AdF.ly - shrink your URLs and get paid!
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-20
Summary:
"A powerful incumbent with a very lucrative business model gets reactive when the content it holds the rights for becomes too freely distributed on the web. First, it was the music industry. Now it’s happening in academia, one of the very last bastions to be affected by the free, unfettered flow of information on the web. Reed Elsevier, which owns many of the most prestigious research journals in the world, has been sending mass research takedown notices to everyone from startups like Academia.edu to individual researchers and universities. They brought in about $1.65 billion in scientific and medical research revenue in the first half of this year, through journals like the Lancet and Cell. For years, they’ve operated a business model where academics provide their research for free and give journals publishing rights to the final versions of their articles in exchange for distribution in prestigious journals. Sometimes academics have quietly published their research on their own personal web sites or new emerging, social networking platforms like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. They’ve done this without feeling too much blowback from the publisher ..."