Scientist Must Pay to Read His Own Paper

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?"

Comments

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[Virgil Tibbs]

if you read tfa you will see he is NOT complaining about access to it to read but them selling its redistribution rights despite the licence explicitly pointing out it is NON-commercial redistribution which is allowed....
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

[kebes]

Just because it's released under CC, doesn't mean that people must give you a copy of it for free on demand.

True. Except in this case, the author is paying an open-access surcharge. In the blog post he says: "After all, the author has paid for this". The purpose of the surcharge is to help the journal cover distribution costs, thereby guaranteeing that everyone can read the article. If the journal accepts that publication fee, but then charges readers anyway, isn't that fraud?

Now, if he released the paper on the condition that no one ever charge for it

He did use such a condition. He used a creative commons license with a non-commercial clause, so it's illegal for the publisher to charge people for distribution. Again from his post, he says: "The journal is therefore SELLING MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WITHOUT MY PERMISSION AGAINST THE TERMS OF THE LICENCE (NO COMMERCIAL USE)"

If publishers are really contributing nothing ... stop publishing through them!

The controversy here is precisely that he decided to publish in an open access journal. In fact, you can read about their open access policy here, which says: "From 1st January 2005, all articles published in NAR are freely available online immediately upon publication. This means that it is no longer necessary to hold a subscription in order to read current NAR content online."

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.

Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

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.

Re:And

[mikael]

I am sure that if he went in to see the library staff, they would be able to give him an Athens login account, and that would allow him to to read his article for free. These are free for any staff or student who is working at a UK university.

This seems to be more of an issue of central services not being informed of which journals they should be subscribing to.

Re:UbuntuDupe Untangling Squad

[kebes]

I need to correct myself (again). The article PDF is available for free download, but if you go to the article page and click on the "Request permission" link, you're brought to a new page where you can request permission to, for instance, print out copies for use in class. The form then tells you how much you have to pay them for those permissions.

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:His license doesn't matter

[Stephan Schulz]

"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."

This part is a bit confusing, but it refers to the author paying OUP to put it into an open access journal, not the reader paying to access this paper. The reader access is described on the right of that form:

"Open access" versions are made freely available online immediately upon publication as part of a long-term archive without subscription barriers to access.

So do what Don Knuth did and leave them.

[conspirator57]

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html

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

[iocat]

I think it's worth RTFA and the Oxford response in his comments section. Pasted below:

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

So, maybe not quite as sinister as it appears.