Just like how people would opt to not go to the cinema because they've pirated the film already."

Overall movie attendances are down slightly and can largely be explained by other factors than piracy (ticket prices, confectionery prices, saturated market, movie quality, movie series (Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... 9999), etc).

Piracy is a grey area in terms of negative impact, especially in the area of entertainment. Company bosses like to see every instance of piracy as a loss of a ticket sale, but in reality it is far more nuanced than that. In some cases, arguably, film piracy can be a positive effect, in other cases there is no guarantee that the type of person that pirates heavily is the type of person who would pay to see a film in the first place. I can go on, but sufficient to say it is a complicated issue.

Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging piracy or supporting it, but neither do I think it is nearly as evil as often depicted.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/movie-theater-attendance-is-de...

Not only human advancement, but I'm pissed off Elsevier is getting rich being the gatekeepers of research my tax dollars paid for.

The entities actually paying Elsevier are mostly college libraries (not individuals). Though librarians tend to be pro open access, college legal counsel is unlikely to let them tell professors/students to use a pirate site (and many of them would not be comfortable doing so, despite not loving companies like Elsevier). And the most vocal professors unfortunately tend to care more about getting the articles they want/need than about promoting knowledge freedom. Therefore, libraries tend to continue paying for those articles to the extent their budgets allow.

I am hearing more lately about libraries/universities taking stands (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006785 for example), which is encouraging.

My university blocks scihub and I'm every angry about it.

Use tor to access the onion domain for scihub (they have one) if you don't already do so.

Maybe https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion.link will work.

Or install Tor browser, and use http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion

That really sucks.

I just asked my brother if he can access scihub via his university's network. He checked and said he can.

He told me his lecturer told all the students about scihub, and they should use it if they can't access a paper via the university's resources. But the university itself is not allowed to use scihub.

You should also try use AARRC.info . It is a full-fledged web service with multiple access techniques to flagship academic papers (Elsevier, IEEE, etc) using a solid browser extension. It is also a free service.

What university. That's not what universities should be doing--blocking websites

Universities, like most other schools in general, maintain huge block-lists and heuristic filters for things like piracy, porn, malware, and anything else they deem to be unacceptable uses of their networks.

On top of the network censorship, most schools and libraries also engage in or are pressured to engage in censoring books and other print material for the same reasons. http://www.pfaw.org/report/schools-and-censorship-banned-boo...

Kind of ironic that the official forefront of education is also the foremost consumer of censorship tools but I think the concerned parents are still winning on this one.

Why not just use a VPN?

I would begin by a) Naming and shaming your university. That decision is clearly counter to the goals of higher education b) Considering moving to another university. If this one censors access to educational material, what else aren't they telling you?

If they were cautious about attention, I don't think Elsevier would have sued Sci-Hub, as there was a major Streisand effect from that.

Elsevier know the end game here. It's when, not if, they go full SCO.

SCO?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies

Not sure what you mean, but Sci-hub was sued in 2015 by Elsevier. Nothing really happened because Sci-hub is hosted in Russia.

At this point, the media companies would've gone through the courts to either have the .io registrars take away their domain name - like they've done repeatedly with various torrent sites - or have ISPs in many countries block the domain by name. Whether they're based in Russia is irrelevant to that.

Sure, that could happen. But hosting from Russia will likely protect them. And they can use other domain names, and Tor onions. But they can't travel outside Russia, for fear of arrest. As it went down for BTC-e.

You can always get around the block no matter what, but if the goal is to ensure that as few people as possible use Sci-Hub, using the court systems that exist to have its domains seized and/or blocked would be a first step. Requiring that people use a proxy or Tor to access the site increases the barrier to entry significantly from where it is now.

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.

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

Elsevier is an artificial barrier.

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

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Because they have unlimited access?

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.

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.

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.

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