Riled up by Elsevier's take-downs? Time to embrace open access

"The publishing giant Elsevier owns much of the world’s academic knowledge, in the form of article copyright. In the past few weeks it has stepped up enforcement of its property rights, issuing 'take-down notices' to Academia.edu, where many researchers post PDFs of their articles. The articles in question were published in Elsevier-owned journals, and are legally available only by subscription, often at exorbitant prices. Before publication, journals owned by Elsevier send academics' manuscripts to other scholars for review. Following the review process, Elsevier reformats the manuscripts into PDFs in the style of the journals, whereupon authors are required to sign away the copyright. So Elsevier is certainly within its legal rights to not allow posting of these final article PDFs to third-party sites, whether it’s Academia.edu or an author’s personal webpage.  Some scholars (such as Mike Taylor) have suggested that scientists should actively rebel by illegally posting final article PDFs to our personal websites. They make the point that Elsevier likely won’t serve take-down notices to large numbers of individual scholars, because doing so would generate too much ill will in the research community.

Nevertheless, I don’t think encouraging illegal posting is the best response to the situation ..."