Elsevier admits it has been mis-selling Open Access and will be contacting mis-sold customers « petermr's blog
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-03-18
Summary:
"Elsevier’s Director of Access and Policy (was “Universal Access”) has commented on my blog posts ... 'We appreciate your concerns about this matter, and I can assure you that Elsevier is taking the issues you have raised seriously and that we are working as diligently as possible to have these resolved. Some elements we were able to address in short order last week, including disabling the links from open access content on ScienceDirect to Rightslink. Please also note that we rapidly committed to reimburse anyone who has made an unnecessary payment. We have completed the investigation for open access content published by us under a CC-BY license and there appear to be 11 customers who may have been impacted and to whom we will reach out in the coming days. We need a little more time to look into other license types. We’re currently working on a more complete and official update that will reaffirm our commitment to this shared journey to implement the UK government’s OA policy, while noting that there will be some bumps on the road. But rest assured we take smoothing these out very seriously' ... This confirms that Elsevier has been mis-selling Open Access products. The DoAP does not give sufficient detail to say exactly what so I don’t regard this reply as satisfactory. Given also that part of the problem appears to be a seriously broken IT infrastructure it cannot be accurate to use it to find problems. It is unclear whether the 11 customers were authors with mispublished articles or purchasers of rights through Rightslink. This problem is of similar seriousness to faulty electrical goods where responsible companies will advertise in the national press ..."