OUP: Thank you for the response

I don’t normally copy comments to posts, but a few of these are important are important:
8 Responses to “OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article”

  1. Kirsty Luff Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 4:34 pm eDear 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
PMR: Thank you Kirsty for the prompt response and the remedial action. Yes, I assumed this was an error. However it is a serious one as Peter Suber comments:

Comment. OUP adopted CC licenses for Nucleic Acids Research (as well as for most of its hybrid OA journals) —presumably to replace RightsLink pages and permission fees. So it is especially disappointing to see this mistake continue. Appearing to leave permission barriers in place is as bad as actually leaving them in place, at least for conscientious readers who will seek permission for uses that exceed fair use or give up and err on the side of non-use. Publishers should not want to make readers less conscientious in this sense, just as they should not want to give authors less than what they paid for and provide less than what they promise.

PMR: Exactly my concerns. I have looked at several hybrid journals from TA-publishers and almost universally they fail to provide a top-class service to the author who has paid for a special product. For some the service is so similar to the closed access product it is hardly worth buying.
I am disappointed that the general standard of OA among mainstream publishers is so poor. (Robbie) The licence information varies enormously between each and requires a huge amount of effort to understand. (Josh) Thank you – this is very serious. Effectively Ingenta have been selling free content. Of course, IF the licence had been CC-BY instead of CC-NC they would – perhaps – have been legally entitled to do so but it would be highly distasteful. But CC-NC expressly forbids this. (BTW I am a proponent of CC-BY – it is OUP who – I think – insists on this. How ironic!)

  1. Robbie Says:
    September 4th, 2007 at 5:35 pm eIn 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.
  2. Josh Says: September 4th, 2007 at 5:56 pm e
  3. 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
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