These people at Elsevier and their ilk are simple thugs who have leveraged their oligopolistic power into a web of extortion and coercion.
They force the people who create their content to give them the copyright, even though they created nothing but the bars of the jail they imprison the content therein.
Firstly, a coercice agreement is not enforceable no matter how they embellish it with soft language. It is like a robber who asks you if you like his gun? Look how pretty it is, and how lethal it is and how badly it could hurt anyone shot by it, so you do not want to get in the way of any bullets do you? By the way, I see you are carrying a heavy burden of valuables, would you let us assist to to carry that burden - good. We will watch over the valuable and test their ability to be spent on good works for the needy (us)
So they are simple thugs to be dealt with by police and the law by exposing and cancelling their coercive and forced copyright assignment agreements and placing those copyrights into a copyleft or similar position. This applies to all prior work and all new work going forward. The cost of running this process will be less than 1% of the monster eye breaking gougery that the colleges now bear.
It has to come, they have to go.
And recall the way they have kept the poor contries down by denial of access - that has kept the third worlders with first world brains, locked in an unethical cubbyhole.
In the mead time, get a few dozen seed boxes online with the last 20+ years of research data indexed and downloadable for free or very low fees. All well hid by technical means for anonymity.
I wish I could do more, but do this much damage to those evil thugs is already a good days work,
Elsevier's wickedness goes beyond coercive publication contracts. They set up a vanity journal for Merck to publish their dubious results concerning Vioxx in. Merck basically published marketing material as scientific papers in order to promote Vioxx, while conveniently withholding information about the drug's dangerous side effects, and Elsevier covered for them, making these publications look likr an independent journal.
The Vioxx debacle is one of the most blatant and straightforward examples of "evil big pharma" in the modern era, and Merck holds most of the blame -- but Elsevier is complicit in the deaths of people who took Vioxx also.
I migrated away from Mendeley the day I found out Elsevier bought them. So ever since then, I've been paying yearly for storage with for Zotero. Overall, I've been very pleased with Zotero thus far. I've never had an issue getting data in or out of Zotero.
Now Endnote on the other hand... if I could just get collaborators to switch away from Endnote...
I got a lesson the hard-way. Mendeley crashed and refused to start up again. There was a known bug that they had not fixed for months. Almost a year of annotations gone. Even though I could find the PDF on disk I could not get to my annotations. they store it in a sqlitedb. I needed to reverse engineer the sqlitedb to get anything out. Total nightmare.
Still searching for a better solution for annotations + referencing. I use zotero and the highlights app at the moment.
I use a standard PDF reader and then the ZotFile plugin. ZotFile processes highlighted text and comments made in PDF compliant ways and turns then into notes in Zotero.
So they are simple thugs to be dealt with by police and the law by exposing and cancelling their coercive and forced copyright assignment agreements and placing those copyrights into a copyleft or similar position. This applies to all prior work and all new work going forward. The cost of running this process will be less than 1% of the monster eye breaking gougery that the colleges now bear.
It has to come, they have to go. And recall the way they have kept the poor contries down by denial of access - that has kept the third worlders with first world brains, locked in an unethical cubbyhole. In the mead time, get a few dozen seed boxes online with the last 20+ years of research data indexed and downloadable for free or very low fees. All well hid by technical means for anonymity. I wish I could do more, but do this much damage to those evil thugs is already a good days work,