Open access – the systems journey | Elsevier Connect

"Over the past year, and particularly last week, the integration of our ScienceDirect platform and an external service has raised questions about whether we are charging readers to download open access articles. The articles in question were always freely accessible to readers using our platforms; however a button linking to Rightslink, a service from CCC for ordering reprints and other reuse permissions, was appearing on every article on ScienceDirect. Rather than offering appropriate permissions for different types of articles, the same rights and permissions were offered. In some cases, these permissions were already permitted under the applicable OA licenses.  It has never been our intention to charge for material or rights that should be free. Since last summer, we've been working to enhance our open access metadata and also working with CCC to enable them to ingest and distribute our open access metadata to handle these situations correctly.  We've come to learn, however, that around 50 customers have paid incorrectly to reuse content published under one of the open access licenses we offer. Eleven of the articles were published under a Creative Commons CC-BY license (totaling less than $1,200) and the rest under other CC licenses or the Elsevier User License. The total value of all these orders is under $4,000.  We are happy to make amends as it has never been our intention to charge for material or rights that should be free. This is a problem that should not have arisen, and now that it has, we are taking all possible steps to correct it and recompense those affected. We have begun the process of issuing refunds to these customers, and have also turned these links off for all open access articles on ScienceDirect to ensure that no one else is inadvertently charged for these permissions. We are also working to ensure that none of our other platforms include Rightslink buttons for OA content until we've fully integrated our OA metadata with CCC. Overall, less than 0.15 percent of the rights and permissions orders placed through CCC for our OA content were handled incorrectly ..."