Open Access News

Peter Murray-Rust, Springer - I resign from your Journal, A Scientist and the Web, July 8, 2007.  Excerpt:

Till today I was a member of the editorial board of Journal of Molecular Modeling · Computational Chemistry - Life Sciences - Advanced Materials - New Methods - published by Springer....

I looked to see what the authors were getting - at least they would get “full open access” - and I could rely on this since Jan Velterop [Springer's Open Access Director] is a signatory of the Budapest Declaration....

I found the overall TOC. This advertises...

Permissions Request To request reuse of content from this Springer Science+Business Media journal, please e-mail Springer Rights & Permissions directly at permissions.heidelberg@springer.com for assistance.This journal is not currently supported for reuse licensing through Rightslink.  Please include content information available on SpringerLink.com (article title, author, date, issn, volume, issue), your request details, your contact information, and a link to the content on SpringerLink if available.

so it is absolutely clear that Springer has no intention of actually making this article Open Access even by their own “Your Research. Your Choice” promise, let alone the BOAI....

So I’m using this blog to resign from the editorial board of JMolMod. I cannot be associated with such practices....

The best that can be said is that Springer don’t care a green fig about Open Choice - they clearly have made no effort to implement it with the care that is required. That’s certainly the impression that most of the large publishers give - they want to be able to say “we offered this choice but hardly anyone wanted to take it up”....

Also see the comments in response.  See especially Jan Velterop's response:

...It is more than a little ironic and sad that the integrity of the one large publisher who is trying to move open access forward is put into doubt, to say it mildly. Is everything perfect? I would be the first to admit that more work has to be done. But does that call for being put in the stocks and having ‘false pretences’, ‘not caring a green fig’, or the rotten eggs of a trashed integrity thrown at you?

First I want to clear up a basic misunderstanding, that open access equals authors keeping copyright. Of course, authors *can* keep their copyright, but *any* copyright holder can make an article open access, and this *includes* the publisher. Having open access articles with the publisher’s copyright is not an oxymoron in the slightest. In fact, as far as Springer Open Choice articles go, it may well still be the majority, and I will explain that in a moment. But open access articles with the publisher’s copyright line on them are *no less* open access than those with the author’s copyright. They are labelled ‘Open Choice’ in SpringerLink (and in their metadata) and they can be used for any non-commercial purpose, according to what Creative Commons licence (the non-commercial one; the one you also use for your blog) and our web site stipulate. This is wholly in line with the definition of open access in the Bethesda Declaration. The ‘permission’ button is a general one that appears on any article and that goes off to RightsLink. It is a flaw that clicking the button didn’t tell you that permissions for non-commercial use of Open Choice articles are not needed, and there were some issues with RightsLink distinguishing the Open Choice articles. Those issues, if they haven’t been solved completely yet, are certainly recognised and will be resolved soon.

There are reasons for not showing an author copyright line on all the Springer Open Choice articles. First of all, the choice is often taken rather late by authors, and the article has already been produced and published when the decision is taken. This is probably a consequence of the fact that we only allow the choice being made after an article has gone through peer-review and has been accepted for publication. This is a way of avoiding that any knowledge that an article would be paid for could lead to inappropriate acceptance decisions. Secondly, not all Open Choice articles have been paid for by authors or their funders, as we have decided ourselves to make article Open Choice in order to track downloads and citations and compare those to other, non-open articles. Thirdly, we have made a few arrangements with universities whereby articles from their researchers have been made Open Choice retrospectively. Just last week, for instance, a thousand or so articles from The Netherlands have been made Open Choice, as a result of just such an arrangement (which provides for Open Choice for all articles from Dutch universities to be Open Choice). Which other major publisher has done anything of the sort?

That said, we do recognise that where authors themselves opt for Open Choice, the copyright line should carry their name, and we are working hard to make sure the procedures we have in place for all of our journals are more robust in making sure that the choice can indeed be made in time for the production of the article....

As for articles being deposited in PubMed Central, we habitually do that if Open Choice is ordered and paid for, and if it is an article that falls within the scope of PMC (obviously civil engineering is not, for instance). Any Open Choice articles, also the ‘complimentary’ ones, can always be deposited in any repository, including PMC....The articles with the label Open Choice’ are fully open, are most definitely *not* “being wrapped in rights management tools to control their use.”

With best wishes, and the hope that you can levy any future criticism in a constructive spirit, without wrapping it in doubts about my — and the company’s — integrity.

Update. The discussion continues on Peter Murray-Rust's blog. I won't be excerpting each new response, but see Peter's July 9 reply to Jan, and Jan's July 10 reply to Peter.

Update. Also see comments by Mark Ware and Matt Hodgkinson.