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

Wed Feb 10 19:31:19 GMT 2016

Dear Peter and GOAL readers,

At Oxford we work closely with Oxford University Press (OUP) on open access issues, as OUP is part of the University. Andy Redman, Editorial Director at OUP is a member of our Open Access Oxford Project Group, so I contacted him to respond to Peter and others’ concerns about OUP’s licensing practice for open access articles. Andy replied as follows, and is cc-ed above if you have specific questions for him.

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Hi Lucie,

We don’t have a registered list member on GOAL so it would be great if you could share a response for us:

We’ve checked on the permissions issue reported by Peter Murray-Rust and it is something where we need to take further action. We use RightsLink for standard permission requests and there are better ways we can use RightsLink to handle OA licences. Our current implementation flags that anyone making a request should consider whether the article is available under a Creative Commons Open Access licence before applying for permission through RightsLink:

“Papers published under Creative Commons Open Access licences may not require permissions for re-use. Please check the copyright line and licence used for this paper before requesting permission. Copyright lines can be found on the abstract of all OUP journal articles and information on CC licences can be found here. If you are unsure if the material is covered by open access or if your reuse requires permissions then please contact journals.permissions at oup.com<mailto:journals.permissions at oup.com>”

However, if someone still continues with a request though the system then they are not barred from doing this in the current implementation and the system will calculate a standard permissions quote (which is what Peter has noted). We will look at when we can implement an OA licence sensitive interface in RightsLink. We will also check for evidence of permissions payments having been made for articles where a Creative Commons licence was in place and, if there are any such instances, we will make arrangements to reimburse the customer.

Peter asked on Twitter whether this was a bumpy road or worse and, on GOAL, said that he hoped that this was a "glitch". Hopefully this answers that question. It’s a case of infrastructure needing to be adapted and the time required to schedule and implement changes which involve multiple systems.

Cheers,

Andy

*************************

Kind regards,
Lucie

Lucie Burgess
Associate Director for Digital Libraries
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Clarendon Building, Broad Street, Oxford
Senior Research Fellow, Hertford College
Tel: +44 (0)1865 277104
+44 (0)7725 842619
Twitter @LucieCBurgess
LinkedIn LucieCBurgess
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6601-7196
Get ready for the REF – Act on Acceptance<http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/home-2/act-on-acceptance/>

From: Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk>>
Reply-To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Date: Wednesday, 10 February 2016 15:57
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Can time-stamped PDF's qualify as OA?

On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:51 PM, Walker,Thomas J <tjw at ufl.edu<mailto: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<mailto:tjw at ufl.edu>      Phone: 352-273-3920<tel: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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