The End of an Era for Academia.edu and Other Academic Networks? | The Scholarly Kitchen

"The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Elsevier has issued a sweeping series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices regarding Elsevier-published content to Academia.edu, a file-sharing network for researchers and other academics. This has prompted a storm in the Twittersphere, a response from Elsevier, a number of commentaries on blogs and list-serves ... While it is too soon to know to what extent this incident will have broader implications, it does bring some important and long-simmering issues to the fore regarding sharing on professional networks, most of which the Chronicle article manages to miss.  Fortunately, the industry’s many pundits rode to the Chronicle’s rescue in the article’s comment section, which is worth reading in its entirety, and which better frames many of the issues involved. One particular exchange in the comments gets to the heart of the matter, but before we get to that a bit of background is in order.  It perhaps goes without saying that authors who publish with Elsevier and most other publishers sign publication agreements that transfer copyright or an exclusive publication license to the publisher and specify clearly what authors can and cannot do with their paper after publication. Generally speaking, publishers tend to frown upon systemic distribution and commercial reuse as such activities undermine their business models. Most publishers explicitly permit one-to-one or private group sharing, which may include emailing a paper to a colleague, using a paper in the classroom or a conference presentation, or other similar uses. Given that this is academic publishing, most publishers’ policies delineate educational or other noncommercial uses from commercial uses, allowing many of the former and restricting the latter without explicit permissions.  One can argue that authors should not sign such publications agreements. One can further argue that all researchers should publish only in journals that use CC-BY agreements, allowing unfettered systemic distribution and even commercial reuse ... Despite the fact that it is a form of (noncommercial) systemic distribution, publishers have, for the most part, become increasingly accepting (to greater or lesser degrees and up to a point) of Green Open Access (Green OA), whereby authors post PDFs of their papers on personal websites, institutional archives, or central subject archives such as PubMed Central or the arXiv. In many cases, publishers explicitly grant such permission or else do not enforce copyright or exclusive license provisions. In some cases publishers allow the final article of record to be deposited in such archives; in other cases only the accepted manuscript can be deposited. In some cases a delay of up to 12 months is required before repositories can make articles publicly available (though there is at least one proposed work-around for that which creates a one-to-one distribution model for such repositories), in other cases such deposits can be made public immediately.  Academia.edu, however, is not an institutional repository. Nor is it a subject-based repository like PubMed Central. Nor is it a noncommercial pre-print server like the arXiv or the new bioRxiv. Nor, despite its '.edu' domain address, is it a not-for-profit academic initiative of any kind. Academia.edu is a venture capital-backed software company that seeks to derive revenue by selling analytics about the activities of its installed user base, much like Facebook, LinkedIn, Mendeley, and many others. Central to its success, however, is the sharing of papers and the metrics around that activity ... Academia.edu, however, likely does not have the legal right to host much of the research that is being shared, both systemically and for its own commercial purposes, on its network. So how has Academia.edu managed to attract funding when its business model hinges on being able to share content that it may not have the right to share? Part of the answer lies in the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that limits the liability of companies like Academia.edu (and YouTube, Facebook, etc.) that often host content under copyright to third parties (like publishers) provided the content was posted by their users and provided they respond to take down notices from rights holders.  So why did Academia.edu and their funders think that publishers would not aggressively issue such take down notices? One possible explanation might be found in the exchange from the comments section of the Chronicle article mentioned above. The exchange takes place between a commenter named 'N.W.J.', Amanda French of George Mason University, and William Gunn (a.k.a. 'Mr. Gunn') of Mendeley. I have reposted the comments below ... William Gunn puts forth an argument that Mendeley has long used for hosting co