‘Open season’ on scholars’ rights if Elsevier loses Meta fight

Academics may find themselves in the unexpected position of cheering on Elsevier in its legal battle with Meta because victory for the Facebook owner would signal “open season” on scholars’ rights to control how their work is represented, legal and publishing experts have said.

While the world’s largest academic publisher has faced boycotts and mass walkouts by journal editors over concerns over its prices and profit margins, Elsevier’s announcement that it is joining a class action with four other major publishers to sue Meta and its founder Mark Zuckerberg over “wilful infringement of millions of textual works…to develop Meta’s Llama large language models (LLM)” may attract significant support from the scholarly community, said Alina Trapova, lecturer in intellectual property law at UCL’s Faculty of Laws.

“Academics might not see Elsevier as the friendliest publisher over the years but now it seems it is fighting for the rights of authors,” Trapova told Times Higher Education on the first artificial intelligence (AI) action brought by several leading publishing houses.

They allege Meta scraped millions of illegally pirated articles and books to train its generative AI model, which has, in turn, returned about 40 terabytes of data, equivalent to about 5 million books, to the internet. Many of the Lllama summaries of research outputs contain hallucinations and inaccuracies which could potentially damage the credibility of academics, claims Elsevier.

“For academics, getting recognition through attribution is really important for us. We need those attributions coming to us rather than having our work spat out in anonymous AI summaries or a hallucination,” said Trapova on why academics will side with Elsevier.

Meta claims its use of articles for training its LLM represents “fair use” but, if accepted, this would ignore authors’ rights to their own materials which Elsevier had sought to manage via individual agreements, continued Trapova.

“Contributors have been asked to sign these documents stating whether they permit their work to be used in different contexts – Meta has interpreted this agreement as that ‘we can do anything with this work’ which is a really nasty move,” she said.

In this respect, “academic integrity is at stake”, although “this is not the central piece of the claim”, Trapova continued.

“For Elsevier this lawsuit is about mainly about protecting their business model and copyright is the legal mechanism to do this. But it will also be looking after the interests of authors and creators,” she said.

While many academics may find it hard to sympathise with Elsevier, whose owner RELX has a market capitalisation of £43 billion, its legal defence of its economic interests may help to uphold how authors can control their works and how they are used, said Trapova. “The case isn’t primarily about research integrity – the legal framework in the US does have a moral side but protections on this side are much weaker. That is why what is actually in court is framed around economic loss,” she said.

Emily Hudson, professor of law at the University of Oxford, whose research centres on intellectual property rights, agreed that academics will mostly side with Elsevier.

“There is a lot of support...for legal actions against tech companies,” explained Hudson, adding: “This is not to suggest that academics are against the use and development of AI, per se. Rather, I think the concern relates to how AI is being used.”

“If a researcher wants to train on my papers to, say, develop an AI that helps diagnose diseases, then I may be happy for them to do so for free, and indeed without asking me for permission. On the other hand, I may be far less comfortable with a tech firm training on the same set of papers to develop a generative AI product that helps users draft emails or write essays,” she explained.

“That said, we need to be clear that the interests of publishers and academics do not completely align,” said Hudson, noting that a compromise deal might be acceptable to Elsevier but not authors.

“In this case, because we have publishers driving the case, it may be that their preferred or acceptable endpoint (such as licensing deals with tech firms) may not be that preferred by academic authors. So while both publishers and authors may have an interest in showing that firms have infringed copyright in existing AI development, there may not be agreement on how this should be handled in the future.”

However, Caroline Ball, community engagement lead at the Open Book Collective, which champions open access publishing, said the Elsevier-Meta face-off was a “complicated one” for academics.

“It’s more complicated than the Anthropic book piracy case, since in that case authors’ rights were at the heart of the issue, and any financial recompense would go to the authors, mostly,” said Ball on the £1.1 billion settlement agreed in September 2025.

“Should Elsevier win and get a payout or compensation, it’s unlikely any of that would make its way back to institutions or academics, since in most cases they will have signed their rights over to Elsevier at the point of publication. So it will be just more money for Elsevier on the basis of their academic labour,” she said.

“Should Meta win, and their wholesale use of copyright material be deemed legal, or more likely in US courts, ‘fair use’, then it’s open season on copyrighted material,” Ball continued, adding: “I suspect for most of us in the academic community it’s a case of ‘a plague on both your houses’!”