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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Walker,Thomas J <tjw at ufl.edu> wrote:

> 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.
>

It's called Copyfraud by many, including me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud gives a good overview. It's a
"victimless crime" for Universities and their libraries, because the
victims are not the Universities but hoi polloi outside the ivory towers.
The people who suffer are artists, naturalists, policy makers, SMEs,
doctors, politicians, and curious minds.


> 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.)
>

I suffered from this.  Springer took all the images published in its
journals and stamped COPYRIGHT SPRINGER over all of them and offered them
for sale at 60 USD. This included all my publications in BioMedCentral, a
CC-BY Open Access journal. I raised this on my blog as "Springergate", see
https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/06/06/springergate-springerimages-for-today/
and preceding/subsequent articles.
I publicized this - was dismissed by Springer first of all and then it was
a "computer glitch" . No one in academia cared.
However Wikimedia cared greatly, because their CC-BY-SA images had also
been universally stamped as Springer property. They made a considerable
fuss, rightly (explore the blog).
The Editor of BMC then spent time correcting it (it wasn't his fault, it
was SpringerImages).

So the moral is that University libraries do not fight to preserve the
public domain or CC-BY*. In a sad extension of this many libraries
(including the British Library - whom I FOI'ed) will take the easy way and
apply charges for everything because it is too difficult to determine
whether anything is in the public domain or CC-BY*. Thus the BL charges
people to read my Open Access papers online, and 120-year old chemical
publications are regarded as belonging to the journal (and hence
chargeable) because they can't prove the authors are dead.

P.



>
>
> 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/
>
> ====================================
>
>
>
>
-- 
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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