There’s a lot to be said about academia.edu, most of which can be found in the post I linked to above. But what that piece sparked in my head was the way academia.edu and other sites enable (and perhaps even promote?) the other enemy of the open access movement: law-scoffing consumerism.

By now, most of us are familiar with take-downs of big publishers like Elsevier or Wiley. Their reputation as the main enemies of open access is, to be frank, pretty well-deserved. But open access is also impeded by total disregard for copyright and laws regarding intellectual property in general. And let’s face it: Academia.edu is chock full of articles which authors probably don’t have the right to post. When we decide that the law and our scholarly ethics are so far apart that we might as well ignore the law and share our work, it’s hard to care about reforming the law at all.

Academia.edu is not the only or worse example of this. We all know about book download sites like bookzz.org where you can go and download ebooks to your heart’s content. These sites make it easier to (probably illegally) download a book than it is to walk over to the library and check it out. Or even turn your chair around to face you bookshelf and pick up your own copy. In fact, it’s so easy to use you start to wonder why we need to have libraries at all.

And that’s a problem. Libraries are important — and in a world of digital publishing where they’re increasingly acting like publishers, they are more important than ever. University presses and independent presses are essential to keeping scholarly publishing going, and for many of them selling content is still (alas) the only business model that they’ve got. It’s one thing to download articles and thumb your nose at Elsevier. It’s another thing to do it to Verso or University of Washington Press.

We are still developing our sense, as scholars, of what counts as ethical sharing and what counts as ripping people off — where fair use and remix give way to plagiarism and piracy. It’s an exciting time to be a scholar and intellectual for precisely this reason. But I worry that when academics develop our communal norms in a context of “who cares who published it and why” we will ultimately develop a sensibility that is not in the best interests of the producers, editors, and publishers of knowledge. When that happens, the only people in the universe who still care about CC licensing will be me and Jason Jackson.

In a perfect world, law, policy, publishing models, and repositories would all be developing in a rich conversation with scholarly thought and practice. And this is happening in a lot of places. It’s hard to not to love the anti-authoritarian, drink-your-fill ethos of book download sites (the free books also add to the appeal). But let’s not forget that ultimately those books came from somewhere. And when let’s remember that while you could just say ‘frack this’ and throw a PDF of your article on academia.edu, when you take the time to get an open access license or observe a green OA mandate and post a pre-print, you’re making the world a better place  for both your work, and for open access in general..

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner. In saying this I am condensing a lot of complex argumentation about what constitutes ownership, authorship, and so forth. But you get the picture. When Elsevier tells you you can’t post your own work on Academia.edu or anywhere else, they are only exercising the rights that you gave them.

So far, Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet. Doing so is in their own best interest — if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight. At the moment, exercising these rights seems a bonehead play because it wakes academics from their dogmatic slumbers and gets them pissed off. But is it really a dumb play? Perhaps this is the first step in a gradual process of acclimatization in which publishers slowly send more and more take down notices, getting us used to the idea that we can’t control our own work. Perhaps Elsevier did the numbers and decided it was better to increase sales, even if it comes at the expense of their public reputation. Who knows? Maybe they’ve decided we can’t hate them anymore and just said ‘to hell with it’.

But you can’t blame them for seeing clearly the nature of the game we play with them. When was the last time you watched Jaws and thought to yourself: “It’s not fair! That shark isn’t supposed to eat people!”  The crazy guy with the stitched up face and the chainsaw? What did you think he was doing here in the same creepy mansion with you? And are you really surprised your cell phone doesn’t work in here?

The world of scholarly communication is deeply screwed up. Most people don’t notice, most of the time. But there are a lot of ways to make it less screwed up. You can publish in fully open access journals. You can publish in green OA journals that allow you to post preprints of your work. You can alter the terms of your author’s agreement (many authors do this successfully) to make your work more accessible. Or if you are on the road to tenure or a job, you can just say “grub first, then ethics” and publish away, knowing that you’ve made a deal with the devil. I understand that sometimes these deals have to be made.

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.