Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper 289
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?"
Typical Cambridge whinger (Score:1, Informative)
Second, Oxford isn't selling his work. It's selling access to his work. If he published his work anywhere else under the license which he claims, then that work would still be fully accessible, sans $48.
Stick with the chemistry, doc! Understanding the law isn't for you.
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Informative)
his issue isn't getting people to publish his article...
his issue is someone selling his work, although the licence does not permit that.
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Informative)
After paying his >$2000 publication charge, the journal turned around and tried to charge others for access. As he points out, this could have been an innocent mistake on their part. But, it's a violation of the agreement he had with them, and needs to be fixed. I don't know if the word "bigoted" is warranted, but I agree that we scientists need to push for open access. Which is what he did, by publishing in an open-access journal.
Story Overblown (Score:2, Informative)
Publish in PLOS (Score:2, Informative)
The open access model works as follows: "Open Access: Everything we publish is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish." Pretty straight forward.
As an author you pay a small amount to support the publication of the journal - often smaller than the cost for color pages at a commercial journal, and then your work is freely available. These are high quality journals and are one important part of the free future of scientific publishing. The more people who make this choice, the more pressure there will be on the traditional journals to open up their content if they want to survive.
The Document Is Free, What Is He On About? (Score:4, Informative)
What Rust's complaint is about is the "Request Permissions" link under the "Services" menu on the left-side of the page. It apparently opens to a third party website [copyright.com] which OUP, it appears, uses to calculate charges for different uses of papers published through OUP.
My guess here is a bit of poor programming for the OUP website. The document is clearly CC and it's free to download, but the copyright.com website doesn't appear to know this, so it's providing pricing on publishing the article. Maybe OUP needs to look into this matter, but the fact remains that the paper is online, freely accessible through OUP to anyone, and clearly listed as being released under CC licensing.
Rust is really making a lot of fuss over nothing.
His license doesn't matter (Score:3, Informative)
here [oxfordjournals.org]
and I quote:
"You agree that OUP may include the Article in an "open access" version of the Journal subject to payment of the relevant 'open access' fee or submission of a valid fee-waiver form."
You have to sign this piece of paper to submit the article. Obviously, he (or a coauthor?) did, so from my read he gave them explicit permission to seek payment.
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:3, Informative)
The article he couldn't access was this one: "MACiE (Mechanism, Annotation and Classification in Enzymes): novel tools for searching catalytic mechanisms [oxfordjournals.org]" (doi 10.1093/nar/gkl774). I just tried accessing it from a non-subscription IP address, and I was able to load the PDF without issue. All the articles on the page seemed to load without asking for payment.
So, in short, this was probably an innocent mistake and seems to be already fixed.
Re:Two Ideas (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, I have... And they didn't have much trouble finding stuff in it.
Re:Price quoted is for commerial use only! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And (Score:5, Informative)
This seems to be more of an issue of central services not being informed of which journals they should be subscribing to.
Diagnosis: Valium deficiency (Score:3, Informative)
As for a claim of "my" article from one of a dozen or so authors (the complaint being about 6th or 8th among them) as well as the complaint about not being able to read it (you've got a copy, don't you?) instead of the more accurate "charge being applied to OUR open access article on THEIR open access journal web site", criminy, take a trank and some deep breaths. You're having a tantrum and it's making you spout extravagant and incorrect claims. It took me all of 5 minutes, including reading the blog posts, to find the contact point for OA's open access admin. Contact the right people and let them fix it.
FWIW, NIH has been working to get any publication supported by NIH funding to be made available for free (at least to US sites, as having been supported by US tax money) via National Library of Medicine's PubMed (nee MEDLINE), no matter what journal it's in. NASA has had good luck making their stuff available through their own channels since they won't sign over copyright to journals because they're publicly supported, and NIH is following their example through their own distribution system. And that's working with copyright snatching pay-for journals. Open access journals are already open, and I haven't had this problem with non-OA open pubs, so it's obvious this is simply a bug in the OA system. It happens. They're not evil ogres out to steal "your" pub.
It might go faster if the first author made the contact with OA, but I doubt it since I doubt they intended for this to happen.
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:5, Informative)
The issue, of course, is that this explicitly violates the creative commons (noncommercial) license that he published under (and which the journal evidently agreed to, in order to be able to post his paper at all). The journal is thus illegally charging others for permissions that are free.
