I am delighted to report the reply from Martin Richardson of OUP about PRISM:

1. Martin Richardson Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 3:41 pm eDear Professor Murray-RustIn your recent ‘Open Letter to Oxford University Press’, dated 2nd September 2007, you request ‘factual information from OUP about its involvement with PRISM and any support for its aims.’
   Oxford University Press is not part of the PRISM initiative, and we do not intend to become a signatory to the PRISM Principles.
   OUP is very active in several Open Access initiatives, all of which are extensively documented on our website (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/). Our approach has been to develop an evidence-based understanding of the implications of OA on scholarly research dissemination, and to share that with the wider community, and this is our preferred method of contributing to the OA debate.
   Yours sincerely
   Martin Richardson
   Managing Director, Oxford Journals

PMR: This is very good news from a major publisher with an early OA strategy.
We have now had several publishers distancing themselves from the PRISM initiative. Unfortunately the PRISM site is closely linked to AAP and so poorly constructed that it is impossible to separate membership of AAP from PRISM.
Publishers should realise that this association is a difficult one. There were a large number of publishers in the AAP’s campaign to oppose s.2695:

New York, May 9, 2006 – Professional and scholarly publishers firmly oppose S.2695, the “Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006” introduced by Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The proposed legislation would require the majority of recipients of U.S. federal research agency funds to make their findings free within six months of publication. Publishers argue that the legislation, if passed, will seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process, and is a duplicative effort that places an unwarranted burden on research investigators.
According to the publishers, the provisions of S.2695 threaten to undermine the essential value of peer review by removing the publishers’ incentive and ability to sustain investments in a range of scientific, technical, and medical publishing activities. The proposed legislation comes at a time when increased public access to government-funded research is already occurring in a voluntary and highly effectiv0? e manner through a variety of publisher-initiated mechanisms and cooperative approaches.
[…]
About the Association of American Publishers
(AAP)The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. AAP’s approximately 300 members include most of the major commercial book publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. The protection of intellectual property rights in all media, the defense of intellectual freedom and the promotion of reading and literacy are among the Association’s primary concerns.# # #

PMR: I try to be fair on this blog and know that the AAP and PRISM are not the same. However it is easy for casual observers to assume that an AAP opposition of S.2695 (“seriously jeopardize the integrity of the scientific publishing process”) and a PRISM attack on the integrity of Open Access science are composed of the same community with the same motivations. It would make things much easier if the actual membership of PRISM were published – if it actually has one. Failing that publishers would save themselves from unnecessary confusion if they were to publicly state their non-affiliation as OUP and others have done.
After all, I am not the only one who can write letters… (and since this blog has a CC licence anyone can adapt the format of my letter(s) without my permission :-)).

Aidan Karley has supplied the following pricing in a comment on the Ingenta issue (I have had to reformat and hope I have caught the drift):

2. Aidan Karley Says:
   September 5th, 2007 at 12:58 pm eConcerning the Ingenta re-selling, their pricing is actually more complex than appears at first, and in some respects, more shocking :
   ……….article fee: £13.00
   ……….delivery: £5.11
   ……….tax: £3.17
   GRAND TOTAL: £21.28
   ~~~~~~~~~~ end snipped text ~~~~~~~~~
   So, for electronic delivery of a PDF pulled from another company’s website they’re charging £5.11 … that’s deeply suspicious.
   Grounds for complaint, certainly.

PMR: I’d welcome comment on the whole issue, including:

• what is being sold?
• what are its licence terms?
• who is shown as having the copyright?
• has the document been altered (the abstract was)
• who gets the article fee? OUP? Ingenta? Split between them? (Certainly not the authors)

The tax is standard UK VAT (17.5%).
Surely someone must have done battle in this arena already? So what can I find out about Ingenta? From their site:

Services overview

Ingenta maximizes the value of content on- and offline for thousands of publishing organizations and libraries worldwide.
Our technology and services manipulate the printed publication to create new revenue streams and services for over 250 publishers, while simplifying the access and acquisition of that same content by 25,000 libraries and research institutions.
We are the provider of technology and services to the publishing and information industries

PMR: and…

Information commerce systems

All publishers or owners of data resources have information assets: turning those assets into revenues is what Ingenta’s Information Commerce system is all about.
