How is it possible that Elsevier are still charging for copies of open-access articles?
March 11, 2014
I hate to keep flogging a dead horse, but since this issue won’t go away I guess I can’t, either.
1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles. I showed how their open-access articles claimed “all rights reserved”, and how when you use the site’s facilities to ask about giving one electronic copy to a student, the price is £10.88. As I summarised at the time: “Free” means “we take the author’s copyright, all rights are reserved, but you can buy downloads at a 45% discount from what they would otherwise cost.” No-one from Elsevier commented.
2. Eight months ago, Peter Murray-Rust explained that Elsevier charges to read #openaccess articles. He showed how all three of the randomly selected open-access articles he looked at had download fees of $31.50. No-one from Elsevier commented (although see below).
3. A couple of days ago, Peter revisited this issue, and found that Elsevier are still charging THOUSANDS of pounds for CC-BY articles. IMMORAL, UNETHICAL , maybe even ILLEGAL.This time he picked another Elsevier OA article at random, and was quoted £8000 for permission to print 100 copies. The one he looked at says “Open Access” in gold at the top and “All rights reserved” at the bottom. Its “Get rights and content” link takes me to RightsLink, where I was quoted £1.66 to supply a single electronic copy to a student on a course at the University of Bristol:
(Why was I quoted a wildly different price from Peter? I don’t know. Could be to do with the different university, or because he proposed printing copies instead of using an electronic one.)
On Peter’s last article, an Elsevier representative commented:
Alicia Wise says:
March 10, 2014 at 4:20 pm
Hi Peter,As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving the clarity of our OA license labelling (eg on ScienceDirect) and metadata feeds (eg to Rightslink). This is work in progress and should be completed by summer. I am working with the internal team to get a more clear understanding of the detailed plan and key milestones, and will tweet about these in due course.
With kind wishes,
Alicia
Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier
@wisealic
(Oddly, I don’t see the referenced comment in the August blog-entry, but perhaps it was on a different article.)
Now here is my problem with this.
First of all, either this is deliberate fraud on Elsevier’s part — charging for the use of something that is free to use — or it’s a bug. Following Hanlon’s razor, I prefer the latter explanation. But assuming it’s a bug, why has it taken two years to address? And why is it still not fixed?
Elsevier, remember, are a company with an annual revenue exceeding £2bn. That’s £2,000,000,000. (Rather pathetically, their site’s link to the most recent annual report is broken, but that’s a different bug for a different day.) Is it unreasonable to expect that two years should be long enough for them to fix a trivial bug?
All that’s necessary is to change the “All rights reserved” message and the “Get rights and content” link to say “This is an open-access article, and is free to re-use”. We know that the necessary metadata is there because of the “Open Access” caption at the top of the article. So speaking from my perspective as a professional software developer of more than thirty years’ standing, this seems like a ten-line fix that should take maybe a man-hour; at most a man-day. A man-day of programmer time would cost Elsevier maybe £500 — that is, 0.000025% of the revenue they’ve taken since this bug was reported two years ago. Is it really too much to ask?
(One can hardly help comparing this performance with that of PeerJ, who have maybe a ten-thousandth of Elsevier’s income and resources. When I reported three bugs to them in a course of a couple of days, they fixed them all with an average report-to-fix time of less than 21 hours.)
Now here’s where it turns sinister.
The PeerJ bugs I mentioned above cost them — not money, directly, but a certain amount of reputation. By fixing them quickly, they fixed that reputation damage (and indeed gained reputation by responding so quickly). By contrast, the Elsevier bug we’re discussing here doesn’t cost them anything. It makes them money, by misleading people into paying for permissions that they already have. In short, not fixing this bug is making money for Elsevier. It’s hard not to wonder: would it have remained unfixed for two years if it was costing them money?
But instead of a rush to fix the bug, we have this kind of thing:
I find that very hard to accept. However complex your publishing platform is, however many different modules interoperate, however much legacy code there is — it’s not that hard to take the conditional that emits “Open Access” in gold at the top of the article, and make the same test in the other relevant places.
As John Mark Ockerbloom observes:
Come on, Elsevier. You’re better than this. Step up. Get this done.
