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

Wed Feb 10 14:51:42 GMT 2016

Peter Murray-Rust’s posting about $400 study packs based on articles published with CC-BY rights statements opened my eyes to a part of OUP/ESA’s business plan I had missed—the use of time-stamped PDFs to make money from students of the teachers who use study packs that include articles by ESA authors in any of ESA’s four principal journals. OUP has slapped time stamps and notices of an ESA copyright on all articles in the four journals going back to 1908 for Ann. Ent. Soc. Amer. and  J. Econ. Ent, and to 1972 and 1965 for J. Med. Ent. and  Envir. Ent.

This should be illegal, as well as ethically and morally unacceptable.  This is because ESA has no valid claim of copyright to articles published in its journals before it started requiring authors to sign over their copyrights to ESA in 1978.  Furthermore, JME, for its entire run of being published by Honolulu’s Bishop Museum (1964-1986), never required authors to sign copyright releases.  The handover of J. Med. Ent. to ESA resulted in the run from 1987-date being copyrighted by ESA.
The magnitude of the deception of OUP claiming an ESA copyright on all articles that ever appeared in ESA’s four journals is that of ESA’s 271 “journal-years” of publication (through 2015 and including the first 22 journal-years of JME), ESA could fairly claim copyright to only 103 (103/271=38%).

That ought to be illegal, but is it? (The evidence is clear cut and online.)

Tom
====================================
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      Phone: 352-273-3920
Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
====================================

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust
Sent: Monday, February 08, 2016 2:08 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Can time-stamped PDF's qualify as OA?

Following up,
I have checked the reuse permissions on OUP's Nucleic Acids Research (see previous mail) and they are charging large prices for re-use of CC-BY articles (e.g. 400 USD for use in an academic course pack for 100 students.
I hope this is a "glitch" (though I am getting very very tired of publisher glitches in their favour). If it is deliberate then although it is possibly legal - they can argue that a consumer can ignore their reprint permission charges - it is morally and ethically unacceptable.
I continue to point out such unacceptable practices. They will continue until the community also regards them as unacceptable and takes decisive action against unacceptable publishers.

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Paul Royster <proyster2 at unl.edu<mailto:proyster2 at unl.edu>> wrote:
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> [mailto: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<mailto: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
============================================
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<tel:%28352%29392-0190>
Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
============================================

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--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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