"But two years later, in 2013, he was notified that the author of the thesis was suing him for violating copyright laws."
I'm assuming this means the author of the thesis would like not to be cited in any future research. Unfortunately,
"He says he does not want to 'put pressure on this person'. 'My lawyer has tried unsuccessfully to establish contacts with the complainant: I am open to negotiate and get to an agreement to move this issue out of the criminal trial,' he told Nature."
In the UK if you're funded by a research council (like almost everyone is here), your thesis is normally open access because the public paid for it. Students are generally awful at disseminating theses and dissertations, but in theory it's available for anyone to see (if only through library services). Whether this extends to copying and posting to Scribd I don't know, but in principle I don't see why it would be an issue.
In some cases if your work has commercial applications you can request to withhold publication for 6-12 months, but ultimately it becomes freely available.
I assume if you have private funding then things are a little different, but most progressive universities are moving towards open access publication across the board. My department will pay the cost to get papers with 'gold access' or whatever they call it, it's not like we get any money from paywalling our research and it's more likely we get citations if it isn't.
Not unless the thesis's author pays about three figures to make it open access. The only other option (without spending a ton of effort to fight the system) if you want to graduate is to let Elsevier charge people money, a tiny amount of which they will forward to you (if you bother to let them know where you currently live).
> In the UK if you're funded by a research council (like almost everyone is here), your thesis is normally open access because the public paid for it. Students are generally awful at disseminating theses and dissertations, but in theory it's available for anyone to see (if only through library services). Whether this extends to copying and posting to Scribd I don't know, but in principle I don't see why it would be an issue.
In the US, most Ph.D.'s research is paid for with federal grants. I agree that they should be open access, but I wasn't willing to pay even more just so that other people could read my thesis. Everything is in (non-open access) journals, so anyone who really cared about my research could just find it there. If someone really wanted to read my dissertation, I'd be more than happy to just send them the same PDF I gave Elsevier, and I suspect that virtually all other Ph.D.s feel the same way.
Sounds like it's a regional and/or departmental issue then. I initially thought it was just our group that would pay for Gold/Green access, but turns out it's uni-wide.
> The student, who is currently studying for a master’s degree in conservation of protected areas at the National University of Costa Rica in Heredia, refuses to reveal who is suing him. He says he does not want to “put pressure on this person”.
I'm assuming this means the author of the thesis would like not to be cited in any future research. Unfortunately,
"He says he does not want to 'put pressure on this person'. 'My lawyer has tried unsuccessfully to establish contacts with the complainant: I am open to negotiate and get to an agreement to move this issue out of the criminal trial,' he told Nature."