Elsevier pointed me to their recent set of #openaccess journals. I have uncovered multiple serious problems in their labelling and access. Now I show that mislabelling and misimplementation could cost customers huge amounts of money. I will pretend I am a manufacturer of heating systems and that I want to reproduce a scientific paper to help sell my new revolutionary systems. I need the following 8-page paper.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261913001803
Heat load patterns in district heating substations
Open Access Article
-
Henrik Gadd
, 
,
- Sven Werner
- School of Business and Engineering, Halmstad University, P.O. Box 823, SE-30118 Halmstad, Sweden
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2013.02.062, How to Cite or Link Using DOI
- Permissions & Reprints
Now I can’t just use it without permission. Although it says “Open Access” it might be restricted to non-commercial use (CC-NC). So I go to Permissions and Reprints. I want 1000 glossy copies for my trade show.
You can do this yourself, 1000 copies of full article, print and electronic, in United Kingdom, translated into 2 languages, for commercial company costs 51,05138 USD
So I am to be charged FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS for reusing this article. (BTW if I wanted 10000 it would have cost 10 times that. And If I were a pharma company wanting 10000 copied it would have cost THREE QUARTERS OF A MILLION DOLLARS (750,000).
This illustrates several points:
- If the paper had, in fact , been CC-BY it wouldn’t have cost a cent
- Elsevier re-use charges are unbelievably huge
And that anyone clamouring for CC-NC (Rosie Redfield, Heather Morrison) is simply feeding huge amounts of money to Elsevier.