I have been dismayed (previous post: “Open Access”) at the lack of commitment to OA by mainstream (primarily toll-access (TA)) publishers and have described this as a “systemic failure” of the industry. Here is another unacceptable lack of clarity and commitment from an Open Access journal from a major publisher. I had been investigating OUP’s site for another reason (PRISM: Open Letter to Oxford University Press) and since I had published with them thought I would have a look at papers I had written (“I” and “my” include co-authors). This is what I found (screenshot):
The electronic article is accompanied by a sidebar with “request permissions”. I followed this and the result is shown above. The journal wishes to charge me 48 USD to:
- USE MY OWN ARTICLE
- ON WHICH I HOLD COPYRIGHT
- FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES (TEACHING)
The journal is therefore
- SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
- WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
- AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)
I am lost for words…
… the only charitable conclusion I can draw is that the publisher ritually attaches the awful Rightslink page to every article automatically and that this is a genuine mistake. I have found such “genuine mistakes” with other publishers in their hybrid journals (i.e. where only some of the papers are OA, the majority being toll-access TA). But this is a fully OA journal – all papers are OA – I assume CC-NC. There is no excuse for including the Rightslink page on ANY OA paper, let alone every one on a journal.
If this is – as I desperately hope – a genuine mistake then my criticism might seem harsh. But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access. And I hope that OUP can and will clarify and rectify the position. If, however, it is deliberate and that the publisher actually intends to charge readers and users for Open Access articles I shall reserve comment.
This is not a trivial point. The normal reader of a journal who wishes to re-use material has to navigate copyright constraints and restrictions on an all-too-frequent basis. Such a reader, especially if they were relatively unaware of Open Access could easily pay the journal for “permission to use an Open Access article for teaching”. (Note that other charges are higher – to include my own article in a book I write would cost nearly 350 USD).
It is all indicative of an industry that simply isn’t trying hard enough.
RECOMMENDATION:
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLES ON PUBLISHERS’ WEB PAGES SHOULD NEVER BE ACCOMPANIED BY RIGHTSLINK OR OTHER PERMISSION MATERIAL. INSTEAD THE PUBLISHER SHOULD PRO-ACTIVELY POINT OUT THE NATURE OF OA AND ENSURE THAT THE READER AND RE-USER IS FULLY AWARE OF THEIR RIGHTS.
After all, the author has paid for this…
Conspicuous, Explicit, Machine-readable.
Those are the non-negotiable qualities of an OA licence. I am reduced to slogans and soundbites in the face of publisher intransigence and incompetence. Something’s gotta work.
Well, we have been here before (albeit in a slightly different incarnation, . The company who runs Rightslink, the Copyright Clearance Centre, is either ignorant of the meaning of “open access” or clearly incapable or worse, unwilling, to set up context sensitive business processes which take into account whether a journal is open access or not or whether an author/scientist wants to do things which do not normally require payment (e.g. request re-use of a previously published figure in a scholarly acrticle).
But you are right, the systemic failur is with the publishers, who, as the clients of the Copyright Clearance Centre do not insist on such context sensitive workflows and procedures. At best, it is unthinking, at worst deliberate obfuscation.
Dear Dr Murray-Rust
I would like to respond to your post entitled, ‘OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article’ (September 3rd 2007).
It is not Oxford Journals’ policy to charge any users for downloading and using Open Access articles for non-commercial purposes. As stated in the copyright line, all Oxford Open articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Rightslink functionality should not be appearing on any of our OA articles, and we are in the process of removing it. For Nucleic Acids Research, the links are not displaying on tables of contents with immediate effect, and will be removed from all article pages as soon as possible. For the OA content in journals participating in Oxford Open, we will also remove any references to Rightslink. In addition to the existing copyright line and the embedded machine-readable licence, we will also display the Creative Commons logo to help make the licence terms clearer to users.
For clarification, it has never been our policy to charge our own authors for the re-use of their material in the continuation of their own research and wider educational purposes, and this includes authors of articles published under a subscription model.
Kind regards
Kirsty Luff
Senior Communications and Marketing Manager
Oxford Journals
Smile!. You’re on slashdot!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/1341248
You’ve been slashdotted.
I release my copyright of this post into public domain.
What’s the big deal? At the bottom of the page – cropped in your screen shot is the text:
If the item you are seeking permission to re-use is labeled OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE then please note that non-commercial reuse of it is according to the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license. Permission only needs to be obtained for commercial use and can be done via Rightslink. If you have any queries about re-use of content published as part of the Oxford Open program, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
i.e. It does state that for non-commercial this article is free, and gives an estimated quote for commerical usage.
Are you going to involve a lawyer? Clearly they are violating your agreement. And many other’s too, I would suppose.
Stephan
In publishing this with OUP a license was granted to them which modified your own copyright claims. http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/publication_rights.html
In the future, if you are concerned, don’t publish with them but, instead, find a free access journal or website, like Archive.org, to host it.
Ok. I looked at the Oxford website and they have seemed to fix that.
However, looking at scholar.google.com , they list 4 sites that mirror your article. Ingenta is charging 36.97 USD for viewing. Another blatant copyright violation. They offer no way possible to “receive any other way”.
Ingenta Violation
Looks like it may have been a mistake. Someone from PR is already trying to fix the “issue”. It may have been a money-grab, but truthfully, I would believe that they know better then that and it probably was just am issue with their software configuration (or lack of being configurable).
What about the folks who might have already paid to read the “mistakenly Rightslinked” OA articles? Will they be found and their money refunded? I’m afraid that question is rhetorical even though I’d love to hear the answer.
Pingback: Could this be what OUP is singing? « Entertaining Research
Pingback: So what pay me | TechWag
Pingback: Gated Logic • nevali.net » Blog Archive » 20 things you may not know
Concerning the Ingenta re-selling, their pricing is actually more complex than appears at first, and in some respects, more shocking :
~~~~~~~~ (this is a cut’n’paste, which I’ll have to re-arrange to mimic the screen’s layout) ~~~~~
Item: 1 article fee: £13.00
MACiE: a database of enzyme reaction mechanisms delivery: £5.11
Holliday, Gemma L.; Bartlett, Gail J.; Almonacid, Daniel E.; tax: £3.17
O’Boyle, Noel M.; Murray-Rust, Peter; Thornton, Janet M.; Mitchell, John B. O. subtotal: £21.28
Bioinformatics, 1 December 2005, vol. 21, no. 23, pp. 4315-4316(2)
Oxford University Press
Total for electronic: £21.28
GRAND TOTAL: £21.28
~~~~~~~~~~ end snipped text ~~~~~~~~~
So, for electronic delivery of a PDF pulled from another company’s website they’re charging £5.11 … that’s deeply suspicious.
Grounds for complaint, certainly.
Indict them.
Its the only way they will learn…
Pingback: PabloG » Blog Archive » links for 2007-09-06
Pingback: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » The British Unlibrary
Pingback: NSDL Whiteboard Report Talk Back » Blog Archive » Add Your Comments to Whiteboard Report #120: Penguins & Polar Bears, Open Access Dispute, NSDL Comment to NSB Draft Report