A month or so ago Elsevier published a “click-through” licence “allowing” researchers to use Elsevier content for Text-and-Data-Mining (TDM) – more widely content mining.  Nature News rejoiced and suggested everyone could start mining. I read the licence carefully and wrote several [start] blog posts [end] showing the great danger of anyone signing . Effectively DONT.
LIBER, the European association of Research Libraries flagged these and said it would do a thorough analysis which has now been published. http://www.libereurope.eu/news/liber-response-to-elsevier’s-text-and-data-mining-policy I’ll show most of this below with my comments. It’s necessarily long, so, to summarise:

• DON’T SIGN
• TELL EVERYONE ELSE NOT TO SIGN
• CROSS OUT ANY CLAUSES RESTRICTING MINING

Other publishers and publisher syndication – e.g. DOI resolvers – may develop their own TDM “licences”

• DONT SIGN THEM EITHER

So here’s why (summarised)

• The licences add additional restrictions and no freedoms
• Researchers could find themselves in legal trouble
• Libraries could find themselves in trouble
• Legislation is coming in UK and elsewhere which renders these licences unnecessary. You will simply be signing away your right
• Publishers’ APIs are worse than using the standard access to research papers
• You do NOT need publishers software. There is better Open Access software that is free.

So, if an Elsevier rep approaches you with a shiny new contract with a TDM clause, strike it out. YOU have the power. Tell the world.
Now the TL;DR bit. I reproduce much of LIBER and comment.

LIBER  believes that the right to read is the right to mine and that that licensing will never bridge the gap in the current copyright framework as it is unscalable and resource intensive. Furthermore, as this discussion paper highlights, licensing has the potential to limit the innovative potential of digital research methods by:

1. restricting the tools that researchers can use
2. limiting the way in which research results can be made available
3. impacting on the transparency and reproducibility of research results.

The full text of the discussion paper is included below or can by downloaded here.

PMR: Yes. LIBER and many others (JISC, BL, etc.) walked out of the attempt to force licences on us. My highlighting 

Over the last twelve months LIBER has devoted a considerable amount of effortto making the case for the need for changes to copyright legislation in order to allow researchers to employ digital research methods to extract facts and data from content. We believe that this will exponentially speed up scientific progress and innovation in Europe. Having explored the issue of TDMwith our members and other stakeholders in the research community we have come to the conclusion that licensing will never bridge the gap in the current copyright framework as it is unscalable and resource intensive.
In the current vacuum left by a legal framework that is unfit for the digital age, and with the ensuing lack of legal clarity, it is unavoidable that libraries or researchers will have to agree to further licences for the mining of content to which they already have access. The terms of such licences, however, should be such that they reinforce the position that the right to read is the right to mine, and not impose restrictions on how researchers apply research methods or disseminate their research.
UK members should exercise particular caution when considering TDM licence terms, since an exception in UK law for text and data mining is imminent and, dependent on the wording in this new exception, TDM licence terms may undermine what researchers will be permitted to do under this update to UK copyright law. Ireland is also considering such an exception.

PMR: This has now been tabled (I shall blog it) and is substantially what has been drafted for the last year. It gives all the rights we felt we could ask for. Singing Elsevier’s contract or any other contract will simply restrict your rights.

This paper has been released in response to the recent launch of the new Elsevier text and data mining policy and API. It is understood that Science Direct licences will be amended to include language around access for TDM. Many libraries may be considering signing, or have even already signed up to the terms and conditions laid out under this new licence.

PMR: DONT sign. Much of what libraries have signed has restricted scholarship for no gains. STOP HERE>

Other publishers may also be considering following in the footsteps of Elsevier by introducing similar terms for the licensing of text and data mining activities into their licence agreements. LIBER is concerned that some of the licence’s terms and conditions relating to content mining may be unnecessarily restrictive and that systematic and widespread adoption of such terms and conditions will severely hamper the progress and dissemination of data-driven research.

PMR: DON’T EVEN LET THEM TRY.

