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

[Paul Royster]

Dear Dr Walker,

I infer that you are talking about the stamp: “Downloaded from http://jme.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on February 8, 2016” or equivalent that OUP pastes on every PDF it sends out? In practice, that stamp can be removed by Adobe Acrobat, though it takes a bit of practice and a delicate touch. (I won’t speak to whether such removal is within the bounds of any specific license agreement.) Those time stamps are an ugly imposition marring the pages of many content sources, including JSTOR, Hathi Trust, and others, and I deplore them. They remind me of dogs marking their territories.

Oxford’s website for the JME says < http://jme.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/charges-licenses-and-self-archiving.html> that authors paying for Open Access under Oxford Open have a choice of CC-BY-NC (no commercial re-use) or CC-BY-NC-ND (no commercial, no derivatives) licenses. Under either of these, authors (who pay) have immediate license to post the Oxford (or ESA) pdf versions in their institutional repositories (or any other non-commercial uses). (Whether CC-BY-NC counts as “real” OA is a matter for discussion with the purists—most people would say it is, some more extreme advocates would not. It’s not clear to me whether it meets the strict BOAI standard or not; or even if that matters.)

Authors who do not pay for Oxford Open still “may upload their accepted manuscript PDF to an institutional and/or centrally organized repository, provided that public availability is delayed until 12 months after first online publication in the journal.” < http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/rights-and-permissions/self-archiving-policyb.html > So authors may still take the “Green OA” route—though whether Green OA counts as “real” OA is another murky or muddled question for some.

Your article in Learned Publishing (2002)15, 279–284 < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1087/095315102760319242/abstract > [though ironically not OA] made a clear and bold appeal for immediate free web access. I wish we had all been sooner to demand this of publishers and societies.

It is unfortunate the ESA has cast its lot with OUP. I hope its members will realize the impact and reconsider the arrangement. Meanwhile, we do a lot of entomology for our repository (including Insecta Mundi), and I would be happy to help you get your JME papers online, if you wish to contact me off-list. Best regards.

Paul Royster
Coordinator of Scholarly Communications
University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries
proyster at unl.edu<mailto:proyster at unl.edu>
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu<http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/>

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Walker,Thomas J
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2016 7:04 AM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: [GOAL] Can time-stamped PDF's qualify as OA?

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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