Ingenta: It gets even worse; corrupt and resell

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 7:52 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.

5 Responses to “Ingenta: It gets even worse; corrupt and resell”

1. » What makes Peter Murray-Rust mad? » business|bytes|genes|molecules says:

   September 5, 2007 at 3:34 pm

   [...] Apparently seeing his open access work being made available for a fee without permission and removal of all CC-NC license notification does. I am sure the folks at Ingenta are surprised that people get upset when something like this happen. Who in his right mind would care about something like that? [...]
2. Steven Bachrach says:

   September 5, 2007 at 5:55 pm

   I 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
3. Ricardo Vidal says:

   September 6, 2007 at 12:05 am

   Steve, that is an amazing find.
   It can be explained if the problem is actually with the website architecture. It might not be OA ready and the purchase link, the AuthorsChoice logo and other aspects might not be popping up when they should be.

   Or… they are playing games and people are spending money on open content. Who knows…
4. pm286 says:

   September 6, 2007 at 12:55 am

   (3) Ricardo,
   See my later post - I blogged about this over two months ago and they have done nothing - not even reply. While I suspect it is technical incompetetence and laziness it is also inexcusable not to take it seriously.

   P.
5. Leigh Dodds says:

   September 7, 2007 at 1:34 pm

   With respect to the problem with the keywords on the article, I can confirm that we always display the metadata provided by the publisher. We are following up with OUP to resolve the source of the error.

   We do take metadata very seriously, and strive to work with publishers to get the best quality metadata we can.

   Cheers,

   Leigh Dodds, CTO, Ingenta