AMI2 and I are going through Biomed Central papers as they are some of the few that carry CC-BY licences. We’ve started at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/11/310 and here’s a picture we’ve found:
What is it? Unfortunately it’s a JPEG and we can’t hack those today (but we will fairly soon). Anyway I went out on the web to find out about Oreina speciosissima troglodytes and the second record was to our old acquaintance SpringerImages. If I want a copy of the picture, I find http://www.springerimages.com/Images/LifeSciences/5-10.1186_1471-2148-11-310-1
License
This image is copyrighted by Borer et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This image is published with open access under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
If you would like to obtain permissions for the re-use or re-print of this image, please click here.
And when I “click here” I get
So if I want to re-use this image I have to contact Springer even though the Image ought to be re-usable without their permission. (Yes *I* know I have a right to it but with all the muddle about licences I expect there are zillions of readers who don’t think they have any rights).
I hope this is a “glitch” as the last time (/pmr/2012/06/07/springergate-i-try-to-explain-springerimages-and-my-continuing-concern/ ). But it’s a shameful glitch. If an author pays a lot of money to a publisher for Open Access the publisher should recognize that and create a service that makes the author feel pleased and happy, not that they are doing something that the publisher regards as unworthy of treating properly.
Springer is a Closed Access publisher despite its acquisition of BMC. It thinks “closed”, it fails to honour Open Access authors. (So do most of the other Closed Access publishers and I’ll come back to another one soon).
If you pay thousands of pounds to publish an article, the least that a publisher can do it highlight it.