petermr's blog

Elizabeth C. Turtle and Martin P. Courtois, Scholarly Communication: Science Librarians as Advocates for Change, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Summer 2007.

and remember there are no guarantees. Why should I get my computing from the University when I can get it from Amazon? My knowledge store when I can get it from Google? And others will arise. LIbrarians need to make themselves indispensable – and quickly.
As one example where librarians are asleep, you should be tackling the copyrighting and theft of scientific data. There is a bright new future in eScience and it is being crippled by commercial interests who are trying to hoard and resell data.  It is now reasonable to say that publishers are a major force acting against data-rich science. Get in there and change it.

I have blogged about how our Open Access paper was offered for sale by Ingenta, and how they had removed our copyright on the abstract and replaced it by their own. I am pleased to see we have a reply:

1. Louise Tutton Says:
   September 6th, 2007 at 6:05 pm eIn response to recent blog postings I’d like to confirm that we (Ingenta) are working closely with our publisher customers to ensure that OA articles are correctly reflected on IngentaConnect. To give you some background, there are currently almost 600 titles with freely available OA content available via the site and this number is steadily growing as more and more publishers experiment with this model. I should emphasize that the current system for flagging OA content isn’t perfect and we are working to improve this. We are also reliant on publishers to provide us with information on which content is OA and the process of flagging OA access rights is at times manual, particularly in the case of titles with hybrid models. Perhaps one answer is the development of an industry standard on the flagging of OA articles within metadata, which would then automate the process and avoid oversights such as those reported here.

PMR: Thanks Louise.
I revisited the Ingenta site and found that the Nucleic Acids Research TOC now had little flags showing the articles were free. I can’t be sure that this is completely new, so I suspect so – i.e. Ingenta were charging for every paper in NAR until I pointed out the problem.
They haven’t removed their copyright notice from OUR abstract.
This blog tries to be reasonably fair and I am happy to accept that there are oversights. There are some significant points which need to be addressed:

• My general experience over the last 2-3 months is that the publishing industry does not take the rights of the Open Access author seriously enough. The author(s) or their funders have paid a LOT of money for the right to have their product exposed and re-used in a certain manner and if any part of the process is less than perfect the author can feel – as one correspondent put it – “pissed”. I don’t believe their is a campaign among most publishers to make Open Access unattractive to authors by failing to honour obligations, but I DO believe there is a systemic failure – Open Access is clearly not given priority by many of those who build
  web sites. This leads to a way of thinking and practice where there is no pro-action. Everyone involved should treat Open Access content with the same concern as pornography, libel, third-party rights, etc.
• Yes, there should be standards. I know standards take time, but if the will was there it would be relatively easy. We have several models to go on. I don’t hear publishers debating their merits other than to discredit Open Access. The software industry has largely solved the problem – publisher should be capable of doing so. However the will isn’t there yet. I have likened publishers’ labels to food labels – “open access” ccan mean anything the publisher wants it to mean.

So, Ingenta, here is a serious and constructive suggestion. By oversight or otherwise a large number of people have paid you for material to which they had free access. You may, of course, intend to find out who  some of them are and return it.
But there will be a lot left over. Why don’t you fund a public project as you suggested – say through JISC and or academia – to prepare the basis for industry standards in publishing. We might be able to give you some ideas…

Peter Suber has blogged Association of Research Libraries on PRISM. The actual document (AAP PR Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Update re the PRISM Coalition) is relatively small and worth looking at.
My immediate comments are that it’s fine as far as it goes but we need to go further and shine more daylight on the PRISM.

AAP PR Campaign against Open Access and Public Access to Federally
Funded Research: Update re the PRISM Coalition
September 4, 2007
Summary
PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine), a new coalition, is attracting substantial criticism from a broad spectrum of researchers. The PRISM message corresponds directly to plans described in internal publisher documents leaked to reporters to “develop simple messages (e.g., public access equals government censorship)” that are aimed at key decision makers.

PMR: ARL has been among the foremost supporters of Open Access and change, including setting up SPARC and the the Open Access mailing list and (in response to me) one on Open Data.

As news of this initiative evolves, it presents an opportunity to engage in conversations with members of your campus community concerning the changes to the scholarly communication system and how this may affect scholarly journal publishing. This memo provides talking points to assist you and your staff in working with members of your campus community with regards to the recently disclosed publishers public relations campaign against open/public access initiatives and legislation concerning access to federally funded research.

PMR: This is the main point of the Brief – making sure that campuses have correct information on the issue. They point out the incoherencies, lies and distortions of PRISM:

“government interference in scientific and scholarly publishing.”
… In describing the consequences, the initiative repeatedly conflates policies regarding access to federally funded research with hypothesized dire consequences ultimately resulting in the loss of any effective system of scholarly publishing. Many commentators agree that inaccuracies abound in the initiative’s rhetoric….