The institutional licence agreement for text and data mining
In order for a researcher within a subscribing institution to gain access to Elsevier content for the purpose of mining, it is necessary for the institution to update their licence agreement to allow text mining access. Note that within this agreement “text mining access” does not mean access to the content on the Elsevier Website that universities subscribe to. Access to content for the purpose of mining is limited to access via an API. The licence explicitly prohibits the use of robots, spiders, crawlers or other automated programs, or algorithms to download content from the website itself, which are the most common ways of performing content mining. Although the new Elsevier policy claims that it “enshrines text- and data-mining rights” in subscription agreements, in reality, under these terms, it compels institutions to agree to very restrictive conditions in order to gain very narrowly defined “access” to content for the purpose of mining.

PMR: Elsevier’s API is constructed solely to reduce the view of the content, control the way it is accessed and monitor what is done. It is not necessary and has no beneficial process. (PLoS and BMC provide all that is necessary without APIs).

Access via an API
An application program interface (API) is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a web-based software application. In the case of the API offered by Elsevier, the API provides full-text content in XML and plain-text formats.  The use of APIs for the mining of metadata is not uncommon. However, article content is much richer, potentially containing images, figures, interactive content, and videos. For researchers in many different disciplines there is as much value in the images and figures contained in the article as there is in the text. In fact, for researchers in disciplines such as the humanities, genetics, chemistry, these may be the most valuable content elements. The Elsevier API allows access to thetext only.And the access limit is an arbitrary and proportionally tiny 10,000 articles per week.

PMR: In the ContentMine we are already extracting data from images and expect to handle millions of figures a year.

Crucially, researchers develop their own tools for handling and exploiting this rich and diverse variety of content and formats. In order for students and academics to be able to perform research freely, in the way that makes sense for their own studies, they must have the freedom to interrogate, query and structure content in ways that fit with their own needs, technologies and requirements. The requirement to use pre-defined publisher technologies hampers academic freedom, learning, and data driven innovation.

PMR: Innovation is critical. Publishers have failed to innovate and held back innovation. We are innovating.

Even for those researchers for whom the API is sufficient, the licence does not guarantee sustained access to the API, as the following clause indicates:
3.4 Elsevier reserves the right to block, change, suspend, remove or disable access to the APIs and any of its services at any time.

PMR: Were you pleased when Elsevier or Nature tightened their policies on Green OA recently? They can do that on TDM.

Use of robots
The Elsevier policy expressly forbids the use of robots for content mining on the grounds that it would place too much strain on their infrastructure. Open access publishers, whose infrastructure is exposed to all web users on the open web,have reportedthat the demand placed on their infrastructure by robots for content mining is negligible and any increase in demand will be easy to manage. For subscription services such as those provided by Elsevier, the demand placed on their infrastructure should be even less, as only users registered at subscribing institutions will have access.

PMR: I can mine the whole literature on my laptop. That’s probably 0.00001% of daily usage. If that crashes Elsevier they shouldn’t be in the business. This argument is FUD.

Control of outputs
Under the terms and conditions of the updated licence agreement the outputs are controlled in the following ways:
1.    Outputs can contain “snippets” of up to 200 characters of the original text
This is an arbitrary limit. Because this is essentially a limit on the amount of text that can be quoted from the original source, it could potentially result in misquotation or, at the very least, an inaccurate representation of the original research.

PMR: some chemical names are > 200 characters. Truncating these could KILL PEOPLE.

2.    Licensed as CC-BY-NC
In signing up to the Elsevier licence agreement, researchers are asked to agree to make their output available under a CC-BY-NC licence. The outputs of TDM are very often facts and data, which are not subject to copyright; however, the Elsevier licence agreement stipulates that this non-copyright information should be put under a licence for copyright works.
In addition, the definition of “non-commercial” is highly ambiguous and open to interpretation. In effect, a CC-BY-NC licence prevents downstream use of the results and may also put researchers who are performing research under a grant agreement that mandates that data be openly available in a difficult position. Universities are also increasingly engaging in, and being encouraged by governments to enter into business partnerships with, private business. This is known as the “knowledge transfer agenda”. We recommend that universities and researchers decide before signing the Elsevier licence whether there is a possibility that the outputs of the research they wish to undertake are commercial. As facts and data are not copyrightable, LIBER’s position is that they should be made available under a CC0 licence.[1]

PMR: The only reasonable way to publish scientific Facts is CC0. We enshrined this in the Panton Principles. These are , for example, endorsed by BMC and Cameron Neylon of PLoS is a co-author

