Elsevier Says It's Infringing To Link To Sci-Hub; Hypocrite Elsevier Links To Sci-Hub All The Time

Academic publishing giant Elsevier really, really, really hates Sci-Hub, the site that offers up access to lots of academic research. Elsevier has sued the site directly and tried many times to get it blocked (which, to date, seems to have only helped it get more attention). Last week, Elsevier got all legal-threaty against Citationsy, a site that helps scholars create citations. Elsevier claimed that Citationsy was infringing its copyright by linking to Sci-Hub.

1/12 So something not-fantastic happened yesterday.
I received an email from a lawyer at @twobirds, @moniquewadsted, on behalf of @ElsevierConnect regarding my blog post about where to download research papers and scientific articles for free. https://t.co/Bf3H19RZ14

- Citationsy (@citationsy) July 31, 2019

But, here's the issue: as Martin Paul Eve pointed out, Elsevier, itself, points to Sci-Hub pretty damn often.

That said, the more entertaining fact is that scholarly publishers frequently end up linking to Sci-Hub. Here's one I found on Elsevier's own ScienceDirect site:

One might also consider this article on ScienceDirect, which in earlier versions contained a now-removed Sci Hub link:

The list goes on. Consider this Elsevier article:

Heck, I found too many examples to list them all, but this accepted manuscript (published online by Elsevier on their site YESTERDAY) contains a Sci-Hub link:

As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing points out, it shouldn't be at all surprising that tons of academic research links to Sci-Hub:

It's also not hard to understand this. You see, the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn't pay for any of the work it publishes, it's hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.

Now, in theory, the referees, peer reviewers, editorial boards and advisors for each journal could lay down the law on this stuff and ban links -- but they're also all volunteers who are not paid a dime by Elsevier.

The reality is that scholarly publishing corporations contribute virtually nothing to scholarship (that's a peer-reviewed, empirical finding -- not a statement of opinion). Indeed, they are so lax and inattentive, with so much of their efforts focused on rent-seeking, that they don't even notice when they themselves violate their own signature policies.

Of course, expecting Elsevier to recognize how hypocritical it's being is a fool's errand as well. Elsevier is not in the business of actually understanding how academics work. It's in the business of squeezing as much cash as possible from universities.