Even mature e-publishing operations are likely to have untapped revenue streams, just waiting to be discovered. Through the provision of both licensed software and ASP solutions, Ingenta can help you derive maximum value from your information asset

PMR: Now it becomes clearer. My article is an untapped revenue stream… Indeed. I just thought I was the controller of that stream. And…

Academic publishers

Ingenta specializes in working with academic publishers to fulfill your online requirements.
Our experience in this sector is extremely diverse and we offer a complete spectrum of online publishing services, as well as sales and marketing support from our dedicated division, Publishers Communication Group (PCG) and coursepack services from HERON.
We help you to:

• Distribute your content online from the secure IngentaConnect platform to over 19 million users and 25,000 registered libraries per month.
• Disseminate your content to the largest network of partners, including abstract and indexing services, subscription agent websites and full-text publishers such as CrossRef, JSTOR and OCLC.
• Create new member and customer services such as websites for society partners seamlessly linked to full text journals. View some examples.

We help you to:

• Replace or build new information commerce systems to sit behind your existing websites, driving new revenues and creating new opportunities for content licensing, repackaging and bundling.
• Create unique, custom-built websites: We are uniquely skilled in creating bespoke projects for academic publishers such as Oxford University Press.
• Effectively review and restructure your online presence with Information Architecture consultancy and training.
• Comprehensively brand your content online.
• Benefit from robust, open source and non-proprietary technology which is future-proof.

PMR: “unique, custom-built websites”. “such as Oxford University Press”.
I did manage to view one of my articles through the Ingenta portal… for the other Ingenta’s robust future-proof technology reported:

Unable To Deliver Document

Sorry. We are currently unable to deliver your document
We were unable to relay document from publisher’s server
Additionally the following error was returned from the remote document server:
404 Not Found
Please contact the Help Desk, quoting order number 39316854, for help in obtaining your document.

PMR: From the publisher’s server? So Ingenta are providing a link to OUP? And they can’t find it there? At least the paper is on the OUP site, and with the copyright:

(C) 2006 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

PMR and also:

Academic libraries

Ingenta has traditionally served academic libraries since its inception in 1998, providing free use of the most comprehensive collection of academic and professional publications at www.ingentaconnect.com.

PMR: so they give the content free to libraries? Now I am confused…

Hi all Bioclipse developers,

Bioclipse has outgrown its original design. We have therefore decided

to start the design of Bioclipse2, which will be a complete rewrite

of the core API and extension points to overcome the many

deficiencies of the current design/implementation. I have established

a wiki page for this (http://wiki.bioclipse.net/index.php?

title=Bioclipse2). If you’d like to participate in the redesign,

please add your name in the members section. The discussion will be

carried out in IRC (irc.freenode.net, #bioclipse) and on this mailing

list.

Cheers,

/Ola

Brief summary of what Open Access means for the reader:  Articles with this logo are immediately and permanently available online. Unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium is permitted, provided the article is properly cited. See our open access charter.
Anyone is free:

• to copy, distribute, and display the work;
• to make derivative works;
• to make commercial use of the work;

Under the following conditions: Attribution

• the original author must be given credit;
• for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are;
• any of these conditions can be waived if the authors gives permission.

Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

[from her message yesterday] I will in fact go and try to collect it [today]. I will refuse to sign the copyright, asking only that I be allowed to read the paper document for 5 minutes and take notes. I fully expect the librarians to refuse this request, in which case an interesting stand-off will occur. I will let you know what happens!

[today] Update on above. Well, I arrived, and made my request. It was refused, on the grounds that it would “set a precedent”.

Apparently, because the photocopy was not the original (whatever that means), they would have to “clarify” whether I could be allowed to read it. Had it indeed been the original, there would have been no problem in letting me look at it, or indeed even letting me photocopy the article for my own use (but still, not my student’s use).

So whatever it was that [Prof Bluttrinker] had to say about [garlic] in 1899 will go undiscovered by me for at least for a few more days (or likely, weeks).

The librarians did seem agreed that if I were to acquire a photocopy, scanning it, followed by OCR and then eg text mining would constitute a gross infringement (punishable by god knows what).

PMR: What are we to do?? We are trapped in this Alice-in-Wonderland where the librarians are there to stop us reading public works. A Fahrenheit2007 where publishers make their living by preventing people reading articles. Where dissemination of public information is a heinous crime.