Update (21st March 2014)
Ten days layer, Elsevier have finally responded. To give credit where it’s due, it’s actually pretty good: it notes how many customers made payments they needn’t have made (about 50), how much they paid in total (about $4000) and says that they are actively refunding these payments.
It would be have been nice, mind you, had this statement contained an actual apology: the words “sorry”, “regret” and “apologise” are all notably absent.
And I remain baffled that the answer to “So when will this all be reliable?” is “by the summer of 2014”. As noted above, the pages in question already have the information that the articles are open access, as noted in the gold “Open Access” text at top right of the pages. Why it’s going to take several more months to use that information elsewhere in the same pages is a mystery to me.
Update 2 (24th March 2014)
As noted by Alicia in a comment below, Elsevier employee Chris Shillum has posted a long comment on Elsevier’s response, explaining in more detail what the technical issues are. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to link directly to the comment, but it’s the fifth one.
Correlation of impact factor and citations: a personal case-study
December 13, 2013
It’s now widely understood among researchers that the impact factor (IF) is a statistically illiterate measure of the quality of a paper. Unfortunately, it’s not yet universally understood among administrators, who in many places continue to judge authors on the impact factors of the journals they publish in. They presumably do this on the assumption that impact factor is a proxy for, or predictor of, citation count, which is turn is assumed to correlate with influence.
As shown by Lozano et al. (2012), the correlation between IF and citations is in fact very weak — r2 is about 0.2 — and has been progressively weakening since the dawn of the Internet era and the consequent decoupling of papers from the physical journal that they appear in. This is a counter-intuitive finding: given that the impact factor is calculated from citation counts you’d expect it to correlate much more strongly. But the enormous skew of citation rates towards a few big winners renders the average used by the IF meaningless.
To bring this home, I plotted my own personal impact-factor/citation-count graph. I used Google Scholar’s citation counts of my articles, which recognises 17 of my papers; then I looked up the impact factors of the venues they appeared in, plotted citation count against impact factor, and calculated a best-fit line through my data-points. Here’s the result (taken from a slide in my Berlin 11 satellite conference talk):
I was delighted to see that the regression slope is actually negative: in my case at least, the higher the impact factor of the venue I publish in, the fewer citations I get.
There are a few things worth unpacking on that graph.
First, note the proud cluster on the left margin: publications in venues with impact factor zero (i.e. no impact factor at all). These include papers in new journals like PeerJ, in perfectly respectable established journals like PaleoBios, edited-volume chapters, papers in conference proceedings, and an arXiv preprint.
My most-cited paper, by some distance, is Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals (Taylor et al. 2009, a collaboration between all three SV-POW!sketeers). That appeared in Acta Palaeontologia Polonica, a very well-respected journal in the palaeontology community but which has a modest impact factor of 1.58.
My next most-cited paper, the Brachiosaurus revision (Taylor 2009), is in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology — unquestionably the flagship journal of our discipline, despite its also unspectacular impact factor of 2.21. (For what it’s worth, I seem to recall it was about half that when my paper came out.)
In fact, none of my publications have appeared in venues with an impact factor greater than 2.21, with one trifling exception. That is what Andy Farke, Matt and I ironically refer to as our Nature monograph (Farke et al. 2009). It’s a 250-word letter to the editor on the subject of the Open Dinosaur Project. (It’ a subject that we now find profoundly embarrassing given how dreadfully slowly the project has progressed.)
Google Scholar says that our Nature note has been cited just once. But the truth is even better: that one citation is in fact from an in-prep manuscript that Google has dug up prematurely — one that we ourselves put on Google Docs, as part of the slooow progress of the Open Dinosaur Project. Remove that, and our Nature note has been cited exactly zero times. I am very proud of that record, and will try to preserve it by persuading Andy and Matt to remove the citation from the in-prep paper before we submit. (And please, folks: don’t spoil my record by citing it in your own work!)
What does all this mean? Admittedly, not much. It’s anecdote rather than data, and I’m posting it more because it amuses me than because it’s particularly persuasive. In fact if you remove the anomalous data point that is our Nature monograph, the slope becomes positive — although it’s basically meaningless, given that all my publications cluster in the 0–2.21 range. But then that’s the point: pretty much any data based on impact factors is meaningless.
