Elsevier Still Charging For Open Access Copies, Two Years After It Was Told Of The Problem | Techdirt

"For some reason, Elsevier seems to take delight in being hated by the academic world. Its support for the awful Research Works Act back in 2012 led to a massive boycott of the company by researchers. More recently, it has cracked down on academics posting PDFs of their own research. Now Peter Murray-Rust, one of the leading campaigners for open access, has caught Elsevier at it again. Here's a good summary of what happened from Mike Taylor, whose post 'If Harry Potter Was An Academic Work' appeared on Techdirt recently: '1. Two years ago, I wrote about how you have to pay to download Elsevier’s "open access" articles. I showed how their open-access articles claimed 'all rights reserved', and how when you use the site's facilities to ask about giving one electronic copy to a student, the price is £10.88. As I summarised at the time: 'Free' means 'we take the author's copyright, all rights are reserved, but you can buy downloads at a 45% discount from what they would otherwise cost.' No-one from Elsevier commented. 2. Eight months ago, Peter Murray-Rust explained that Elsevier charges to read #openaccess articles. He showed how all three of the randomly selected open-access articles he looked at had download fees of $31.50. No-one from Elsevier commented (although see below). 3. A couple of days ago, Peter revisited this issue, and found that Elsevier are still charging THOUSANDS of pounds for CC-BY articles. IMMORAL, UNETHICAL , maybe even ILLEGAL. This time he picked another Elsevier OA article at random, and was quoted £8000 for permission to print 100 copies.' Stung by Murray-Rust's outraged post, the Director of Access and Policy at Elsevier, Alicia Wise, replied as follows: 'As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving the clarity of our OA license labelling (eg on ScienceDirect) and metadata feeds (eg to Rightslink). This is work in progress and should be completed by summer. I am working with the internal team to get a more clear understanding of the detailed plan and key milestones, and will tweet about these in due course.' Although that sounds superficially reasonable, it's not, as Taylor points out, it's not ..."