OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article
I have been dismayed (previous post:
“Open Access”) at the lack of commitment to OA by mainstream (primarily toll-access (TA)) publishers and have described this as a “systemic failure” of the industry. Here is another unacceptable lack of clarity and commitment from an Open Access journal from a major publisher. I had been investigating OUP’s site for another reason (
PRISM: Open Letter to Oxford University Press) and since I had published with them thought I would have a look at papers I had written (”I” and “my” include co-authors). This is what I found (screenshot):
The electronic article is accompanied by a sidebar with “request permissions”. I followed this and the result is shown above. The journal wishes to charge me 48 USD to:
- USE MY OWN ARTICLE
- ON WHICH I HOLD COPYRIGHT
- FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES (TEACHING)
The journal is therefore
- SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
- WITHOUT MY PERMISSION
- AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)
I am lost for words…
… the only charitable conclusion I can draw is that the publisher ritually attaches the awful Rightslink page to every article automatically and that this is a genuine mistake. I have found such “genuine mistakes” with other publishers in their hybrid journals (i.e. where only some of the papers are OA, the majority being toll-access TA). But this is a fully OA journal - all papers are OA - I assume CC-NC. There is no excuse for including the Rightslink page on ANY OA paper, let alone every one on a journal.
If this is - as I desperately hope - a genuine mistake then my criticism might seem harsh. But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access. And I hope that OUP can and will clarify and rectify the position. If, however, it is deliberate and that the publisher actually intends to charge readers and users for Open Access articles I shall reserve comment.
This is not a trivial point. The normal reader of a journal who wishes to re-use material has to navigate copyright constraints and restrictions on an all-too-frequent basis. Such a reader, especially if they were relatively unaware of Open Access could easily pay the journal for “permission to use an Open Access article for teaching”. (Note that other charges are higher - to include my own article in a book I write would cost nearly 350 USD).
It is all indicative of an industry that simply isn’t trying hard enough.
RECOMMENDATION:
OPEN ACCESS ARTICLES ON PUBLISHERS’ WEB PAGES SHOULD NEVER BE ACCOMPANIED BY RIGHTSLINK OR OTHER PERMISSION MATERIAL. INSTEAD THE PUBLISHER SHOULD PRO-ACTIVELY POINT OUT THE NATURE OF OA AND ENSURE THAT THE READER AND RE-USER IS FULLY AWARE OF THEIR RIGHTS.
After all, the author has paid for this…
This entry was posted
on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 6:43 pm and is filed under open issues.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Conspicuous, Explicit, Machine-readable.
Those are the non-negotiable qualities of an OA licence. I am reduced to slogans and soundbites in the face of publisher intransigence and incompetence. Something’s gotta work.
Well, we have been here before (albeit in a slightly different incarnation, . The company who runs Rightslink, the Copyright Clearance Centre, is either ignorant of the meaning of “open access” or clearly incapable or worse, unwilling, to set up context sensitive business processes which take into account whether a journal is open access or not or whether an author/scientist wants to do things which do not normally require payment (e.g. request re-use of a previously published figure in a scholarly acrticle).
But you are right, the systemic failur is with the publishers, who, as the clients of the Copyright Clearance Centre do not insist on such context sensitive workflows and procedures. At best, it is unthinking, at worst deliberate obfuscation.
Dear 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
Smile!. You’re on slashdot!
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/1341248
You’ve been slashdotted.
I release my copyright of this post into public domain.
What’s the big deal? At the bottom of the page - cropped in your screen shot is the text:
If the item you are seeking permission to re-use is labeled OPEN ACCESS ARTICLE then please note that non-commercial reuse of it is according to the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license. Permission only needs to be obtained for commercial use and can be done via Rightslink. If you have any queries about re-use of content published as part of the Oxford Open program, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
i.e. It does state that for non-commercial this article is free, and gives an estimated quote for commerical usage.
Are you going to involve a lawyer? Clearly they are violating your agreement. And many other’s too, I would suppose.