References
- Farke, Andrew A., Michael P. Taylor and Mathew J. Wedel. 2009. Sharing: public databases combat mistrust and secrecy. Nature 461:1053.
- Lozano, George A., Vincent Larivière and Yves Gingras. 2012. The weakening relationship between the impact factor and papers’ citations in the digital age. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(11):2140-2145. doi:10.1002/asi.22731 [arXiv preprint]
- Taylor, Michael P. 2009. A re-evaluation of Brachiosaurus altithorax Riggs 1903 (Dinosauria, Sauropoda) and its generic separation from Giraffatitan brancai (Janensch 1914). Journal of Vertebrae Paleontology 29(3):787-806.
- Taylor, Michael P., Mathew J. Wedel and Darren Naish. 2009. Head and neck posture in sauropod dinosaurs inferred from extant animals. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 54(2):213-230.
Plagiarism is nothing to do with copyright
September 20, 2013
I was astonished yesterday to read Understanding and addressing research misconduct, written by Linda Lavelle, Elsevier’s General Counsel, and apparently a specialist in publication ethics:
While uncredited text constitutes copyright infringement (plagiarism) in most cases, it is not copyright infringement to use the ideas of another. The amount of text that constitutes plagiarism versus ‘fair use’ is also uncertain — under the copyright law, this is a multi-prong test.
So here (right in the first paragraph of Lavelle’s article) we see copyright infringement equated with plagiarism. And then, for good measure, the confusion is hammered home by the depiction of fair use (a defence against accusations of copyright violation) depicted as a defence against accusations of plagiarism.
This is flatly wrong. Plagiarism and copyright violation are not the same thing. Not even close.
First, plagiarism is a violation of academic norms but not illegal; copyright violation is illegal, but in truth pretty ubiquitous in academia. (Where did you get that PDF?)
Second, plagiarism is an offence against the author, while copyright violation is an offence against the copyright holder. In traditional academic publishing, they are usually not the same person, due to the ubiquity of copyright transfer agreements (CTAs).
Third, plagiarism applies when ideas are copied, whereas copyright violation occurs only when a specific fixed expression (e.g. sequence of words) is copied.
Fourth, avoiding plagiarism is about properly apportioning intellectual credit, whereas copyright is about maintaining revenue streams.
Let’s consider four cases (with good outcomes in green and bad ones in red):
- I copy big chunks of Jeff Wilson’s (2002) sauropod phylogeny paper (which is copyright the Linnean Society of London) and paste it into my own new paper without attribution. This is both plagiarism against Wilson and copyright violation against the Linnean Society.
- I copy big chunks of Wilson’s paper and paste it into mine, attributing it to him. This is not plagiarism, but copyright violation against the Linnean Society.
- I copy big chunks of Rigg’s (1904) Brachiosaurus monograph (which is out of copyright and in the public domain) into my own new paper without attribution. This is plagiarism against Riggs, but not copyright violation.
- I copy big chunks of Rigg’s paper and paste it into mine with attribution. This is neither plagiarism nor copyright violation.
Plagiarism is about the failure to properly attribute the authorship of copied material (whether copies of ideas or of text or images). Copyright violation is about failure to pay for the use of the material.
Which of the two issues you care more about will depend on whether you’re in a situation where intellectual credit or money is more important — in other words, whether you’re an author or a copyright holder. For this reason, researchers tend to care deeply when someone plagiarises their work but to be perfectly happy for people to violate copyright by distributing copies of their papers. Whereas publishers, who have no authorship contribution to defend, care deeply about copyright violation.
One of the great things about the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC By) is that it effectively makes plagiarism illegal. It requires that attribution be maintained as a condition of the licence; so if attribution is absent, the licence does not pertain; which means the plagiariser’s use of the work is not covered by it. And that means it’s copyright violation. It’s a neat bit of legal ju-jitsu.
References
- Riggs, Elmer S. 1904. Structure and relationships of opisthocoelian dinosaurs. Part II, the Brachiosauridae. Field Columbian Museum, Geological Series 2:229-247, plus plates LXXI-LXXV.
- Wilson, Jeffrey A. 2002. Sauropod dinosaur phylogeny: critique and cladistic analysis. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 136:217-276.