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