Guest Post - Academics and Copyright Ownership: Ignorant, Confused or Misled? - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The recent law suit against ResearchGate brought by Elsevier and the American Chemical Society follows hard upon the $15 million damages awarded to Elsevier in their recent case against Sci-Hub. These are just the latest actions in a long line of scholarly copyright wars. As far back as 2001, Stephen Pinfield found that academics were illegally posting publisher’s copyright content on ArXiv — a practice since dubbed ‘Black Open Access’ (Bjork, 2017). A series of subsequent studies have reported a similar disregard for publisher copyright policies (e.g., Antelmann, 2006; Troll Covey, 2009) culminating in Jamali’s 2017 study that suggested just over half of all papers on ResearchGate were illegally posted publisher PDFs. This has led to a perception that academics just don’t care about or understand copyright and that someone needs to take responsibility for getting those academics a copyright education. There is no doubt some truth in this, but I think the situation is slightly more complex than that. In fact, I think that the keys to resolving this may rest in the hands of publishers, but in using those keys publishers may pay a high price."