PMR: Carefully put – not an incitement to the barricades.

Below are some of the “simple messages” proposed for the publishers’ campaign against open access/public access to federally funded research and some responses to use when engaging members of your campus community. Where appropriate, quotes from PRISM statements are included as well with the caveat that PRISM is honing its messages on an ongoing basis. Even within a few days of its launch, the site’s messages have been regularly reconfigured.

[… detailed discussion of deficiencies in PRISM’s message snipped…]
Next steps
Important questions face researchers, their funding bodies, research institutions, libraries, and publishers. Where these questions are discussed honestly on the basis of their own merits, there is the best opportunity to develop systems and strategies that fully leverage society’s investments in advancing knowledge and researchers’ efforts to create and apply new knowledge. Focusing on real risks and needed changes rather than defending established interests in the wake of change opens the path to meaningful dialog.
For more information contact:
Prue Adler, Associate Executive Director, Federal Relations and Information Policy, ARL, prue@arl.org
Karla Hahn, Director, Office of Scholarly Communication, ARL, karla@arl.org

PMR: A useful start but more needs to be done – and ARL seems the best place to me. Here are some suggestions:

• FIND OUT WHO PRISM ARE. I have been doing this on an ad hoc basis. I think ARL should write to PRISM and ask for their membership. Give us daily updates on their response, including silence.
• Mobilise senior faculty to do the same. The junior faculty is aroused, at least in part, but where are the messages we saw from the top institutions in the PubChem/ACS affair? OK, it’s early days but regents, deans and provosts should be writing.
• Put individual publishers on the spot. Do they, or do they not, belong to PRISM? It’s simple – write to them in public. Or get a letter for them to sign.
• Document the PRISM web site. I am not surprised that it’s changing. As far as I can see this is the only public utterance made by PRISM (presumably the rest is in the lobbies). What do the changes mean? Let’s see them on a daily basis.
• Gives links to reputable pro-active discussions such as Peter Suber’s blog. Encourage the public collation of information.

No, I’m not going to do it … I have code to write.

Today I received the following unsolicted eMail from Klaus Gubernator of eMolecules and Wiley, which I regard as unacceptable, both morally and legally. At one stage I was investigating a collaboration with eMolecules – now I shall not go near them:

from: “Klaus at eMolecules”
to: [my email, obviously scraped or bought]
date: 5 Sep 2007 20:18:51 -0400
subject: 700,000 NMR, IR and MS from Wiley just a click away

Dear Fellow Chemist,

Would you like to have over 700,000 NMR, MS, and IR spectra at your fingertips whenever you need them?

Now you can!

Introducing ChemGate, the search engine for high-quality spectra from a trusted source: Wiley-VCH.

Just draw a chemical structure, search, and view the spectrum.

–       Over 500,000 complex organic and inorganic molecules

–       Easy to use substructure search, and stepwise refinement

–       Analyze your spectrum with powerful tools

–       Buy one spectrum at a time – no long term commitment

Try it yourself right now! Just visit www.chemgate.emolecules.com and view your first spectra for free.

We look forward to becoming your one-stop resource for chemical spectra.

Kind regards,

Klaus Gubernator, CEO, eMolecules

www.chemgate.emolecules.com

To be removed from this list, please go here: http://news.emolecules.com/c.asp?FOF8Q/SX8PX7RguR4uElbQ33UXRipfFS7Ixh1CVmnCPA

This is SPAM. In the EU it is illegal. Gubernator and Wiley have operations or have resided in Europe. They know that SPAM is illegal.
Wikipedia is definitive enough:

E-mail spam (WP)

Legality

Sending spam violates the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) of almost all Internet Service Providers. Providers vary in their willingness or ability to enforce their AUP; some actively enforce their terms, some lack adequate personnel or technical skills for enforcement, while others may be reluctant to enforce restrictive terms against otherwise profitable customers.
In the United States spam is legally permissible according to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, provided it follows certain criteria: a truthful subject line; no false information in the technical headers or sender address; “conspicuous” display of the postal address of the sender; and other minor requirements. If the spam fails to comply with any of these requirements, then it is illegal. Aggravated or accelerated penalties apply if the spammer harvested the email addresses using methods described earlier.
Article 13 of the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC) provides that the EU member states shall take appropriate measures to ensure that unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications, the choice between these options to be determined by national legislation.

