Academia.edu slammed with takedown notices from journal publisher Elsevier | VentureBeat | Business | by Jordan Novet

"Academia.edu wants to help researchers share their scientific papers freely. But at least one publisher of academic journals has more, well, nuanced thoughts on access to the research — and it’s issued requests for thousands of papers to be dropped from the site. The news surfaced in a post on Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, a blog about open access. In response to Elsevier’s requests, Academia.edu has sent messages to several academics on the site to let them know their papers have been removed. And that’s gotten a lot of people talking on Twitter. In an email to VentureBeat, Richard Price, Academia.edu’s chief executive, told a bit of the backstory."