From: "Pikas, Christina K." <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 09:49:22 -0500

At the risk of coming off as an Elsevier defender.... I'd like to make
some points in response:

1) Academia.edu is a private company running on venture capital -
presumably they aspire to make money on the content that users upload

2) Authors signed a legal agreement with the publisher to transfer
copyright. (many would argue that they shouldn't have, but they did,
or they wouldn't have been published)

3) The agreement they signed allowed them to put some version on their
own page or in their institutional repository - not to give to a
company with the license that the company could make it available for
any and all users to download

4) When these authors joined Academia.edu, they had to agree to the
terms of service here: http://www.academia.edu/terms . Uploading
things for which you do not have the copyright is against the terms.
It's listed in the General Prohibitions.

Too bad they got caught. I'm not sure why Elsevier waited so long, but
probably they mulled over the risk of letting this pass and decided it
was too big. I am curious what will happen with the content on
Mendeley.

This is only my opinion (NAL) and does not reflect anything my
employer or school have to say about anything.

Christina Pikas