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

[Jan Velterop]

For a 'gold' CC-BY article, the original publisher is morally and legally obliged to ensure perpetual open access. Anybody else can sell a CC-BY article. Although it's unethical and immoral to hide its CC-BY status at the point of sale. 

Did I gather that Wiley wasn't the original publisher (of at least some of these examples)? If they took over the original publisher, that should have included their legal open access obligations. If they didn't, and just made the articles available on their own site at a price -- which is legal -- then they are only to blame if they hid the open access status and availability of an open access version of the article before taking payment. That would be a serious offence in many jurisdictions, beyond just morally indefensible. 

They could redeem themselves by immediately stopping the practice and getting a refund to anyone who bought any of these articles, without further ado or form-filling demands and the like. 

Jan Velterop


Sent from Jan Velterop's iPhone. Please excuse for brevity and typos. 

> On 27 Mar 2015, at 11:55, 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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