Registration and click-through licences
In order for an individual researcher to gain access to the Elsevier content that their institution subscribes to, he/she must register directly with the Elsevier developers portal, provide details about the research they wish to undertake, and agree to the terms of a click-through licence. LIBER is particularly concerned about making such demands of researchers for the following reasons:
1.    We want to protect the privacy of our users.
Libraries have a strong track record of putting measures in place to protect the personal details and reading habits of our patrons. By requiring researchers to register individually and to provide details of their research project, Elsevier is circumventing the protections that libraries have put in place. The reason given by Elsevier for this requirement is that the publisher needs to check the credentials of the individual accessing the content. However, in authenticating individual user accounts the institution has already established the bona fide nature of the researcher. Further verification should not be necessary. We object to data about the research being performed by our users in our institutions being collected by an external third party. It is not the job of a publisher to control, monitor and vet what research takes place at a university.
2.    We want to protect our researchers from undue liability.
Many institutions employ full time experts to negotiate the terms and condition of licence agreements on their behalf. This process can take months, and yet, a researcher is expected to agree to the Elsevier click-through licence in a matter of seconds. The terms of this click-through licenceare extremely complex, in many places unclear[2] and could haveserious down-stream implications for the outputs of the research. We also note that there is no cap on liabilities for a researcher:
2.3 The User will be solely responsible for all costs, expenses, losses and liabilities incurred, and activities undertaken by the User in connection with TDM Service. [BOLD here is from LIBER]
What is more, Elsevier retain the right to amend the terms, without notice and the changes will be deemed accepted by the researcher immediately. This is unacceptable.
Many of the responsibilities that are placed on the researcher by the click-through licence will be difficult to implement in practice e.g. the licence states that copyright notices may not be changed from how they appear in the dataset. This means that in a dataset derived from 10,000 articles there may be at least 10,000 appearances of the word “copyright”. A normal way of dealing with this “noise” would be to remove these irrelevant data from the dataset, but this would contravene the terms of the licence.
The click-through licence also makes it impossible to ensure the transparency and reproducibility of research results as the researcher may not share the dataset used for the research project and must delete it after use. The researcher is also expressly prohibited from depositing this dataset in their institutional repository.
Lastly, the licence is silent on post-termination use of the results of content mining. The licence will be terminated if the subscribing university “does not maintain a subscription to the book and journal content in the ScienceDirect® database”.If a researcher has mined thousands of articles, how do they check that each and every one is being subscribed to? If one or many are cancelled, what does this mean for the results, categorisations and hypotheses contained in data they have invested time and effort to produce?

PMR: Can anyone suggest that these terms are good for science?

Outlook
We estimate that European universities spend in the region of €2 billion a year on Scientific Technical and Medical published content, the vast majority of which is on e-journal subscriptions. The new Elsevier licence terms and added requirement of an additional licence for each and every researcher who wishes to mine the content raises questions about what institutions are actually purchasing when subscribing to digital information. The implication of the Elsevier TDM policy is that institutions only purchase the right to cache, look at, print out, and do a word-search on a PDF. We believe that universities should be able to employ computers to read and analyse content they have purchased and to which they have legal access. An e-subscription fee is paid so that universities can appropriately and proportionately use the content they subscribe to. For what other purpose is a university buying access to information?
Research and innovation is best encouraged in a free-thinking and enabling environment where researchers can fully exploit the content they have access to through their library. Going forward, it is important that libraries can ensure that the scientific freedom of their researchers is not eroded, and the impact of their scientific outputs undermined, by limits imposed through licences.

---

[1]This licence is recommended so that reuse is not prevented under the sui-generis Database Directive.

[2]Terms used in the licence such as “recognition” and “classification” (2.1.1) are unclear. Another crucial, term “integration” (3.3) has been left undefined.

PMR: In summary, the ONLY reason for Elsevier’s licence is to give them stranglehold over this new technology. Libraries gave away author’s rights (they should have flagged this and communally refused to let it happen).
Any library who signs a publishers’ TDM clause will destroy the new information-led science.
Even if you aren’t in UK it is very probable that it is legally allowed to extract facts. The only thing stopping you doing it is the additional clause you have agreed to with the publisher.
Kill the restrictive clauses you sign with the publisher. You don’t have to.
 
