OpenStreetMap Moves Beyond The Streets, Starts Mapping Amazonia

from the boldly-going dept

OpenStreetMap is fast-emerging as one of the key open projects -- so much so, that proprietary rivals in the world of digital maps are evidently getting worried. Just as the LAMP stack -- GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python -- provided a robust and free foundation for a whole generation of websites a decade and a half ago, so OpenStreetMap is becoming more widely adopted as part of the mobile web, and as geodata grows in importance for a new generation of software applications aimed at users on the move.

Although OpenStreetMap provides better coverage than well-funded commercial rivals in many parts of the world, with important knock-on consequences, there are still some regions where its maps are largely empty. Take Amazonia, for example. OpenStreetMap shows the main rivers, a few towns, and that's about it. Nothing if not ambitious, OpenStreetMap has just announced a new project -- Mapazonia -- which aims to bring its maps here up to the standard of other regions:

The Amazon rainforest includes territory belonging to nine different nations and there are a lot of environmental institutions and governments that need better geospatial data to do their work in that region. Furthermore it's always good to have quality data in case of a natural disaster or other humanitarian issues. In Brazil there aren't many editors in this northern region, so there are a lot of towns without any data and some roads to trace.

As that notes, once completed Mapazonia will be an important tool for environmental organizations -- for example, those seeking to monitor and reduce Amazonian deforestation -- and for humanitarian bodies to use in the event of disasters there. It's a great example of OpenStreetMap stepping in to fill gaps left by commercial offerings that have no interest in mapping vast areas with few people and little business activity. It emphasizes once more that open projects are not just valuable because they are open, but also because their different priorities lead them to tackle problems ignored by those whose primary motivation is profit.

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Filed Under: amazon, amazonia, mapping, open access, open data, open street map
Companies: openstreetmap

Google Pulls Out The Nuclear Option: Shuts Down Google News In Spain Over Ridiculous Copyright Law

from the bad-copyright-policy dept

Back in October, we noted that Spain had passed a ridiculously bad Google News tax, in which it required any news aggregator to pay for snippets and actually went so far as to make it an "inalienable right" to be paid for snippets -- meaning that no one could choose to let any aggregator post snippets for free. Publishers have to charge any aggregator. This is ridiculous and dangerous on many levels. As we noted, it would be deathly for digital commons projects or any sort of open access project, which thrive on making content reusable and encouraging the widespread sharing of such content.

Apparently, it's also deathly for Google News in Spain. A few hours ago, Google announced that due to this law, it was shutting down Google News in Spain, and further that it would be removing all Spanish publications from the rest of Google News. In short, Google went for the nuclear option in the face of a ridiculously bad law:

But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we’ll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. Let me explain why. This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it’s with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain.

Every time there have been attempts to get Google to cough up some money to publishers in this or that country, people (often in our comments) suggest that Google should just "turn off" Google News in those countries. Google has always resisted such calls. Even in the most extreme circumstances, it's just done things like removing complaining publications from Google News, or posting the articles without snippets. In both cases, publishers quickly realized how useful Google News was in driving traffic and capitulated. In this case, though, it's not up to the publishers. It's entirely up to the law.

The reason the law made it an "inalienable right" was to prevent Google from just removing those publishers. Instead, the end result is it got Google to shut down the whole thing, and deprive every Spanish publication not of money, but of traffic -- which may be much more important.

For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that -- creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers’ attention and for advertising Euros increased. We’re committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues.

And the really stupid thing in all this is that, as Google notes, it wasn't even placing ads on Google News in Spain. So it's not even that publishers could claim that Google was "profiting" from driving such traffic to their sites.

So, nice going Spanish politicians. Your new copyright law not only makes you a laughingstock for pushing a ridiculous industry-driven legislation, but you've made life worse off for everyone. Citizens lose an important way to find relevant news. Publishers lose a big traffic driver. Open access and digital commons are now effectively dead in Spain as well. Who has won here?