So Wiley and eMolecules are knowingly breaking the law. Does it matter? YES. Firstly every bit of SPAM wastes my time, my bandwidth, my disk and my chance of finding emails. I get several hundred SPAM a day and each one matters. Also Wiley are selling integrity – they are – presumably – closely aligned to the PRISM effort where we are told how wonderful the publishers are and how the private sector is the only hope for a better informatics future. So yet again they show their arrogance – legislation is to control readers, purchasers and authors, but does not, of course, apply to the commercial industry who often seem by definition to be above the law. Putting a “remove from more SPAM” link in the mail is NOT acceptable practice – it is just MORE effort on my part.
Wiley, of course, is quick to prosecute readers who overstep what they regard as acceptable practice – see Sued for 10 Data Points and links therein for the full horrendous story of a young reseracher who was threatened by Wiley for publishing a graph of scientific data.
I shall return to the actual content of ChemGate which represents all that is wrong with the aggregation and possession of scientific data. Meanwhile here is a screen shot – what is the interesting point I shall make in a future post?:

Oh, and just in case you think this will be a cost effective way of managing spectra, here are the costs:

and for 1000 users – e.g. not much larger than the size of our department – 35,000 USD. You can probably buy a  useful entry-level spectrometer for that and an awful lot of chemicals.
Now, Wiley publish a lot of chemistry. And they accompany this with supplemental info – data which they copyright. Do you think if I ask them nicely they will let me aggregate this non-copyrightable data in the same way as we have done for CrystalEye? Please, Wiley, let me know. And if you say yes, I’ll forget about the spamming as an oversight.
from “Dear Fellow Chemist”

I am delighted to report that OUP has responded rapidly to my concern about charging for Author-pays Open Access papers which are intended to be free to read and free to re-use non-commercially for all:

1. Kirsty Luff Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 3:13 pm eDear Professor Murray-RustIn response to the comments raised on your blog today regarding Oxford Journals and Ingenta, we can confirm that steps have been taken to ensure that all content from Nucleic Acids Research and also open access content from journals published under the hybrid author pays model (Oxford Open) is freely accessible via Ingenta. Furthermore, Oxford Journals is currently liaising with other individual article suppliers to ensure that OA articles that use the Creative Commons Licence are freely available from all sites/platforms.
   Kind regards
   Kirsty Luff
   Senior Communications and Marketing Manager
   Oxford Journals

PMR: Good to have the rapid response and the promise of remedial action. There are still a number of outstanding points:

• How much money did Ingenta (and others) receive for selling free articles?
• What are they going to do with the money?
• Why is this “oversight” endemic in non-OA publishers? (I have found this in Springer and ACS as well and I haven’t stopped looking)

PMR: How much damage has this done to the reputation of the toll-access publishing community? It claims “high quality”, “responsible preservation”, the “private sector” is the appropriate place for maintenance of the scholarly record. Yet it cannot manage the simple task of differential access to sites.
From now on I shall assume that all major science publishers are aware of this blog and therefore aware of this problem. I expect them to check that their PAID “open access” does proper justice to the concept. Anything less is a mixture of deceit, arrogance, cynicism, incompetence, or business-driven non-compliance. Any single one of these makes a publisher unfit to be the paid guardian of science. At present the ACS has failed to meet my criteria.
PS – I don’t ENJOY doing this –  I’d rather write code. If anyone – like Steve Bachrach has – wants to help it’s easy:

• find a publisher who offers some form of paid open/free access
• find a paper offered under such a scheme (very rare in some publishers)
• see if it is possible to find access controls to read the paper
• report it

… and let me write about it.

Two months ago I reviewed the hybrid offerings for “openness” from major publishers. In Author Choice in Chemistry at ACS – and elsewhere? I reviewed the ACS’s policy and found that they gave the paying author a very poor product. Not just the price – USD3000 for – at best – “limited green access” but also that it was possible that readers coming from certain directions – such as Google – were not aware that the article was free. Perhaps an honest mistake, poor technical support, a less than committed editorial staff – but not a knowing way to maximize income.
Here is the audit trail that a typical reader without a subscription sees:

• GOOGLE:

Supercharging Proteins Can Impart Unusual Resilience

Michael S. Lawrence, Kevin J. Phillips, and David R. Liu*. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard University …
pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/2007/129/i33/abs/ja071641y.html – Similar pages

• LEADS TO

• CLICK ON FULL TEXT and you get:

So the reader, who has NO IDEA that this is Free to Read, is asked to pay full price for a paper for which the author has paid to make free.
When I pointed out a similar problem two days ago at Oxford University Press they immediately admitted this was a mistake and promised to mend it instantly. (I shall check that they have done so). But I pointed out this problem to the ACS  OVER TWO MONTHS AGO. I have heard nothing. I know that this blog is read in the ACS – it is inconceivable that no-one knows about this problem.
The ACS is a charity. With a responsibility for helping the scientific community.
However it clearly does not care about Open Choice, or about taking money gto which it is not entitles. I’ll let you form your own conclusions – I am just very very sad.

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.

1. Steven Bachrach Says:
   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

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.