Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Elsevier charges to read #openaccess articles « petermr's blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-08-15

Summary:

"I got the following advertising tweet today: 'Elsevier Energy @EnergyJournals Read recent papers published Open Access in Elsevier Energy journals ow.ly/nMNAe #OpenAccess #OA #energy'     I follow the hashtag #openaccess and now many publishers are using this to promote their open access. So I thought I would follow this and see what sort of open access this is. The landing page (http://www.elsevier.com/physical-sciences/energy/open-access-articles) says:    'Elsevier offers the option for authors to sponsor access to individual articles through hundreds of individual journals and via arrangements with funding bodies. These options enable authors to decide how their articles are published and to comply with the requirements of institutions, governments and funding bodies. Sponsored articles are freely available to all readers. Click here for more information. We are delighted to bring you a selection of the sponsored articles published in Elsevier’s Energy Journals to date' ...    The first 2 articles I chose were indeed visible. There was no licence – the rubric was '© Elsevier All rights Reserved.' (So even if they are 'open access' they aren’t re-usable. But then I chose – at random – International Journal of Hydrogen Energy   and started on the table of contents listed on the “open access page” and found these are behind a paywall ... Now I expect it’s an error. But part of Elsevier’s and other publishers arguments is that they claim to add professional quality to publishing and that academics and the world should pay for this. And this was a promotion. Elsevier are saying 'look we are doing Open Access'. And they can’t even get a list of ca. 50 titles correct.  My guess is that they don’t have a proper system internally for deciding what is 'open access'. Last time I asked them for a list of open access articles they said they couldn’t find it. My guess also is that they use 'open access' in several different ways so they can’t create consistent metadata. If they labelled articles as CC-BY – as they should – then this is an easy thing to label. But I have no idea what the actual status of these articles is.  So Elsevier please do Open Access competently. Use CC-BY only, and put it in your metadata. And use it."

Link:

http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.policies oa.licensing oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.fees oa.libre

Date tagged:

08/15/2013, 11:28

Date published:

08/15/2013, 07:28