A Rant on Strawberries, Open Access Licenses, and the Reuse of Published Papers | C.W. Schadt | ORNL-UTK Microbial Ecology Lab

The open access movement in scientific publishing had almost fully converted me.  I have been moving towards publishing more of my work in open access journals for several reasons.  1) The idealist in me likes the fact that anyone, anywhere, anytime can download and read my work free of charge.  Thus likely increasing public/layperson access as well as that of scientists and institutions in the developing world that might not be able to afford access otherwise. 2) The pragmatist in me has noticed than when I add up the open access fee vs. page charges and color figure charges, etc. in traditional journals, they are not all that different. For the most part any small difference there may be will likely be affordable by my research budgets. Im still ready to make the move towards putting most of my papers in open access journals. I even recently signed up as an editor for the an open access journal (BMC Microbiology).  However in the last couple of weeks at least certain aspects, that primarily have to do with reuse of published papers, have come the fore that bother me. Anyway, here’s the story. A few years ago I had the opportunity to host a Ph.D student from Washington State University while she worked in my lab on the analysis of some soil microbial community data derived from organic and conventionally grown strawberry fields.  Long and short of it was we ended up with two pretty good papers out of the work, one describing the overall study in PLoS One (open access from Public Library of Science) and another more focused on the microbial community part in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal (from Nature Publishing Group, which features a moving paywall so older articles become free after a year or so).  The PLoS One paper made a bit of a splash, primarily among organic agriculture advocates ... Most open access journals also seem to have an open reuse policy vs. traditional journal where you must get the permission of both the authors and journal publisher to reuse the material (whether it’s just one figure or the whole paper).  I guess I assumed that by paying the open access fee we retained the ability to say yay or nay to reuse (or at least be notified).  Much to my surprise, that is not the case in many open access journals I recently checked out.  Both BMC Microbiology and PLoS one use a version of the same policy from the Creative Commons for example.  This is where the story converges, I promise.  While browsing through my Google Scholar profile page recently I noted this rather strangely formatted entry that features author names where the title should be.  Turns out this  links to a chapter in a recently published book titled Sustainable Soil Management 'edited' by Deirdre Rooney and published by Apple Academic Press – CRC Press – Taylor Francis.  Actually I think Apple is the 'original' publisher of the book and CRC/Taylor Francis are just distributors, but they are hopelessly inter-tangled so I’m not sure.  Judging by what I can see for free on the Google Books preview, this turns out to be just a lightly reformatted and retitled version of our PLoS One paper.  Not really much editing involved in the traditional sense of the word.  Here is what really irks me about this.  1) Neither I nor the corresponding author had any idea this had been (re)published until after the fact.  Had to run across it on Google like everyone else.  A simple email from the 'editor' or 'publisher' would have been nice to let us know that they loved our paper so much they wanted to disseminate it in this book.  2) The publishers are charging over $100 for this book.  This, when we already paid when we published this paper to make it freely available!  Not only are we not getting any kickback on this, I was not even sent a complimentary copy as is traditional when you publish in a book! 3) Maybe all the above would be OK if the book just did one thing.  Prominently state (maybe on the 1st page of the chapter and the table of contents) that this is a reprint from the PLoS One paper and cite/link the paper.  This would seem to actually be a requirement of the Creative Commons license linked above (however this is vague and open to various interpretations). Credit in the form of a citation is really the only thing I hope for in a