 

NOTE ADDED after first version. This is so massive that I completely forgot to mention a whole chunk of contributors including Ernesto Priego, Graham Steel (McDawg) and others. Here’s Ernesto’s blog:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/03/24/wellcome-trust-apcs-serials-crisis/
where he first outlined the headline figures and plotted the amounts paid to each major publisher.  I was concentrating on the mechanics of community editing, rather than the whole community picture. So yes, anyone else involved should add info. We are a community, not a group of infighters.
 
Last week The Wellcome Trust published its list of ca. 2000 articles for which it had paid Article Publishing Charges (APCs). It spent about 3 million GBP.
Those publications are a valuable investment. On Monday Mark Walport told us at the EuropePMC young scientist writers awards that publishing was as valuable as test tubes. Well-communicated science is of great value. Science behind paywalls loses hugely. My rough guess is that publishing is ca 1-2% of the cost of the grant, so I’d guess this represents about 200 million GBP overall investment. [See below how to avoid the guessing].
But what the Wellcome Trust lists offers is just the beginning. Michelle Brook , who runs Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation, immediately saw the potential. With great energy (and loss of sleep) she coordinated volunteers to curate this list. The result is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RXMhqzOZDqygWzyE4HXi9DnJnxjdp0NOhlHcB5SrSZo/edit#gid=0
This isn’t the “version of record”. It’s a snapshot. Get used to the idea that in the Digital Century everything is snapshotted. There is often no “final version”. There may be intermediate versions used for specific purposes – for example checking that Elsevier has published what it got paid to publish. But everything is capable of revision and enhancement – in so many ways. I’ll give some below.
Michelle is using Google spreadsheets – which allows anyone to view the exact state of the spreadsheet. When she first prepared the spreadsheet it could be a bit confusing because if anyone sorted a column it alters everyone’s views.  But we solve that by social, not technical means. We know who is there – they are all friends (by definition you are part of the community) and we let each other know what we are doing.
The result is mind-blowing. It’s a human-machine synthesis of a section of scholarly publishing. So here’s a rough roll of honour:

• Mark Walport, Robert Terry for making Wellcome the most dynamic force in Open Access and providing the funding
• Robert Kiley and colleagues
• Michelle Brook (andOKFN) for pulling this together and in no order (and maybe with omissions)
• Stuart Lewis
• Theo Andrew
• Nic Weber
• Jackie Proven
• Fiona Wright
• Stuart Lawson
• Jenny Molloy
• Yvonne Budden
• SM
• Rupert Gatti
• Peter Murray-Rust
• ck

That’s 13 contributors in less than a week. That’s how crowdsourcing works. About half the entries have names, so there’s lot of opportunity for you. You don’t need to have any specialist knowledge – and it’s open to all. Would make a good high-school project. Open Access Button could be involved, for example.
I think this spreadsheet has added a million GBP to Wellcome’s output.
What???!!! That’s an absurd amount to claim for 1 week of crowd sourcing. OK, I’ll revise it below…
Yes. There is 200 million GBP of investment. If no-one knows about it its values is small (we can count people trained, buildings kept-up, materials, etc.). But the major outcome of research funding, apart from people and institutions is KNOWLEDGE.
If the knowledge is 100 million, that’s a bad investment. If it’s 200 million, it’s marginal. To be useful the knowledge must be at least 300 million. [I’ll claim a multiplier of 5 for the mean of Open Knowledge and I’ll write a separate post…].
So what can this spreadsheet be used for?

