Elsevier sends wave of takedown requests - Medical Marketing and Media

"Elsevier is taking a hard-line posture against several different universities, asking them to take down their own scholars' research, the Washington Post blog The Switch reports. The publisher has sent out thousands of requests for Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedowns. Academic social media site Academic.edu, for instance, got 2,800 requests in a few weeks, to which the network complied. It was part of a broader effort to take down unauthorized copies of papers from across the web -- also getting takedown notices were the University of Calgary, the California-Irvine and Harvard University. According to the blog, Elsevier is within its rights to send out the notices but is going against a 'long-standing tradition of looking the other way' in the case of scholars disseminating their own work. The publisher, which the blog points out made $1 billion in profit in 2012 with a 34% profit margin, has been aggressively lobbying against policies promoting open access. It does offer academics publishing in 1,600 of its journals the ability to open-access publish, although freely dissmeniaing their work requires a substantial fee and the free option allows ony early drafts to be shared ..."