Institute of Physics (IOP) Charges for Open

ContentMine has a new collaborator – an astrophysicist. We’re going to work together on mining data from journals. Their leading two include “The Astrophysics Journal” (TAJ) published by the Institute of Physics (IOP). Now s/he’s one of the #scholarlypoor – left academia, but stiil fiercely interested in their discipline. Now TAJ is not Open, but I am allowed to read it. I always practice being a scholarlypoor, so went to the website and saw

WOW! an “Open Issue” – just what s/he needs to use to develop a scraper. So I have a look…

I understand the words, so I am competent to do ContentMining on this – I’m an astrophysical miner… Let’s look at a paper…

WHAT!??? Open = Pay us SIX QUID (and that’s just rental)
I give publishers the “cock-up” benefit before the “conspiracy”. I can hypothesize that “Open” was a typo for “Current” or that Openness is a new concept for IOP, who haven’t switched the linksand so describe this as a “Bumpy Road” (a phrase coined by Elsevier). Or… let’s hear from IOP.