I used to think that part of the Librarians’ role was to help develop new tools for scholarship. They have now been turned into junior police officers…
… unless some of you tell me different.

I posted recently (Copyright madness – story 2) about a colleague who wished to access an EIGHTY-FIVE YEAR OLD scientific paper (in the transactions of the Transylvanian Haematological Society) and had bizarre restrictions put in her way. Now she wishes to access an even older paper and it gets worse:

The absurdities apply equally to  VERY OLD articles, which should be well out of copyright. Thus  I am looking into the early origins of [garlic as a blood clotting agent], having traced the concept back to 1899, and a journal (and author!)  long since deceased.  Only the  British Library still has it,  but a request for an inter library loan to them is only granted if I agree to the BL’s own copyright terms, which include my not being able to

a) copy what they send me

b) give my copy to anyone else

c) have it translated for me (it’s in Transylvanian)

d) or acquire it in digital form should I wish to pass it through OSCAR or other text mining.

I will in fact go and try to collect it […time and strategy deleted…]  I will let you know what happens!

PMR: This is grotesque. There is no way this document is in copyright. A colleague confirmed that the British Library has effectively decided that the simplest management technique is to copyright everything they issue as an Interlibrary loan. And they have some sort of protection from the law by doing this.
I appreciate that if I need a C19 (sic) volume it has to be treated with care. But this is a digital object. You don’t have to handle it with digital gloves. It doesn’t fall apart in sunlight. It can be copied without deterioration. I have met people from the BL and they have a digital library program. They know that electronic documents are not books. But it seems like the BL have decided that scholarship is less important than convenience and safety. It’s this sort of attitude that is silently conniving at the restriction of scholarship through copyright censorship.
The LOCKSS idea is “Lots of Copies, Keep Stuff Safe”. The BL appears to have OOCKIL “Only One Copy, Keep It Locked”. Even for digital documents.
The really sad thing is that in the current digital revolution librarians should be leading the way forward.

Gavin Baker posts a long discussion of the complexity of licences related to the WHO Bulletin. The gist of this is that complexity is hindering necessary things like (human language) translation and re-use. In similar vein one important WHO publication for me is WHO Drug (e.g. latest issue). Excerpts from Gavin:

WHO’s journal has backwards approach to open access

The World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations, is ostensibly an organization dedicated to the public interest. The fourth point of the WHO agenda is “harnessing research, information and evidence”. In support of these goals, the agency publishes a scientific journal, the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. In their own words:

Since it was first published in 1948, the Bulletin has become one of the world’s leading public health journals. … [The Bulletin is] the flagship periodical of the World Health Organization…
(from “About the Bulletin”)

The Bulletin is no scientific backwater; it’s a relatively influential journal:
[…]
After some investigation, my verdict is: close, but no cigar.

The Bulletin gets one major point right:

In keeping with its mission statement, the peer-reviewed monthly maintains an open-access policy so that the full contents of the journal and its archives are available online free of charge.
(from “About the Bulletin”)

[…]
Print subscriptions to the Bulletin are also available and relatively affordable: $298 annually for developed countries, $163 for developing countries (both including shipping).
The Bulletin is published in English, with article abstracts and MeSH descriptors of main articles translated into Arabic, French and Spanish. This is not a complete solution to overcome language barriers, but it is a good start. (No journal has the resources to translate its content into every human language, or even the six official languages of the UN.)
This is where things start to go downhill.
If the Bulletin wants to facilitate solutions to overcome language barriers, it should grant users the right to freely make translations of articles. The Public Library of Science journals and others do this by adopting Creative Commons licenses that permit derivative works. In fact, PLoS maintains a list of translations of its articles, enabled by the CC Attribution license.
[…]
In the face of these compelling arguments […omitted…] to allow user translations, what does the Bulletin’s policy say?

The Bulletin requires each author of a contribution to grant an exclusive licence to help ensure international protection against infringement of copyright, in particular unauthorized photocopying, digital distribution, and other use by third parties, and so that it can handle requests from third parties to reproduce contributions or parts of contributions.
(from “Licence for publication”)

So the Bulletin does not use open license. Moreover, the Bulletin requires authors to assign their copyright to the journal, so the authors themselves cannot adopt a CC license for their articles. (However, it is believed that in such transfers, journals only acquire the copyright on the article in its form as finally published, i.e. not on earlier revisions. Therefore, an author would still be legally entitled to adopt a CC license for a pre-print of the article.)