• we can download all the full text and search it. [“some of this isn’t CC-BY” so you can’t do that… Well I’m going to mine it for Facts, and that’s legal and anyway if you want to take me to court and claim that copyright stops people doing research that stops people dying I’ll see you there. It’s Open – Wellcome Trust has paid huge amounts of its own money and we have a moral right to that output.]. So expect the Content Mine to take this as a wonderful resource.
• we can teach with it. For most science the publishers forbid teaching without paying them an extra ransom. Well, there’s enough here that we can find masses of useful examples for teaching. tells, sequences, species, phylogenetic trees, metabolism, chemical synthesis, etc. When you are creating teaching resources one of the first places you will look will be the WT-OKFN spreadsheet
• we make science better. There’s enough here to create books of recipes (how-tis), typical values, etc. We can detect develop FRAUD detection tools.
• we can engage citizens. [“Hang on – you’re going too far. Ordinary people can’t be exposed to science”. Tell that to cyclists in cambridge – there’s a paper on the “health benefits of cycling in Cambridge”. I think they’ll understand it. And I think they may be more knowledgeable that many paywall-only readers.]
• we can detect papers behind paywalls. and the hints are that it’s not just Elsevier…
• we can develop the next generation of tools. This spreadsheet is massive for developing content-mining. It’s exactly what I want. A collection of papers from all the biomedical publishers and I know I can’t be sued.
• a teaching resource. If I were teaching Library and Information Science I would start a modern course with this spreadsheet. It’s a window onto everything that’s valuable in modern scientific information.
• an advocacy and awareness aid.
• a tool to fundamentally change how we communicate science. This is where the future is and it’s just the beginning. Information collected and managed by new types of organisation. The Open Knowledge Foundation. Democracy and bottom-up rather than top-down authoritarianism. If you are in conventional publishing and you don’t understand what I have just said then your are in trouble. (Unless of course you have good lawyers and rich lobbyists who can stop the world changing). We haven’t even put it into RDF yet and that will be a massive step forward.
• a community-generator. We’ve already got 13 people in a week. That’s how Open Streetmap started. it’s now got half a million. WT-Brook could expand to the whole of enlightened scientific communication. Think Wikipedia. Think Mozilla, Think Geograph, Think OpenStreetMap. Think My Society, Think Crowdcrafting, Think Zooniverse. These can take off within weeks or months.

 
So it was silly to suggest this spreadsheet liberates a million pounds of value. I’ll be conservative and settle for ten million.
 

Someone needs to take formal action against Elsevier. Like taking them to court. In this case Wellcome.
Two days ago I posted /pmr/2014/03/24/today-at-elseviergate-more-potholes-and-bumps-on-the-shared-journey-please-help-us-find-paywalled-openaccess-elsevier/ where  I mentioned an APC-paid Open Access article behind a paywall. In response to this Elsevier lifted the paywall.
Prompted by a tweed from Ross Mounce I looked again. Now they have put the article back behind the paywall. Requiring non-subscribers to pay for Open Access.  Unethical, Immoral and I suspect a clear breach of contract law.
Here’s todays’ screen shot

I simply don’t know what to say. Does anyone care? Or do we continue to pour public funds into an arrogant, avaricious, unprincipled company?
UPDATE: I’ve checked the earlier paywalled Open Access articles and they are not accessible to anyone (“we are experiencing technical difficulties”);
 

The recent (wonderful) collection of Wellcome-sponsored articles (thanks Robert Kiley) has highlighted the huge percentage of “hybrid” articles – where both the author and the subscribing library pay the publishers. Publishers claim they give the money back to libraries.
Do you trust major publishers to get it right?
Michelle Brook has made a magnificent effort to collate all this information. In her blog post “the-sheer-scale-of-hybrid-journal-publishing” she gives tables:

Top 5 publishers by total cost to Wellcome Trust

It’s easy (if tedious) to find paywalled Open Access articles in Elsevier journals. You go to Robert Kiley’s excellent spreadsheet (curated by Michelle Brook and others) , find publisher = Elsevier , search for the title and go to the journal pages. Here I show how
Wellcome Trust has apparently paid 2797 GBP in APCs for this article (it’s just over 1 page long – actually an editorial)

Search for “The asexual cycle of apicomplexan parasites: new findings that raise new questions.” in Google. Yes, you can get it in PubMed and EuropePMC for free. But go to the Elsevier site (normally Science Direct) – where many people would land – and…
What did they get for their money?

 
 
I am waiting for an official statement from Elsevier – not a random comment on my blog about Javascript and marketing FUD such as “share our journey” on “our bumpy road” . A statement that can convince Robert Kiley that Elsevier is competent and committed to Open Access.
I did that on Friday.
Now Elsevier are aware of my investigations , so I looked today and found something different.

