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Voilà un événement qui mérite qu’on en parle : il y a là une attaque très violente à la liberté de publier son propre travail, ses propres créations, Elsevier joue sur les mots de la loi. a diffuser largement et tout faire pour lutter contre. Je me souviens avoir personnellement demandé à un éditeur scientifique de libérer un texte sur la cartographie de la pensée, lequel texte n’était accessible qu’àprès avoir payé 50 dollars à l’époque, c’était il y a dix ans. Je me souviens que j’étais furieux...

Elsevier s’en prend maintenant directement aux universites.

Elsevier steps up its War On Access
▻http://svpow.com/2013/12/17/elsevier-steps-up-its-war-on-access

Now, they’re targeting individual universities.

The University of Calgary has just sent this notice to all staff:

The University of Calgary has been contacted by a company representing the publisher, Elsevier Reed, regarding certain Elsevier journal articles posted on our publicly accessible university web pages. We have been provided with examples of these articles and reviewed the situation. Elsevier has put the University of Calgary on notice that these publicly posted Elsevier journal articles are an infringement of Elsevier Reed’s copyright and must be taken down.

How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research
▻http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/19/how-one-publisher-is-stopping-academics-from-sharing-their-research

Both the University of California-Irvine and Harvard University have confirmed to the Washington Post that they received similar takedown requests.

With academics doing much of the work and the Internet reducing distribution costs, you might expect the cost of academic publishing to fall as the Internet makes communication more efficient. Instead, the opposite has happened. Subscription rates for top academic journals have skyrocketed in recent decades — with one study reporting per journal subscription costs rose 215 percent between 1986 and 2003, despite the consumer price index only increasing 68 percent in that same time period.

More recently, these rising costs coupled with scaled-back library budgets due to the Great Recession have left many universities struggling to maintain access to the body of scholarly work they helped produce. Even one of the world’s wealthiest universities, Harvard, has felt the crunch. “Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,” said the Harvard Library Faculty Advisory council in a 2012 memo on the subject.

But while libraries have been hurting, the system works quite well for the publishers. Elsevier represents the “scientific, technical and medical” segment of the business of its parent company, Reed Elsevier. The subsidiary generated over $1 billion profits in 2012 with a 34 percent profit margin, according to the company’s financial disclosures. That year, Elsevier accounted for 52 percent of the Reed Elsevier’s operating profits, with the disclosure reporting “approximately 65 percent of revenue came from subscription sales” like those to academic institutions.

#urgent_action_required