Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Elsevier replies in part: “systems issues are inevitable” « petermr's blog

"Elsevier has replied (italics) to my blog post http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2013/08/14/elsevier-charges-3000-usd-apc-and-then-retains-all-rights-is-this-openaccess-no-they-then-put-it-behind-paywall-32-usd/ and addressed one of the problems I reported ... 'Dear Peter, Thank you for pointing out these concerns. It’s a good thing to have someone so focused on pointing issues out for us, though the immediate assumption of the worst is not entirely helpful. I did not “assume the worst'. I wrote: 'Elsevier don’t seem care very much about honouring agreements they make with authors and/or they aren’t very competent at publishing. If you take 3000USD of someone and contract to apply one of three licences then you have a legal requirement to do so.'  I contend that any organization which exacts such a high fee from a customer has a duty of care above what you have shown. 'As you know the infrastructure underpinning publishing is considerable, and has evolved over a very long period of time with the scholarly communication system itself. We readily acknowledged the large scale of change and investment in this infrastructure that is required to support new open access business models, and we readily acknowledge that systems issues are inevitable.'  I do not accept that failures in public offerings such as the ones that I have encountered are 'inevitable'. You promoted a list of a relatively few Open Access journals to the world and failed to check that they worked properly. The very fact that I have discovered at least three independent issues in half a day suggests that you did no user testing of the Open Access licensing issue. Saying that’s it’s a big task is no excuse – you have billions in revenue that should be used to get things right. We have teams in place proactively planning system enhancements, and we work hard to repair errors as they occur. Nevertheless, it is useful to be alerted to problems and concerns so that we are able to address these. It is far better to test the systems before release ..."