 
IT’S CHANGED!!
I have two hypotheses:

• The Director of Access and Policy and the VP of Products spent their weekend trying to patch up the potholes on their “bumpy road”. (translation – the underinvestment and incompetence of their system). If so they’ve made a terribly botched job of the change. See below.
• The Elsevier system isn’t stable. It’s clearly broken – there is no indication that that Elsevier systems give the same result on different sites, different days, etc.

Take your pick. It’s clear that Wellcome haven’t got value for money (nearly 3000 GBP). Here’s what’s still wrong.

• The article isn’t labelled Open Access
• The article has no licence
• The article doesn’t acknowledge Wellcome Trust funding
• The article is still (C) Elsevier All rights Reserved
• The Table of Contents for the issue doesn’t say “Open Access”
• Elsevier haven’t made a public apology to the author and Wellcome for stopping the world reading this article.

I’ll note that this is a 1-page editorial. It’s almost certainly not formally peer-reviewed. It’s morally scandalous that Elsevier have the brass neck to charge 3000 quid for it. But, as everyone tells me the purpose of publishing is to make money, not communicate science.
Oh, and I predict a message from Elsevier of the form “thanks for informing us, please keep these coming” .  I’m certainly informing my Parliamentary representatives (Julian Huppert, David Willetts and Vince Cable) and asking what parliament is going to do about Elsevier’s misselling and misdelivering. And with your help I expect to keep them coming
PLEASE MAIL ME WITH ANY MORE EXAMPLES YOU KNOW OF WHERE PAID APC ARTICLES ARE STILL BEHIND ELSEVIER PAYWALLS. We want to publicise all those potholes.
TIP: University libraries- why don’t you mail all academics and ask them to check whether their APC-paid articles are visible and CC-licenced.
 

I am working very closely with Michelle Brook on OKFN science and the Content Mine. Yesterday she spent much of it hacking the splendid Wellcome Trust spreadsheet of how much WT has spent on Open Access APCs and  with which publisher. It’s a splendid document, but no more than a responsible organisation should provide. There’s about 2400 entries with an average spend of 2000-3000 GBP and top of ca 6000 GBP (guess who?).
The spreadsheet is large and complex and so, in true OKFN spirit, Michelle is leading us in a datathon. It’s now in a Google spreadsheet which means that lots of us can share it. I’ve worked with communal docs before but not spreadsheets. There’s often about 5-10 people logged in, with 2-3 actively editing. That seems to mean that the spreadsheet can jump around – sorting on publisher, or title or … The attendees are all animals, starting with Anonymous Aardvark, and doubtless Anonymous Kangaroo. Haven’t yet worked out how to show my real name…
Anyway it’s been valuable – if stultifying boring – for me. I’ve been going through the Elsevier entries, scraping the titles and Googling them. I correct a few minor errors. But mainly I want to see if the paper is behind a paywall. It’s boring because most aren’t and the frequency of mispaywalling seems to be ca. 1% (I can’t be sure because Elsevier may be tweaking the papers right now). [But that’s a completely unacceptable frequency and I’ll show how much it costs the world.].
Michelle’s blog is Quantumplations and in here latest post she is puzzled by Wiley-Blackwell’s licences.

Every Wiley-Blackwell article I’ve looked at so far makes the statement: “Re-use of this article is permitted in accordance with the Creative Commons Deed, Attribution 2.5, which does not permit commercial exploitation.” (For an example, see the image below).

This is junk from WB.
CC-BY allows any use – it only requires attribution. You can use it for sun-beds, baby milk, tobacco and alcohol. You can build bombs with it.
I have three possible explanations (these are on the OKFN mailing lists) – I am not saying which

• Incompetence. WB don’t understand licences. That’s inexcusable as their whole business is built on licensing material that scholars have given them. They should understand licences.
• Indifference. “Doesn’t matter whether we get it right. Who cares? The libraries and funders will keep paying us.”
• Deliberate. It actually helps WB business in some way to give misinformation. See “Elseviergate” for discussion.

What is clear is that the standard of business practice in TollAccess scholarly publishing is appalling. If they built aircraft they would fall out of the sky. If they made electric goods people would get electrocuted. If they ran banks people would lose money.
But, hey, it’s only Scholarly Publishing. No-one minds if publishers foul up. It doesn’t cost anyone – it’s only public money – and we can mend it when MLB and PMR complain.
Well it DOES cost and I’ll show why in a later post.
 
