[GOAL] Re: Bogus online publishers

[Marc Couture]

On Feb 29, 2012, Karen Shashok wrote in EASE-forum:

>
> Fake journals, fake conferences, and now an online outfit that is
charging for access to
> articles published in open access journals!
>
>
http://www.newsrx.com/newsletters/health-and-medicine-week/2008-05-12/200512200820915W.html
>
> This particular hit is almost certainly an article I published (as sole
author) in BMC
> Medical Research Methodology in 2008. I paid a lot of money to make sure
that article
> was 100% open access. Now this!
>
> USD3 is not much but regardless of the amount they charge, surely what
NewsRx is
> doing is illegal?
>

This makes an interesting case study in light of the debate on "libre" OA.

First, there seems to be nothing illegal, at least in matters of copyright,
in selling this article. BMC papers are published under the most "libre" CC
license (CC-BY), which "permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited".
In particular, commercial uses are allowed, the idea being that someone can
ask money for an OA article only if they offer some added value, because
anyone can access the article for free.

But I had always wondered if some unscrupulous third parties could succeed
in making people pay for OA articles simply by hiding the fact that they
are freely available elsewhere.

So the issue here is more a matter of false representation (which is
unethical, and could well be illegal). The "new" article begins in the same
way as articles in science news media: "According to recent research from
Granada, Spain...". But then this is followed (between quotes) by the exact
beginning of Ms Shashok’s paper, and one has to pay to see if the remaining
of the article is also just an exact copy of the whole original paper. As a
matter of principle, I didn't want to pay the fee, even if it's small, just
to verify, but I suspect the added value to be close to zero.

There is also the question of complying with the terms of the CC license:
one could argue that, in order that the original paper be "properly" cited,
the complete BMC reference should be given, including a hyperlink to the
(gratis) original article. Maybe there is such a reference in the part of
the article which is not displayed; this would technically satisfy the
license requirements, but the ethical issue would remain the same.

According to Peter Suber (
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-11.htm), about half of
the 22% of OA journals using CC licenses have chosen the CC-BY version. The
others often add the NC (non-commercial) restriction, maybe to avoid this
kind of questionable business practices. But there is a price to pay, which
is that legitimate commercial uses may be impeded by the NC restriction.

Marc Couture
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