Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

A place for users to ask each other questions, make suggestions, and discuss Bookends.
Post Reply
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by DrJJWMac »

Now that BE allows sharing ...

I have been reading various postings on restrictions set by copyright or publishing rights that can/do/may limit how I should share journal articles. Here are a few that I find of highest importance.

https://www.howcanishareit.com

https://authorservices.wiley.com/asset/ ... elines.pdf

https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing

What I especially gather reading between the lines and/or reading directly in other guidelines is this: You cannot post a journal article *where you are not an author* to shared drive and believe that, simply by limiting access to that shared drive, you are automatically protecting yourself from being held accountable for violating policies that should otherwise tell you that you cannot share the article. (... added note ... when you are an author, you can typically post to a private, by-invitation-only shared drive and/or send the journal article in response to a direct request).

What I also gather is that commercial citation managers such as Papers, Mendeley, Zotero, ... have somehow gotten permission to set up methods so that their users do not have to worry about whether they can or cannot share. We might simply call the approach to grant such permission as ... private groups. In private (invitation only) groups, you can share journal articles in their entirety even when you are not an author on the journal articles being shared. Or at least, this is what I gather so far.

My example is perhaps drawn to excess on lawyer-anxiety. As noted somewhere (paraphrased) ... You may actually be violating the sharing policies, but your activity level is below anything that will likely draw attention. Or perhaps also, even though how you share your journal articles is in violation to publishing guidelines, you are a mosquito hovering around over a pond of alligators.

In posting this, I simply want to put forth a framework for collecting information that might help me and others make more well-informed decisions about how we share journal articles using BE (and indeed even using Google Drive for that matter). For example, I would be glad to hear with supporting references that sharing journals with BE will raise absolutely no concerns only when you apply restriction XYZ .... e.g. only when you share the articles with team members who are at the same academic institute as you so that they have the same baseline access to the journal articles as you.

What insights do others have?
--
JJW
Nifuro
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Nov 26, 2021 12:17 pm

Re: Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by Nifuro »

Interesting question, never thought about it. Would like to know if it is possible
iandol
Posts: 465
Joined: Fri Jan 25, 2008 2:31 pm

Re: Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by iandol »

There are indeed some swathes of grey area here (what exactly does fair-use encompass in terms of education and research?). But personally, I refuse to be a private copyright police for corporate entities like Elsevier. I've shared PDFs and photocopies before that, of papers with colleagues and students all my career. This was entirely as to learn, study and improve our shared knowledge. We should be worrying about interesting questions in our fields of study rather than worrying about publishers profit models. Subscription silos of locked away knowledge is a sorry travesty of these corporations occupying the space that should be occupied by non-profit entities. Paywalls are antithetical to academic progress (especially for the millions of scholars stuck outside of rich institutions), and slowly crumbling; at least in the Sciences where an increasing number of funding bodies refuse to have work they paid for locked away by others, and insist on open access (OA). Sorry for the rant...
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10048
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
Contact:

Re: Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by Jon »

If there were a thumbs up button, I'd click it.

Jon
Sonny Software
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

Re: Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by DrJJWMac »

As a follow up, I have settled on an approach to share PDFs for bibliographies. I only share with folks who are working on a collaborative project with me, I only share with folks who are at my institution, I only share files that can also be obtained using library search services at my institution, and, if I do go outside of the Mendelely or Zotero or Papers or ... services for sharing, I only share using my institution-sanctified cloud service (Google in this case).

I appreciate the need to reduce the extent that we lock electronic publications behind paywalls. I respect the need to stay within the fair use guidelines for copyright, at least as far as I understand my obligations to them. I think I've struck an effective and efficient balance between a free-for-all posting approach and the get-it-on-your-own approach.
--
JJW
Dellu
Posts: 268
Joined: Sun Mar 27, 2016 5:30 am

Re: Seeking insights on (copyright) limits to sharing journal articles

Post by Dellu »

In the humanities, the current convention among scientists is this: either you publish it in an Open Access journal: or, share the preprint in an online repository. So, you have to make your paper available to the broad community, in one or the other means.
Post Reply