"Open Access" and "low fat"

In an earlier post Open Access and Fuzzy Access I challenged the position of “Molbank” as a collection of Open Molecules. The position is that Molbank is “Open Access” but copyrights the articles and imposes special conditions on their re-use – i.e. “not for commercial use with permission”. I have argued that this is not compliant with the BOAI declaration in that material is not reusable Openly.
There is confusion in that “Molbank” started out as “Molecules” and then split. IIRC Molecules was supported by a grant from the Soros foundation to develop Open Access publishing. Here I argue that botj Molecules and Molbank try to keep to the letter of some of the words in the declaration rather than the spirit. I shall repeat the material – allow readers (if there are actually any readers interested in Open Data) to make their own assessments – and invite discussion.
=== Molbank ===

1. Dietrich Rordorf Says:
   May 5th, 2007 at 4:40 pm eThanks for the comments.Firstly, “MolBank” and “Molecules” have been separated since 2001, and are published as separate journals.Secondly, the copyright notice for MDPI journals has been “(c) 200x by MDPI (http://www.mdpi.org/). Reproduction is permitted for noncommercial purposes.” since 2000, excepted for the MolBank journal. Actually we forgot to change the copyright statement for this journal, and it is only changed this year (see http://www.mdpi.org/molbank/molbank2007/m522.htm for an example).
   Thirdly, regarding BOAI, the statement says “The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, SHOULD be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” “Should” is not the same as “must”. Therefore, we believe to adhere to the BOAI.
2. Dietrich Rordorf Says:
   May 5th, 2007 at 4:45 pm eIn reply to Jean-Claude Bradley:You may read the “Instructions for Authors” of the MolBank journal at http://www.mdpi.org/molbank/publguid.htm:“Copyright of published papers: We will typically insert the following note at the end of the paper: © 200… by MDPI (http://www.mdpi.org). Reproduction is permitted for noncommercial purposes. For ALTERNATE ARRANGEMENTS concerning copyright, please CONTACT THE PUBLISHER.”

=== PMR ===
“Should” is not the same as “must”. Therefore, we believe to adhere to the BOAI.
These are weasel words. (Yes, there is a distinction between SHOULD, MUST and MAY in computer science, but here it is very clear that SHOULD does not mean OPTIONAL). This is of that same standard as the food industry claiming that it is “low fat” because it has persuaded the governments that anything not 100% fat is low fat. Here “Open Access” is being used to sell journals which in fact have a high degree of closedness to them.
(I have suggested several times that the words “Open Access” should be qualified in a more rigorous manner than Green and Gold which confuse people I suggest something like Creative commons:
OA – copyright author; all re-use permitted;
as opposed to the weaker:
OA: copyright publisher; visible on publishers website when they feel like it; mountable on personal website; commercial re-use at whim of publisher.
Personally I do not regard the latter as OA. Unfortunately for me many members of the Open Access movement do.
=== Molecules ===
Molecules says:

Open Access: free for readers, with low publishing fees paid by authors or their institutions.
I quote from this completely (the statement is, of course copyright MDPI but I am claiming fair use):

Open Access (free subscription for readers) Advantages

• Much higher citation impact: Open Access papers are much more frequently cited [1]. They have higher publicity because they are free to read and the full text is searchable on the Internet and they are more quickly and easily added into many indexing databases.
• Much less costly: Open Access publishing is supported by authors and their institutes and is much less costly. Open Access publication fees we collect are only 800 CHF (approximately 500 EUR) per paper (compare to much higher fees of other nonprofit publishing organization such as PLoS [2,3] or to Springer’s Open Access publishing fees of 3000 USD [4,5]) regardless of the length of the paper, because we wish to encourage publication of long papers with complete results and full experimental or computational details [6]. The instructions for transfer of donated funds are at the http://www.mdpi.org/transfer.htm website.
• Open Access papers are typically published online more rapidly [7].
• Waiver of publication fees: In order to encourage publication of high quality papers, we will continue to waive publication fees with Open Access for those papers of high quality recommended by referees or editors and for papers from those who have published high impact factor papers in our journals [8].

Links and Notes

1. Open Access citation impact advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Authors_and_researchers. For example, a very ordinary research paper “Molecules 1998, 3, 100-106” has been cited 49 times, the highest number of citation among all the papers published up to 2006 by the same author.
2. According to a recent report (Rovner, S. Evolving Access. Chem. Eng. News 3 July 2006, 84 (27), 8) the nonprofit Open Access publishing organization PLoS has just increased its author fees from $1500 USD per article to 2000−2500 USD to better reflect the cost of publication, in addition to other revenue (grants, institutional memberships, and advertisement).
3. MDPI also plans to increase the amount of Open Access publishing fees to an adequate level in 1 April 2007.
4. See: http://www.springeronline.com/openchoice
5. The traditional subscription-based publishing are even more expensive. The scientific journal subscription has a standard price of 1 USD per page (see the subscription price for journals published by Elsevier or Springer). For example, if a journal has a worldwide circulation of 5000 copies, for a article of 10 pages, the other parties (readers, libraries, etc.) pay the publishing company 50000 USD. That is why a single journal e.g., Tetrahedron or Tetrahedron Letters of Elsevier, can bring tens of millions of USD revenue for the publishing house. Elsevier and Springer both started to provide author paid immediate Open Access and the cost of 3000 USD per paper has been charged to authors [2]. This amount looks very high, yet this Open Access service should be encouraged because Open Access publishing is much less costly for other parties to pay the publishing service.
6. Recently a research paper of 23 pages has been published: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/11110867.pdf.
7. Well written papers have been peer reviewed and published in less than two weeks from manuscript submission, see the example: http://www.mdpi.org/molecules/papers/11040212.pdf.
8. The choice of Non-Open Access (Editorial: “Open Access and Author’s Open Choice“) or Delayed Open Access publishing (Editorial: “Delayed Open Access or Permanent Non-Open Access“) is not recommended since September 2006 as we decided to make all MDPI journals fully Open Access again.

Dr. Shu-Kun Lin
Publisher of MDPI journals

Last change: 6 March 2007, Webmaster: lin@mdpi.org
© 2007 by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI), Basel, Switzerland

They have also completely confused the issue in that many of the papers they have published are not Open Access at all, see their CDROM stuff.

The fees 80 CHF* per paper can be easily paid afterwards by credit card through Paypal or directly through Paypal. Note: 5% of the bank fees should be added. For example, you need to send 84 CHF (80 + 80×5%) so that MDPI can receive 80 CHF.

Personaly I do not find paying 80CHF for a 1-2 page paper “easy”. Nor do I have any confidence in the guardianship of the scholarly record. (But most of my readers don’t seem to care about that…)
So the message is clear. The publishers are running rings round us with clever marketing campaigns. Springer et al are far worse. How many of you have seen a Springer Open Choice paper in chemistry? Or for that matter any other subject? What percentage of papers are published in this way? It allows publishers to say

“we are an Open Access publisher. We have Open Access journals. We are trying get authors to publish Open Access. But it’s very hard – they don’t seem to be interested”.

I know the publishers read this blog. I wonder if any of the “low fat Open Access” publishers can convince us that it’s anything more than a marketing gimmick.
My main concern is that Open Data doesn’t become “low fat”. For data there are no weasel words – no halfway houses – no “Open Choice Data”. For data it is very simple. It belongs to the scientific commons, not the publishers.
Do you care enough to do something about it?