One little tweet… | Guy's Site

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-12-10

Summary:

"So I thought I had best write up a post about what happened in the latter half of the first week of December 2013. The story begins back in late 2010 when I published a paper in the journal “Infection, Genetics and Evolution” on “Resolving the question of trypanosome monophyly: A comparative genomics approach using whole genome data sets with low taxon sampling” – ScienceDirect. This was a small chapter of my PhD thesis and was drafted around the time I was in completion mode. As many will know, it’s quite a stressful and manic period of time. I, therefore, and also being quite new to the world of publishing, was not completely confident nor knowledgeable. I left the decision of journal choice to the corresponding author. There were reasons for choosing this journal but they’re lost to time. Then not much happened, there have been about seven citations of the article according to Google Scholar. Not bad for my second paper, but it wasn’t my primary area of research. In 2011, charged with updating the website for my new post-doctoral position at The Natural History Museum, London. I and with agreement from my PI, uploaded all papers that we had published (both together and separately), making them available to everyone. For example, the general public (who had in part funded many of our research projects) and other scientists at institutions without access to certain journals due to extremely large access fees. At the same time I decided it would be prudent to update my Academia.edu profile and whilst I was at it, my ResearchGate.net and Mendeley profiles. Why not? I had all the PDFs neatly organised and ready for upload. They were uploaded and then I thought no more of it, more pressing post-doc duties were incoming. Over this time, Open Access and the free accessible nature of scientific research had become more pressing. I noticed it was starting to be discussed in University and Academic institutions, open access publishing funds were set up and institutions started inviting speakers on the subject – I remember Stephen Curry coming to give a very engaging departmental talk on Open Access publication options and trying to impress the importance of this. It was also becoming a larger talking point of several academics that I follow on Twitter, most noticeably Jonathon Eisen – who along with his brother were instrumental in setting up PLoS. None of this really matters, other than to say I had become interested in the topic, agreed with the importance of making research accessible (or what is the point!) but had not become heavily involved or really done any huge in-depth background reading. Anyway. In the very early morning on 6th December – 19 minutes past midnight I received this email ... It was late and I decided to wait till the morning to read it further and to deal with it. Reading the message, it was very clear Academia.edu had received the take-down and had to comply with Elsevier’s strict policy on the posting of published journal articles (here) but they definitely did not agree with Elsevier’s position, the wording is exquisite and included a link to a petition website http://thecostofknowledge.com/ protesting Elsevier’s business practises. Immediately signed.  When I got in to work that Friday morning I did a quick twitter search – I forget what I searched for exactly – to see if anyone else was tweeting about take-down notices. I noticed this tweet from Rafael Maia who also received the same message for one of his papers! ... It is interesting to note that on Academi.edu I have another published journal article from an Elsevier journal. So far there has not been a take-down for this article. Nor have I been contacted by ResearchGate or Mendeley, where exactly the same PDF versions of the paper that Elsevier decided was breaching their rules. I plan to leave them there until / if I am contacted.  Either way as much as I can I will be avoiding Elsevier both for publication and peer review and hopefully impressing on my colleagues to do the same. They say all publicity is good publicity but I really don’t think Elsevier can push a positive spin on their previous conduct nor on their recent conduct. 2800 requests is 2800 pieces of research that have now become inaccessible to the public for no good reason. If one little (open, accessible, free) tweet can generate this amount of interest over a Friday and a weekend then just think how much interest and knowledge you can impart on the world by not publishing with Elsevier and making any articles that you have published with them available and free to access online. Hello Elsevier ... There has been some suggestion on line – I won’t waste electrons with a link – by a few people that 'we open access advocates' are 'oddly surprised'

Link:

http://guy-leonard.co.uk/open-access/one-little-tweet/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.academia.edu oa.versions oa.takedowns oa.advocacy oa.boycotts oa.pledges oa.libre

Date tagged:

12/10/2013, 06:52

Date published:

12/10/2013, 02:01