[GOAL] Elsevier selling access to open access articles... again

[Ross Mounce]

Dear Alicia,


Approximately five days ago you wrote on behalf of Elsevier to this mailing
list in response to my finding of a single paid-for hybrid "open access"
article paywalled and actively being sold at the Elsevier journal
*Mitochondrion*.

In the response Elsevier sought to re-assure the world (open access is for
the benefit of everyone) that:

*"We’ve gone through the system, this is the only article affected."*

I then found another paid-for hybrid "open access" article paywalled and
actively being sold at the Elsevier journal *The Lancet*.

*We appear to have had no official response from Elsevier since.*

Today, an independent analysis by Christoph Broschinski of more paid-for
hybridOA articles at Elsevier journals may have found up to five additional
paywalled, for sale articles. The Cambridge one is a mistake, the payment
was for page charges & colour figures not open access, I have done due
diligence on this and checked myself since I am at Cambridge.
http://openapc.github.io/general/openapc/2017/02/23/elsevier_hybrid_access/

I'm struggling to reconcile what I have found and what Christoph might have
found with Elsevier's statement:

"We’ve gone through the system, this is the only article affected."

*The most likely conclusion I can draw from Elsevier's statement and these
reports that appear to conflict with that statement is that Elsevier's
system is not adequately tracking paid-for hybridOA articles. *

Assuming this to be true:

1.) *Will Elsevier openly publish on a single web page, on a continuous,
ongoing basis, the exact DOIs of all articles that Elsevier has been paid
to make "hybridOA"* , including the DOIs of articles that Elsevier were
paid to make open access, that now reside at journals published by other
publishers (if the journal was subsequently transferred to another
publisher) ?

This will enable any interested party to:

a) Check that each and every one is actually freely accessible from the
publisher site landing page

b) This 'master list' of Elsevier hybridOA can be cross-checked against
institutionally-held lists of paid invoices. Any articles listed by an
institution as paid-for OA, but not on Elsevier's hybridOA 'master list'
can be further investigated, to perhaps further reveal more articles that
should be "open access" that Elsevier's faulty "system" has overlooked.

2.) *Will Elsevier refund 100% of the paid APC to each institution, funder,
or individual that has a wrongly paywalled paid-for "open access" article
behind a paywall?*

3.) *Will Elsevier hire and fully pay for an independent 3rd party forensic
accounting firm to go through their pay-per-view and re-use licensing
data/systems and records*, including the period from January 1st 2005 until
today (23rd February 2017), to produce a thorough openly available report
on the extent of PPV payments AND re-use licensing payments for articles
that should not have been sold to access, or to re-use?

I hope Elsevier will do this to ensure that every individual who has paid
to access or re-use 'mistakenly' paywalled "open access" material is
refunded in full, with interest, including the local taxes applied not just
the article fee, and not with "credit" that can only be used to purchase
other Elsevier goods or services.

4.) *What meaningful assurances can Elsevier give that it will not make
these mistakes again, given that it appears to be making these mistakes
over and over again?*

Full open access publishers have an error rate of precisely 0 out of over
>500,000 articles published so far e.g. PLOS, PeerJ and eLife.

Errors such as these are simply intolerable and have the potential to cause
great harm.
For instance, imagine if an article providing the first report of Ebola in
Peru was paid-for to be hybridOA but was instead mistakenly paywalled...
Since Peru is now "too rich" [1] to qualify for HINARI, but still too poor
to pay to subscribe to most subscription journals, many Peruvians would not
have access to this vital information unless it was open access.

c.f. the first report of Ebola in Liberia which was also infamously
paywalled at an Elsevier journal [2]


[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(16)30188-7
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/opinion/yes-we-were-warned-
about-ebola.html


Sincerely,

Ross
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