Comments on: Elsevier replies about hybrid #openacess; I am appalled about their practices. Breaking licences and having to pay to read “Open Access”

By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - #animalgarden “Hybrid gold” and “Universal Access” #elsevier at “Beyond the PDF” #btpdf2 « petermr's blog

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:38:46 +0000

[...] them. S: That’s what PMR thought. He asked @wisealic , the director of Universal Access, (http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/08/05/elsevier-replies-about-hybrid-openacess-i-am-appalled-about… ) on 2012-08-05 5. Where is the machine-readable list of all articles published under this scheme? [...]

By: pm286

pm286 — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 22:41:41 +0000

Thanks,
I agree this looks like a case of at least two independent cockups by Elsevier. But that does not excuse them. They have taken 6 million dollars off scholars for publishing hybrid journals – I know a lot of people who can run a website better than that for less money.

And why do I have to spend my time showing the incompetence of Springer and Elsevier and doubtless the others when I start looking. They all keep telling us what a wonderful quality job they do in publishing. The impression given is that they don’t care about getting licence information correct.

By: Dan S

Dan S — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:36:28 +0000

Yes – assuming for now that Elsevier is not the copyright holder in the documents (ie copyright has not been transferred), I think that they cannot state that permission is required for re-use, since that would conflict logically with the CC-BY licence that the authors have agreed to.

But then, as seems to be confirmed by Alicia’s comment, it’s probably more of a website cockup than a deliberate act. (That doesn’t make it excusable, since the cockup could prevent people from making use of the CC-BY terms as they should be able to. So let’s hope they fix it as Alicia’s comment suggests they will.)

By: pm286

pm286 — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 10:58:14 +0000

Just to clarify.
Most pay-to-read publishers operate some form of pay-to-author hybrid publishing, if only because it’s the only way authors can (a) publish in the journal of choice and (b) satisfy the funder’s mandates for free visibility. Very few of these schemes are full CC-BY

By: Elsevier Ethics? : Beyond Search

Elsevier Ethics? : Beyond Search — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 23:56:28 +0000

[...] Ah, pay to play. That’s the way to stimulate objective information, all right. A blog out of the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Information rails against such a move in the long-windedly titled post: "Elsevier Replies About Hybrid #openacess; I Am Appalled About their Practices. Breaking Licences and…." [...]

By: pm286

pm286 — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:07:11 +0000

Thank you for this reply which clarifies the situation.

Peter Murray-Rust

By: Alicia Wise

Alicia Wise — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:04:06 +0000

Hi Peter,

We are currently investing in a major overhaul of our open access infrastructure and until that upgrade is complete do have various systems limitations in presenting open access content. To make our open access more clear and visible in the interim we’ve created various work-arounds. You have found two problems with these – many thanks for flagging them for our attention.

The article in response 3 above is correctly labelled in the body of the article as bearing a CC-BY license. The OA symbol at the top right links to a page that incorrectly signals this article can be re-used for non-commercial purposes only. This is an error in the programme which deploys the OA symbol, and we are looking into whether the OA symbol incorrectly appears on all of our sponsored physics articles. More importantly, we are looking into how to correct this.

The article in response 4 has proven to be extremely interesting. I chose it randomly to illustrate the location of the OA symbol in the top right of our open access articles. After considerable investigation we have discovered that the article was not in fact published open access at all, and the OA symbol appeared on it in error. My colleagues have now corrected the programme, and the OA symbol has been removed from the article.

I assure you we are keenly interested in open access publishing, but do have legacy systems that need to – and are – evolving. Your constructive comments and suggestions during this process would be, of course, very helpful and welcome.

With kind wishes,

Alicia

By: pm286

pm286 — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 10:41:49 +0000

The relevance of the Open-PHACTS paper is that we now have a sample of 1 where the authors have paid for some form of “open access” and have received some form of open access. So we now need examples where the authors paid for OA and didn’t get it. I have two.

Elsevier do not seem to us CC licences for hybrid OA – they create their own terms. Whether these are crafted as a licence I don’t know. They are roughly equivalent to CC-NC-BY.

A CC-BY paper should have the licence info in the paper. The Elsevier paper has a form of words , possibly pointing to the Elsevier terms.

By: Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 10:33:01 +0000

I second Steve’s observation for this Open PHACTS paper. I saw the icon clearly too (though I personally find it placed wrongly, among the add-ons part of the page, rather than the main paper content), and could also read the paper as HTML fully, and download the PDF.

However, just below the DOI of this paper, just above the abstract there is also a “Permissions & Reprints” link with conflicting and misleading information. Additionally, this paper does not feature a CC license, AFAIK. But I have no idea how to distinguish a CC-BY paper from an “Elsevier Open Access” paper…

By: pm286

pm286 — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 07:12:07 +0000

I shall continue to jump through the ridiculous hoops of “Universal Access” to highlight the harm and poor value that Elsevier provides. Straight answers are almost unknown.