[…]
The situation is not so dire with the Bulletin: there is no DRM wrapped around its articles. But the WHO copyright notice may serve to inspire uncertainty:

Extracts of the information in the web site may be reviewed, reproduced or translated for research or private study but not for sale or for use in conjunction with commercial purposes. … Reproduction or translation of substantial portions of the web site, or any use other than for educational or other non-commercial purposes, require explicit, prior authorization in writing.

Whether this statement is meant to permit data mining for research purposes is a debate for the copyright lawyers. If it does, whether it permits researchers employed by for-profit organizations to do so is equally unclear. (Why the WHO would seek to do either is even foggier.)
Even worse, the copyright transfer agreement further muddies the water:

I/we hereby grant to the publisher for the full period of copyright including any renewals or extensions throughout the world and in all languages an exclusive licence to publish the above contribution … and to exploit subsidiary rights in the contributions, including database rights. (emphasis added)

This is counterproductive on two grounds:

1. It is incredibly vague. Moreover, since database rights are standardized only in the EU, users elsewhere are left to ponder what “database rights” exist in their jurisdiction, if they exist at all.
2. It is the polar opposite of what the WHO should encourage: the proliferation of Bulletin articles in databases, which will increase access and “findability” for users.

To be fair, the copyright transfer does include a handful of rights for the author or her institution. However, the rights granted are far less than the author (and all other users) would receive with a CC license – less rights, I will argue, than are sufficient.
It remains unclear how the Bulletin proposes to enforce the publication agreement against authors who can claim no copyright in their article, such as this article by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As icing on the cake, the Bulletin adheres to the Ingelfinger rule. This means a researcher with important public health discoveries may not publish, “in whole or substantial part”, his findings – including, one can assume, on a blog or other Web site – if he wishes to be considered for publication in the Bulletin. In attempting to reserve prestige for the journal, the Bulletin does a disservice to both science and public health, by discouraging the quickest and widest possible dissemination and discussion of research.
It’s time for the Bulletin to amend its policies: to reflect the realities of research in the 21st century, and to maximize the WHO’s investment in human health.
PMR: It is depressing to find this complexity at every stage. One major message is that there is a global illiteracy in almost all major institutions as to what is required in the C21. I am sure that the WHO does not wish to make it difficult to find information – and lack of information increases health risks.
I worked with the WHO on-and-off for several years on their International Classification Of Disease (ICD) so  I have a little insight. I wanted to make an electronic version of WHO Drug – and if you look at the chemical structure diagrams therein you will see the benefit of doing so. At the very least they should include InChIs.
But it seems like we have a long way to go in getting the message through – the problems are everywhere.

Yesterday I got a comment: “smile, you’re on slashdot”, and thought relatively little about it. Slashdot (WP) or /. is essentially the first major community discussion site – it predates blogs and although some of its functionality is duplicated by blogs it retains a fairly unique and complex system of recursive moderation. Glyn Moody had seen my post about “paying for my own article” and posted it (or caused it to be posted) on slashdot. Thanks (seriously), Glyn:

Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday September 04, @12:00PM
from the who-own-paper-town dept.

Glyn Moody writes “Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press’s website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. As he writes, the journal in question was “selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the license (no commercial use).” In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn’t it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?”

What I didn’t know about was the Slashdot effect. Slashdot has 5 million+ readers and when they see a story zillions rush off to read it. So the server effectively suffers denial-of-service, although quite benign in intention. Our server fell over (probably due to the thread limit being exceeded). So apologies to those who couldn’t read the site for a few hours and thanks to my colleagues for restarting it.
There were hundreds if not thousands of comments. (My blog gets about 1 per post). Many of these were hidden below a moderated threshhold – presumably wibblers, trolls etc.
Remember that the readers on slashdot will simply have seen Glyn’s (meta)post and the title. Strictly, of course, I could read the paper – it was there, Open, on the OUP site. And, since the slashdotters had come in halfway through the movie they didn’t realise it was an ongoing concern on this blog. “Science is not clear whether he can reproduce his own paper for teaching purposes” would be more accurate. So leaving aside those who asked why I hadn’t backed it up, who thought I wanted the publicity, and who thought this was an Oxford-Cambridge battle, the discussion was roughly:

• Why are you making a fuss – it has a CC licence – just go ahead. (Remember I have been cut off by commercial publishers machinery for doing “legal” things).
