Has Zotero signed the STM sharing principles?
I am looking into how I am legally allowed to share PDFs in a private group.
I found a handy website, howcanishareit.com. If I put in a DOI it will tell me how I can share the article. Many can be shared in Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) but Zotero is not listed. Approved SCNs for sharing in a private group include Mendeley, Papers, ReadCube, Trellis, LabArchives.
Wiley articles sharing guidelines state that I can share a copy of the published article in a private group on Scholarly Collaboration Networks that have signed the STM sharing principles.
Has Zotero signed? If no, are there any plans to or reasons Zotero has chosen not to?
References:
- Wiley Article Sharing Guidelines: https://authorservices.wiley.com/asset/Article-Sharing-Guidelines.pdf
- https://www.howcanishareit.com
- https://www.stm-assoc.org/
I found a handy website, howcanishareit.com. If I put in a DOI it will tell me how I can share the article. Many can be shared in Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) but Zotero is not listed. Approved SCNs for sharing in a private group include Mendeley, Papers, ReadCube, Trellis, LabArchives.
Wiley articles sharing guidelines state that I can share a copy of the published article in a private group on Scholarly Collaboration Networks that have signed the STM sharing principles.
Has Zotero signed? If no, are there any plans to or reasons Zotero has chosen not to?
References:
- Wiley Article Sharing Guidelines: https://authorservices.wiley.com/asset/Article-Sharing-Guidelines.pdf
- https://www.howcanishareit.com
- https://www.stm-assoc.org/
I don't work for Zotero and have no insight into what Zotero might do, but I'll note that all links point to initiatives by large, for-profit publishers and the "approved" SCNs are tools run by those same publishers or their subsidiaries, which would likely explain the lack of Zotero representation...
While publishers certainly have the right to determine publication of content for which they hold copyright, I'm not convinced they have the right (let alone the legitimacy or the ability to enforce) to ban sharing content in small, private groups as allowed by Zotero.
@adamsmith to be clear, 'howcanIshareit.com' covers both sharing your own work and other's work, and it covers SCNs as well as other mechanisms of sharing, broken out by type (author's copy, accepted copy, copy of record).
The focus of my question isn't 'what behaviors can publishers practically or legitimately prevent' but 'what behaviors meet expectations of copyright law'?
In the US, where Zotero is located both in terms of legal personhood and server location, fair use provides fairly robust exceptions for small scale, non-public sharing of copyrighted materials. Fair use (if you're covered by the doctrine) involves weighing of interests, which also means that things like the nature and size of the group is important.
5 people at a university look very different from 50 people at a publicly traded company in the eyes of US copyright law, e.g.
If Zotero allowed publicly sharing potentially copyrighted material, they should probably join this (that's, I assume, why CoS, a non-profit that runs preprint servers, has signed). Given that it doesn't, I think it's safe to ignore.
On the legal side, the situation is perhaps not always as clear as assumed. For example, in the current sci-hub case in the Indian courts, sci-hub's lawyers argued that publisher's copyright transfer contracts with researchers should be deemed invalid, because the researchers did not get paid for their work, directly or in the form of royalties (ie the way in which the law assumes that copyright transfer works). Of course researchers do not on the whole want to be paid for the papers they write (they still get their salaries either way); but nor do they want publishers to profit to the tune of billions of dollars by restricting access to their work. In any case, that motion failed only on a technicality, so was never tested on its actual legal merits.
If you read the text of "What are Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs)" at the howcanIshareit site you could be forgiven for thinking that they are a warm and fuzzy researcher-centered notion about how those researchers can share the work they authored with other like-minded researchers. But then you see how particular platforms are listed by name as either offering 'networking functionalities', or not. Then a more cynical view might instead describe SCNs as a publisher-invented euphemism for platforms that their corporate lawyers should monitor closely for potential copyright breaches.
I suggest again that Zotero should have nothing to do with publishers' transparent front operations designed to strengthen the assertion of their questionable copyright.