Steve Bachrach has been a long-time supporter of new approaches in scientific publishing. He started the Internet Journal of Chemistry (which sadly failed to gain traction – ahead of its time). Here he comments on the ACS’s hybrid OA scheme. I have reviewed this about 2 months ago (Author Choice in Chemistry at ACS – and elsewhere?) and comment later.
PMR: I found similar. Little seems to have changed in the last two months. I shall try to be objective (the difficulty is trying to navigate the sites). I wrote:
There are several aspects of this:
- The abstract (and the full text) is copyright ACS.
- There is no mention in the abstract that this is an Author Choice publication
- or in the HTML or PDF full text
- the material cannot be used for commercial purposes
- The link from the abstract to the HTML links to the access toll-access login – i.e. this link is closed.
- as is the PDF
Indeed I thought the whole paper was closed until I realised that the Open Access was possible only though the graphical abstract. (To be fair this is what the DOI – at present – points to so the open access version would be found in Google through the DOI). I cannot see any reason why the full abstract should only point to closed versions of the paper. Indeed I cannot see any reason why there are closed versions of the paper at all.
I have looked at the current example Steve gives. I now seem to get the DOI link going to the NON-graphical abstract – which hasn’t changed and does not indicate any openness. Since I am accessing things through the University it goes seamlessly through to the PDF without a tool-page.
The point – which must be hammered home to every publisher – is that Open Access of whatever sort – but particularly that for which the author has paid MUST be identified as such, must be promoted, and must NEVER be associated with the opportunity to pay by mistake. Also the terms and conditions (which are always ludicrously long and impossible to interpret MUST specifically mention Open Access and MUST identify clearly and prominently those things which are free.
One of the problems some slashdot readers had was they didn’t see why this was an issue. They don’t spend their time browsing through pages where they are repeatedly told they can’t do this, must pay for that, cannot photocopy, must not give to students, must not keep on disk, etc. The scholarly community is is Pavlov-conditioned to obey publisher copyright even when it has no force.
September 5th, 2007 at 5:55 pm eI was curious as to how ACS is handling their OA articles, called Author Choice. One can find a list of articles that are published in this manner, that are free to all readers, but the page is a bit difficult to locate:
http://pubs.acs.org/4authors/authorchoice/articles.html
I checked out one of the articles: Supercharging Proteins Can Impart Unusual Resilience
Michael S. Lawrence, Kevin J. Phillips, and David R. Liu
J. Am. Chem. Soc.; 2007; 129(33) pp 10110 – 10112; (Communication) DOI: 10.1021/ja071641y
Now it is clearly marked in the TOC as Author Choice and also when one does a search for it through the ACS search page. However, there is still the standard purchase link listed beside the article, even though it is available at no cost to the reader. My guess is that this purchase option is the standard display for all articles and they just haven’t figured out how to make this disappear (or don’t want to go through the effort) for Author Choice articles. Since I have a university subscription to the ACS journals, I get to it directly when I select the purchase button for all articles, whether its Author Choice or just a regular article, so I can’t tell what happens in the general case where one is not a subscriber.
A bit more disturbing is when one gets to the article via the doi (try this link 10.1021/ja071641y). Now there is NO indication that the article is under the Author Choice program, and there’s that purchase option again.
Just confirms your findings of the schizophrenic behavior (at best!) of the publishers that run hybrid operations with regards to OA.
Steve