[GOAL] Can time-stamped PDF's qualify as OA?

[Walker,Thomas J]

In investigating the PDFs of articles in Journal of Medical Entomology [JME] published by Oxford University Press [OUP] I’ve found that OUP puts a time stamp on every PDF they provide to others.  This makes it impossible for authors, who have paid a fee or $2000 to $3500 for OA, to make a non-time stamped PDF openly accessible on the Web.

This is because even though OUP has granted copyrights to OA-fee paying authors, it requires the corresponding author of each article to sign (for himself and for any other authors of the article) OUP’s “License to Publish.”  This License<http://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/OUP_License_to_Publish.pdf> states (in legal language) that OUP has the exclusive right to publish the article!  That would mean that authors could not legally post their copyrighted PDFs on their homepages.

In a draft of a paper about this practice, I’ve argued that OUP’s time-stamped PDFs should not qualify as OA:

All the meanings of OA that I am aware of would exclude PDF files that have been altered to prevent their being an unaltered copy of the printed pages of the version of record.  None of the PDF files in OUP’s archive are unaltered.  I challenge anyone to find one PDF that is a true electronic version of the printed version of that article [which is the “version of record”].   Yet PDF files of journal articles are valued because they are unaltered scans of the pages of the paper version of the article.

But am I wrong and OUP’s PDFs meet current NIH standards for OA?

Tom
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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw at ufl.edu<mailto:tjw at ufl.edu>     FAX: (352)392-0190
Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
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