• Sue the hell out of OUP.

One valuable, if sad, outcome was that the additional publicity generated the comment leading to the Ingenta mis-appropropriation, corruption, closure and resale of the article. Had that been clear I think the discussion would have been more one-sided.
And – in case you think I don’t do any real science, yesterday I:

• reviewed 4 papers for an eScience meeting
• oversaw the creation of our next generation of polymer informatics software
• helped graduate students write/debug some of the code to do it
• planned the science to come out of our CrystalEye project
• negotiated a grant

etc.
[NOTE ADDED: It wasn’t slashdot that crashed the server – it was overflow in CrystalEye. But perhaps that simply came first…]

When I snipped the screenshot of the last post ( Ingenta: It gets even worse; corrupt and resell ) I missed a tiny detail. In such small print it really doesn’t matter, does it:


the only problem – it’s MY article. MY copyright.
And the terms and conditions?…

Terms and Conditions

Ingenta offers its users the ability to obtain certain articles from various publishers. Particular articles are displayed in the manner in which they appear in the journals in which they are originally published and are made available through Ingenta’s service in conjunction with the entirety of the journals in which they were published. Such articles are made available to Ingenta’s users under arrangements between Ingenta and the publishers of such journals, and also, in some instances, under arrangements between the users and such publishers.
To the extent that Ingenta offers users the ability to order articles that are not contained within Ingenta’s system, Ingenta’s system offers users the ability to search databases containing the table of contents of those journals, and the table of contents of the entire journal will be available to the user, if the user desires. Where articles not contained within Ingenta’s system are ordered, those articles are reproduced from the original journal in which they appear under arrangements with the publishers of such journals.
The articles made available through Ingenta’s service are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. To the best of Ingenta’s knowledge, the publishers that use Ingenta’s service to make documents available have secured all necessary rights to make these documents available to be copies by the users. Use of these documents by Ingenta’s users may be restricted by the user’s agreement with the publisher. In addition, any user’s unauthorized copying, distribution, public display, public performance, and preparation of derivative works from such documents is prohibited by copyright law.
By using this service, the user represents and warrants that he or she will not use the service in any manner that would violate any third party’s copyright, intellectual property, or other rights. Any violations or potential violations should promptly be reported to help@ingentaconnect.com
THIS SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS,” WITH NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER. ALL EXPRESS, IMPLIED, AND STATUTORY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT OF PROPRIETARY RIGHTS ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW. NEITHER Ingenta NOR ITS PARENT CORPORATIONS, SUBSIDIARY CORPORATIONS, SUCCESSORS, AFFILIATES, OR ASSIGNS (COLLECTIVELY, “INGENTA”) SHALL BE LIABLE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES FOR THE USE OR MISUSE OF THIS SERVICE. SUCH LIMITATION OF LIABILITY SHALL APPLY TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW TO PREVENT THE RECOVERY OF DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, AND PUNITIVE DAMAGES (EVEN IF INGENTA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES).

PMR: so OUP appears to have colluded with Ingenta. ” The articles made available through Ingenta’s service are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws.” Indeed. But whose copyright?
I wait to hear replies from both

In reply to my post on OUP’s failure to remove the Rightslink page Josh has pointed out something even worse. I am so mad that I have to breathe deeply. This is an industry which trumpets its integrity and quality. The following shows the reverse end of both scales.

1. Josh Says:September 4th, 2007 at 5:56 pm e Ok. I looked at the Oxford website and they have seemed to fix that. Ingenta Violation

The link he gives points to this [screenshot]:

• MY article
• is being resold – NO option for free access
• without my permission
• expressly violating the licence I attached and violating copyright
• without any notice of Open Access

I am not prepared to spend 37 USD to see whether the have retained the Open Access licence on the paper itself – perhaps some reader can tell me. But imagine a reader who paid 37 USD and then found that the article itself was free – is that not close to deliberate deceit?
I and my co-authors deliberately pay for Open Access because we ant as many people as possible to read it. By removing the Open Access ntice Ingenta are insulting our integrity – we do not appear as Open Access scientists who have paid to free our work.