 

Some years ago Elsevier  led a PR campaign, PRISM, to discredit Open Access. They paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a PR “expert” Dezenhall whose speciality is dirtying people and organisations. He told them that they should promote Open access as “Junk Science” and (see  Peter Suber)) Dezenhall also advised the AAP “to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship’”
Elsevier are even now trying to push through the FIRST act in the US, another zombie reprise of PIPA, SOPA, RWA, etc.
This is the company which leads the scholarly publishing market in terms of revenue.

Here an article which has hit the twitterati and has shocked the scientists I talk to

Journal of Proteomics

Volume 75, Issue 3, 4 January 2012, Pages 914–920

Harry Belafonte and the secret proteome of coconut milk

• Alfonsina D’Amato,
• Elisa Fasoli,
• Pier Giorgio Righetti^, 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1874391911004957#

Proteomics is the science of discovering and identifying proteins in samples, usually via chromatography and mass spectrometry. It has nothing to do with Harry Belafonte (a singer) and even less to do with the picture below which is included in the paper.

Scholarly publishing is about reporting science in a way that can be repeated and used at the basis of more science. This degrades the message .
I have used the image without permission as it’s fair use and fair comment.
 

Elsevier’s VP of Product Management, Platform and Content (VPPMPC) and Director of Access and Policy  (DoAP) have published a statement “Open access – the systems journey” about their misselling of rights. They say nothing about the continuing problem of APC-paid articles wrongly behind firewalls. On reading this you might be tempted to have some sympathy for Elsevier. That’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome where the captured or oppressed are tempted to bond with their oppressors. The fact that Elsevier staff are publicly visible supports the Syndrome – that’s why I refer to them by their formal position.
Elsevier deserve no sympathy. Quite the opposite – I have asked David Willetts whether there is a case for formal legal or government action.  I have asserted, and stand by:
Closed access means people die.
Remember that when you feel this doesn’t matter or it’s all a game. It isn’t. I know people who, if academic colleagues did not have access to the closed literature would have died. Every paper behind a paywall adds up. Papers which are wrongly paywalled are morally inexcusable.
Elsevier were alerted to problems TWO YEARS ago. I re-exposed serious problems SEVEN MONTHS ago. Elsevier have not fixed them. You may get the impression that they are simply buying time. But NOW is the time that you should be angry.
So here’s today’s offering from Wellcome’s spreadsheet. Wellcome paid 2262 GBP to Elsevier so that the world could see potentially valuable medical advances
PMC3477630; Clinical Radiology; Chest radiographic patterns in 75 adolescents with vertically acquired HIV infection.

I can’t read it. It’s behind a paywall. I assume it has pictures of X-Rays. But I expect it’s of value to doctors in Africa with AIDS patients – maybe they have an Xray that they’d like to compare. Maybe it’s got a recipe for taking better pictures. I don’t know.
Because it’s behind a paywall. And, assuming this isn’t a fault in Wellcome’s spreadsheet, that is MORALLY, ETHICALLY and LEGALLY unacceptable.

 
Please get angry. Check your APC papers published with Elsevier. If they aren’t visible mail me.

[2014-03-21]
Content mining isn’t easy but it can be done by experts and this post will give another indication of the power. Here are two small chunks of English; each of them has something hidden which a natural language engine might, if properly constructed, bring to light in milliseconds. Do not look them up on Google as it will reveal the secret. Here’s the first; it’s slightly shortened:

In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy.

The following is accidental, but it has become a classic

Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight

And this is a special Friday for it bears upon the subject. When you feel you’ve solved the problem  try to answer in the spirit of the way the joke was written.

 
I follow the #openaccess announcements on Twitter – to check licences, etc. Here’s one from Wiley and I’ve gone to the Rightslink page

 
Unlike Elsevier, where the Rightslink is often badly constructed, this is clear. It’s CC-BY, no weasel words, no attempt to link to a pricing sheet , no declaration that you have to mail the publisher, no statement that the publishers’ permission is required.
However it’s a pity that Wiley are even offering CC-NC. I thought that two years ago they were completely CC-BY. That’s the honest thing to do. You get paid a large amount of money for Open Access – you give the appropriate return.
[Sorry about the fuzziness – my wordpress is blurring pictures – have to find out why.