It still looks like a honest mistake. The structure of the website is such that a standard "permissions system" is being applied to a wide range of content for various journals. They seem to be mistakenly applying this system even to the open-access journals in the collection.
Even though this is probably just an honest mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. They are presently breaking the law and very much going against the spirit of the agreement that he entered into with them when he published his paper.
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:3, Informative)
as the 'alternative' site to prism (they forgot that wanting to share you knowledge is the work of communists).
Background:
Researchers at Universities do research.
They are paid by the University, and they (well the University) may have received a grant to carry out the research (from nsf in the US or the research councils in the UK for example).
Once they have done their research they write it up, normally in a paper (in the arts it can be a dance!).
They send the paper to our journal. The journal's editorial board receive it and will the have it peer reviewed by other researchers in the same field to ensure it meets a level of quality and is suitable for the journal. This is the crucial part of the process. But the peer reviews do not get paid for this, and the VAST majority of editors do not get paid either.
The publishers then sell the journal to the very Universities who supplied the articles for free and allowed their academics to peer review and edit for free (on university time normally).
The publisher will normally demand they own the copyright.
The price they sell journals to Universities have gone up far more than inflation year after year after year, which means unis cancel journal subs. Plus the contracts are complex with huge tie-ins and 'if you buy x you must by z' clauses.
All publishers to is take the work of the academic (for free), get the editors and peers to review (for free) and then demand they own it, all for basically doing little more than formatting the document, proof reading and putting on a website (and, rarer now-a-days, in print). These are basic clerical jobs, not something which means they should own the copyright.
As noted, Universities and academics often do not have access to their own work.
There are changes afoot.
The Open Access movement is taking off (either through freely available journals, or by making the articles available on University websites). The latter are referred to as Institutional Repositories (unsexy name!) and I happen to run one. The software they use is either http://www.dspace.org/ [dspace.org] or http://www.eprints.org/ [eprints.org] both are free and open source.
Chris
Re:His license doesn't matter (Score:5, Informative)
So do what Don Knuth did and leave them. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html [colorado.edu]
Dr. Knuth has a stark and telling financial analysis for his journal in particular and its trend in relation to the marketplace in his letter to the Editorial board of the Elsevier journal of which he was a member. It led to the resignation of the entire editorial board and the formation of the ACM journal Transactions on Algorithms. It's a must read for the current discussion.
BTW: I just started back at school for my master's and the required orientation seminars include a segment from the librarians. The librarians emphasize the importance of searching the more expensive, private journals they pay for (Springer, etc.) claiming that your academics will suffer if work has been published in a journal and you don't reference it. The librarian sounded like he was reading Springer's marketing material to us. It was disgusting. For the scientific community to break out of this media trap, we must reject this mentality, allow researchers to answer questions on research sources on ethical grounds, and ultimately make the decisions that Dr. Knuth and the JoA board made.
Re:And (Score:5, Informative)
Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad (Score:3, Informative)
This is a nice idea, but a researcher is unlikely to make this choice even if they want to promote open access. The reason is, a big factor in determining a researcher's career opportunities is the level of prestige of the journals that they can get their papers published in. A researcher's output is research, and the tangible and visible sign of that is publications, so it is the only reflection of their work that many people see. Prestige is so important that there is a formal system to denote the prestige of a journal: they are each assigned an Impact Factor [wikipedia.org]. So, 99% of the time, a researcher will submit their paper to the most prestigious journal they think will accept it, and any other concern is secondary.
There do exist open-access journals, but at present these tend to be towards the lower end of the prestige scale. Basically, journals that have a high impact factor do not have any need to offer open access and can easily get away with charging for access. Journals with a lower impact factor are interested in providing open access as a way to create interest in their journal. So although some journals have a motivation to provide open access, most researchers are motivated to publish in journals with high prestige, and as a consequence, they tend to prefer journals which as a side effect happen to not be open access.
SImilar thing happened to me. (Score:4, Informative)
I phoned the ACM and got it sorted out. As you see now on their site, it's freely-available. The ACM was reasonable and reacted quickly. That isn't always the case.
Re:The document is free to read (Score:3, Informative)
Please get your facts right. As a Cambridge alumnus myself, I have some pride in my alma mater.
13th century, not 7th.