So this is in fragrant violation of both ethics and law. How did Ingenta get the article? Did OUP licence it to them? In which case OUP has a much more serious case to answer than failing to remove Rightslink. Did OUP get paid for this? I don’t know. If they DID then they are also guilty of violating my copyright as commercial re-use is forbidden:
AND
the CC-NC licence requires that it is retained on our work but this has been deliberately and contemptuously removed.
IT GETS WORSE:
Note the keywords. These are garbage. The article is about an enzyme database. There is no way in which any of the 3 keywords bears the slightest resemblance. So, by doing this, Ingenta have corrupted our work and besmirched our reputation – it appears we are incompetent to provide metadata. I care very much about metadata – it’s a significant part of my research. Ingenta couldn’t care about anything as long as the money rolls in.
I shall wait to see how OUP and Ingenta reply to this blatant theft and corruption of intellectual property.
The scary thing is that I wasn’t even looking for this. I casually visited an article I had written and discovered this disgrace. Do those statistics scale to all TA publishers and all journals. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Publishers often shout about how wonderful they are in preserving the scientific record – “the private sector” is fitter to maintain archives than government.
It’s clear that significant sectors of the publishing industry are incompetent, careless of ethics, indifferent to quality. If THEY violate copyright, they cannot complain if we do. It’s time to end this stupidity and release scientific work to the world.

I don’t normally copy comments to posts, but a few of these are important are important:
8 Responses to “OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article”

1. Kirsty Luff Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 4:34 pm eDear Dr Murray-Rust
   I would like to respond to your post entitled, ‘OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article’ (September 3rd 2007).
   It is not Oxford Journals’ policy to charge any users for downloading and using Open Access articles for non-commercial purposes. As stated in the copyright line, all Oxford Open articles are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
   Rightslink functionality should not be appearing on any of our OA articles, and we are in the process of removing it. For Nucleic Acids Research, the links are not displaying on tables of contents with immediate effect, and will be removed from all article pages as soon as possible. For the OA content in journals participating in Oxford Open, we will also remove any references to Rightslink. In addition to the existing copyright line and the embedded machine-readable licence, we will also display the Creative Commons logo to help make the licence terms clearer to users.

For clarification, it has never been our policy to charge our own authors for the re-use of their material in the continuation of their own research and wider educational purposes, and this includes authors of articles published under a subscription model.

Kind regards
Kirsty Luff
Senior Communications and Marketing Manager
Oxford Journals
PMR: Thank you Kirsty for the prompt response and the remedial action. Yes, I assumed this was an error. However it is a serious one as Peter Suber comments:

Comment. OUP adopted CC licenses for Nucleic Acids Research (as well as for most of its hybrid OA journals) —presumably to replace RightsLink pages and permission fees. So it is especially disappointing to see this mistake continue. Appearing to leave permission barriers in place is as bad as actually leaving them in place, at least for conscientious readers who will seek permission for uses that exceed fair use or give up and err on the side of non-use. Publishers should not want to make readers less conscientious in this sense, just as they should not want to give authors less than what they paid for and provide less than what they promise.

PMR: Exactly my concerns. I have looked at several hybrid journals from TA-publishers and almost universally they fail to provide a top-class service to the author who has paid for a special product. For some the service is so similar to the closed access product it is hardly worth buying.
I am disappointed that the general standard of OA among mainstream publishers is so poor. (Robbie) The licence information varies enormously between each and requires a huge amount of effort to understand. (Josh) Thank you – this is very serious. Effectively Ingenta have been selling free content. Of course, IF the licence had been CC-BY instead of CC-NC they would – perhaps – have been legally entitled to do so but it would be highly distasteful. But CC-NC expressly forbids this. (BTW I am a proponent of CC-BY – it is OUP who – I think – insists on this. How ironic!)

1. Robbie Says:
   September 4th, 2007 at 5:35 pm eIn publishing this with OUP a license was granted to them which modified your own copyright claims. http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/publication_rights.html
   In the future, if you are concerned, don’t publish with them but, instead, find a free access journal or website, like Archive.org, to host it.
2. Josh Says: September 4th, 2007 at 5:56 pm e
3. Ok. I looked at the Oxford website and they have seemed to fix that.However, looking at scholar.google.com , they list 4 sites that mirror your article. Ingenta is charging 36.97 USD for viewing. Another blatant copyright violation. They offer no way possible to “receive any other way”.
   Ingenta Violation