[Open-access] Wiley have been caught incorrectly paywalling & selling (Dirk Verdicchio)

Fri Mar 27 12:25:51 UTC 2015

I think there are many different cases and that's the problem. I personally
have observed at least:
* paywalling articles for which an APC has been made for "Open Access"
* re-copyrighting and reselling CC-BY material on an industrial scale
* adding resale rights and charging for material (very common)
* changing the access and re-use rights without author permission (the
current case)

This can be summed up by:

**The mainstream publishing industry frequently violates legal and moral
rights and has take no action to redress this. **

It may be that many of these were not deliberate but in other areas of life
this would still be criminal negligence. IMO it is no longer acceptable to
continue to say this is "a computer glitch", "problems in handing over
journals" or "bumps in the road" (Elsevier's attempt to excuse their
illegal paywalling.)

Because most of these instances individually harm only a small number of
players, any redress would be minimal and often just "putting it right".
IMO this is no longer acceptable. It is a sign of an industry that doesn't
care and knows it can get away with anything.

The formal procedures are:

* alert the industry. This has clearly failed.
* alert the industry bodies (STM publishers, ALPSP). This has also clearly
failed.
* alert the academic community. This has failed.
* alert academic libraries and their organizations. This has failed.
* take it to our elected representatives. I have done this and not got much.
* take it to funders. This has worked in part with Wellcome Trust and
possibly with others. However it only applies when Funders pay for some
form of access.

So we are left with:
* take it to court. This could be trading standards, or class actions.
Others may have different ideas.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, March 27, 2015, 10:56:20 AM, you wrote:
>
> > It surely is NOT legal from a contract perspective. They have accepted
> > APCs from authors in exchange for providing free, unlimited access to
> > the published work, and are not fulfilling their side of the bargain.
>
> And my question was: is this really what has happened in all cases we have
> discussed here?
>
> 1) Obviously, if the publisher I have paid an APC to make my article OA is
> not doing what I paid them for, this should obviously be illegal. If it
> isn't, it ought to be :-)
>
> 2) If an entity other than the one I paid to make my article OA, takes my
> OA article and then sells it, that's a different story to which I wouldn't
> immediately object.
>
> Are all cases revealed here (Elsevier, Wiley, Springer) of type 1? Or were
> there some type 2 cases which I interpreted as being type 1 as the two
> cases were conflated?
>
> 3) Or is there a third case where the same publisher I paid an APC is
> providing two copies, one for free and one for sale?
>
> I'm sorry, but the arguments I hear in this discussion seem to discuss at
> least the first two cases, maybe even case 3, so I'm not really sure what
> is the status of each case any more. Can someone disambiguate this for me?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Bjoern
>
>
>
> --
> Björn Brembs
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurogenetics
> Universität Regensburg
> Germany
>
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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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