Stephan
In 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.
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
Looks like it may have been a mistake. Someone from PR is already trying to fix the “issue”. It may have been a money-grab, but truthfully, I would believe that they know better then that and it probably was just am issue with their software configuration (or lack of being configurable).
What about the folks who might have already paid to read the “mistakenly Rightslinked” OA articles? Will they be found and their money refunded? I’m afraid that question is rhetorical even though I’d love to hear the answer.
[...] With due apologies to Shania Twain (and chemists) –I know I am getting carried away! But, I just couldn’t help it when I read blogposts like this; via. [...]
[...] Works are released open Creative Commons, only to find that others are charging for access to that material, material that is needed especially in an education system, so that research can be conducted. If education gets the idea that all works need to be copyrighted, and that access to information for educators needs to be paid for, we are doomed when it comes to making the next generation of scholars. I have been dismayed (previous post: “Open Access”) at the lack of commitment to OA by mainstream (primarily toll-access (TA)) publishers and have described this as a “systemic failure” of the industry. Here is another unacceptable lack of clarity and commitment from an Open Access journal from a major publisher. I had been investigating OUP’s site for another reason (PRISM: Open Letter to Oxford University Press) and since I had published with them thought I would have a look at papers I had written (”I” and “my” include co-authors). This is what I found (screenshot): Source: Petermr’s Blog [...]
[...] Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge, has discovered that the OUP is selling—for £25—his research paper on its site, in violation of the Creative Commons license he released it under, and is demanding an end to the abuse of copyright and opposition to open access by publishers of scientific research. [...]
Concerning the Ingenta re-selling, their pricing is actually more complex than appears at first, and in some respects, more shocking :
~~~~~~~~ (this is a cut’n'paste, which I’ll have to re-arrange to mimic the screen’s layout) ~~~~~
Item: 1 article fee: £13.00
MACiE: a database of enzyme reaction mechanisms delivery: £5.11
Holliday, Gemma L.; Bartlett, Gail J.; Almonacid, Daniel E.; tax: £3.17
O’Boyle, Noel M.; Murray-Rust, Peter; Thornton, Janet M.; Mitchell, John B. O. subtotal: £21.28
Bioinformatics, 1 December 2005, vol. 21, no. 23, pp. 4315-4316(2)
Oxford University Press
Total for electronic: £21.28
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.
Indict them.
Its the only way they will learn…
[...] OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article - Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive (tags: creativecommons abuse journal editeur academic OpenAccess copyright auteur critique research science) [...]
[...] I am now gobsmacked. Earlier I have recounted (OUP wants me to pay for my own Open Access article) how I was expected to pay for access to my [*] own Open Access paper both through the actual publisher and an aggregator. (These organizations have admitted that this was inappropariate and are changing their technology to support free Open Access as opposed to charging for it). However, arising from concerns about access to out-of-copyright material through the British Library, I raised this here and Peter Suber commented (More access barriers at the BL document delivery service) that the British Library charge for Open Access material. PS Comment. See the BL response when the PLoS Director of Publishing, Mark Patterson, asked why the BL was charging for copies of PLoS articles, which are all OA. At first I thought the BL was saying, in effect, that it doesn’t have the resources to see whether an article is under an open license (or in the public domain). But it’s more complicated than that, and the more I re-read it, the less I understand it. In the case of PLoS articles, the BL charges a copyright fee set by UKCLA and passes the fee on to UKCLA, keeping nothing for itself. But it doesn’t explain why UKCLA believes that PLoS articles should carry copyright fees [...]
[...] Open Access to Scientific Papers Librarians are responding to a public relations campaign funded by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM) was launched earlier this year with support from the AAP’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division to “ensure the quality, integrity, and economic viability of peer-reviewed journals.” Two weeks ago, an issue brief from the Association of Research Librarians said that the group’s real purpose is to oppose initiatives that ease public access to federally funded research, and to oppose “open access generally.” They point to the case of Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, who found Oxford University Press’s website demanding $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. [...]