From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2013 12:26:56 +0000

What Elsevier has done in regard of take-down notices is perfectly
legal. Is it also ethical? That is a more complicated question, but in
general, I think that question should be asked of the law, not of the
party that may happen to disproportionately benefit from the law. The
only thing I do find a bit iffy here is that they waited so long with
these take-down notices (posting of published articles at the
Mendeleys, Academias etc. of this world has been going on for years),
giving a false sense of agreement with – or at least tolerance of –
the practice.

What the situation does demonstrate, however, is that the whole system
of scientific knowledge recording and sharing, developed in and for
the print world, is singularly unsuitable for the web era.

What was sensible in the print era, the transfer of copyright when
multiplying (copying) and dissemination themselves represented the
bulk of the cost of publishing, has lost its validity. And what
authors don't seem to realise sufficiently is the fact that their
transfer of copyright to the publisher is a form of payment for the
publisher's service. Paying for a service and then expecting to be
able to take back one's payment doesn't seem proper to me (though I
suspect quite an amount of sloppiness at publishers and if they don't
have a signed copyright transfer agreement, authors should be regarded
as not having transferred their copyright and free to post their
articles anywhere). That said, total transfer of copyright seems to me
a very steep price to pay in any event. There are alternatives.

In my view, the answer can only be one of two things:

1) Pay with money for a publisher's service, e.g. in the form of an
APC*, with the benefits of clarity, straightforwardness and the
removal of impediments to true open access (CC-BY);

2) Self-publish without asking a publisher to perform any services at
all – plenty of opportunities exist. Pre-publication peer-review
doesn't have to be publisher-mediated but can be author-mediated as
well (publishers often ask authors for suggestions as to whom should
be asked to review). See this for further details of my thinking in
that regard: http://theparachute.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/essence-of-academic-publishing.html

*Which may amount to zero, if the journal in question is wholly
subsidised, which does happen for a number of small journals.

Jan Velterop