ONCE upon a time, it was common for scientists to receive letters from researchers working in other institutions, asking for reprints of papers they had published. It was the usual practice in those days for journal publishers to furnish authors with a couple of dozen such reprints, precisely for this purpose—but, if these had run out, a quick visit to the photocopier kept the wheels of scientific discourse turning, and though it was technically a violation of copyright, no one much minded.

Then, the world wide web was invented—initially, as it happens, with the intention of making it easier for scientists to share their results—and everything changed. Now, any scientist worth his grant has a website, and that site will often let the casual visitor download copies of its owner’s work. And, though it has taken a while, some publishers have decided they do mind about this—indeed one, Elsevier, based in the Netherlands, has been fighting back. It is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), an American law that lets copyright holders demand the removal of anything posted online without their permission, to require individual scientists to eliminate from their websites papers published in its journals. In doing so it has stirred a hornets’ nest.

The first hornets to come buzzing out were members of a scientific social-networking site called Academia.edu (in which Rupert Pennant-Rea, chairman of The Economist Group, was an early investor). In early December they started receiving e-mails from Academia.edu informing them that some of their papers had been removed from the site in response to DMCA requests from Elsevier.

When some of them mentioned on Twitter what had happened, it became clear some universities had also received demands from Elsevier that papers be removed from the home pages of individual academics. There are, as a result, a lot of dischuffed scientists out there.

Elsevier (which also owns a scientific social-networking site called Mendeley—a direct competitor to Academia.edu) seems to have the law on its side. Like journalists writing for a newspaper, academics submitting an article to a journal usually sign contracts which transfer copyright to the publisher. But, though the firm may be right legally, culturally it is on trickier ground, given the ubiquity of current practice. As Thomas Hickerson, the University of Calgary’s chief librarian, puts it, “requesting such removals…seems at odds with the nature of an academic enterprise, in which the sharing of research information is an essential element.”

The short-term response from scientists and their employers seems to be that if Elsevier persists, and other publishers join in, they will try to find legal workarounds. As the University of California, Irvine, which was on the receiving end of some of the takedown notices, points out in advice to its staff, it is usually only the final version of an article, as it appears in a journal, that is covered by publisher’s copyright. There is nothing to stop scientists making earlier versions available. Many universities run repositories in which such drafts can be deposited for anyone to read. In an article posted shortly after the row started, Elsevier itself pointed out that such earlier versions can be shared freely.

In the longer run, however, cracking down in this way risks having the perverse effect, from the publishers’ point of view, of accelerating the rise of “open access” publishing, in which papers are made available online at no cost to the reader, and which therefore sidesteps at least some of the administrative headaches of traditional journal publishing.

Many advocates of open access make a moral case for it, too, arguing that freely available research is a public good—and that much of it is paid for by taxpayers in the first place. Ross Mounce, a palaeontologist at the University of Bath, in England, and an advocate of open access, is enthusiastic about what has happened. “This”, he says, referring to the row, “has been great [for open-access advocates]. Lots of people who were completely apathetic before are starting to realise the importance of how we distribute scientific research.”

That point is not lost on the publishers themselves. Elsevier has created open-access journals of its own. And the firm can take solace from the fact that—for now, at least—none of the opprobrium heaped upon it has had much effect on its bottom line. In 2012 it posted profits of £780m from revenues of £2.1 billion.