Tim Gowers has a long post  on the cost of Elsevier journals. My contribution to the discussion is to plot data he showed in tables relating...

Update: figures now in from Imperial. See below. Further update: figures in from Nottingham too. Further update: figures now in from Oxford. Final update: figures in from LSE. A little over two yea…

In fight over journal pricing, University of Konstanz ends license negotiations with publisher

Academic seeks to gather examples of cases where open access article fees have been paid but content remains behind a paywall

Universität Konstanz

This is a free translation of a previous french publication: Faut-il signer l’accord d’Elsevier? I’ve put it in the public domain: feel free to share. France is on the verge of signing a national agreement with Elsevier. The forthcoming deal has been announced a week ago by the main negotiator on the French side, Couperin, … Continuer la lecture de French National Agreement with Elsevier: Why We Should not Sign →

Elsevier's new ideas on text mining  are getting a lot attention  now. Sadly, they get it wrong, again. On the bright side, all other publis...

'But the truth is that a copyright includes any work that is derived from the copyrighted work and is “substantially similar.”'

In the week leading up the two-year anniversary of the SOPA blackout protests, EFF and others are talking about key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day, we'll take on a different

With all the delicacy and tact of Rob Ford at a press conference, the academic publisher Elsevier has stepped up their attempts to control the circulation of journal articles, sending thousands of takedown notices to websites in December.

A publishing giant goes after the authors of its journals’ papers

Elsevier recently sent DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices to some UC campuses, claiming that the availability of certain Elsevier journal articles posted on university websites infringes Elsevier copyrights. UC faculty might be wondering, what does this mean for me?  Am I at risk of receiving a takedown notice and, if so, what should I do? At this point, the takedown action only applies to local campus web pages like department sites, faculty profiles, or lab pages. This action does not currently apply to any content you may have posted to UC’s eScholarship Repository.  Read a recent article in […]

Show me the data!

This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders. Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see.

Elsevier has two reasons to buy Mendeley. One is to squash it: to destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model.

The huge scientific publisher sparks resentment by gobbling up a popular online gathering place. Sound familiar?