Even if you're a Google hater who is happy to see a country pass a clearly anti-Google law, there are much bigger issues here, as pointed out by the EFF, which highlights how this law is an attack on the basic right to link:

What concerns EFF more is that these ancillary copyright laws form part of a broader trend of derogation from the right to link. This can be seen when you examine the other parts of the Spanish copyright amendments that take effect in January (here in PDF)—notably placing criminal liability on website operators who refuse to remove mere links to copyright-infringing material.

This year's European Court of Justice ruling against Google Spain on the so-called Right to be Forgotten, is part of the same larger trend, in requiring search engines to remove links to content judged to be “irrelevant”, even if the content is true. We are also disturbed by comments made by new European Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger who has foreshadowed [German] a broader roll-out of ancillary copyright rules throughout the EU.

Online intermediaries may be a convenient scapegoat for the fading fortunes of European newspaper publishers, but banning the use of text snippets alongside website links is a misguided and—now self-evidently—counter-productive approach. Once it becomes illegal for aggregators to freely link news summaries to publicly-available websites, it becomes that much easier for those who want to prohibit other sorts of links, such as links to political YouTube videos, to make their case.

Hopefully politicians in the rest of Europe take notice, before pushing forward with similarly short-sighted attacks on linking and aggregating.

Filed Under: aggregation, ancillary copyright, copyright, google news, linking, open access, spain
Companies: google

Bill Gates Evidently Gets Open Access And Open Data: So What About Open Source?

from the baby-steps dept

One of most important ways of helping to promote open access is for major research organizations to make it a condition of their funding. Two of the pioneers in this respect were the Wellcome Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which made open access a requirement in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Here's another major funder joining the open access club:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to information sharing and transparency. We believe that published research resulting from our funding should be promptly and broadly disseminated. We have adopted an Open Access policy that enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded, in whole or in part, by the foundation, including any underlying data sets.

Specifically, the CC-BY license, one of the most open, has been adopted:

All publications shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic License (CC BY 4.0) or an equivalent license. This will permit all users of the publication to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and transform and build upon the material, including for any purpose (including commercial) without further permission or fees being required.

Now, this is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation making this announcement, not Bill Gates, but it's hard to believe he doesn't know about and approve of the move. After all, it represents a very high-profile boost for the idea that making things freely available for anyone to "transform and build upon" is better than locking things up so that neither of those is possible. So the natural question is: when will Gates admit the same is true for software too?

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Filed Under: bill gates, education, knowledge, open access, open source, research
Companies: gates foundation

French Government Takes 172 Million Euros From Citizens To Pay Publisher For Access To Research Public Already Paid For Once

from the and-slashes-public-education-funding-on-top-of-it dept

It's all about priorities. Those providing the valuable research will have to learn to do without because the publishers must be paid.

France may not have any money left for its universities but it does have money for academic publishers. While university presidents learn that their funding is to be reduced by EUR 400 million, the Ministry of Research has decided, under great secrecy, to pay EUR 172 million to the world leader in scientific publishing Elsevier.

If the name Elsevier rings a bell, it's because the academic publishing giant has dragged its own dubious reputation through the mud with alarming frequency over the past several years. It has charged for access to open-access documents, despite being repeatedly informed of this "oversight" in its purchasing system. At one point it had a division dedicated to cranking out fake medical journals for use by pharmaceutical companies to buttress iffy claims about medicinal effectiveness. It was also engaged in ghostwriting copy for these same companies in order to downplay disagreeable research findings. It has also routinely targeted researchers who have posted copies of their own work on personal sites or to freely-accessible university online libraries.

As the Open Knowledge Foundation points out, France is paying multiple times for the same documents -- documents created for "free" by university researchers who don't see a cent of Elsevier's profits.

The scientific publishing market is an unusual sector, those who create value are never remunerated. Instead, they often pay to see their work published. Authors do not receive any direct financial gain from their articles, and the peer review is conducted voluntarily. This enormous amount of work is indirectly funded by public money. Writing articles and participating in peer review are part of the expected activities of researchers, expected activities that lead to further research funding from the taxpayer.

So, in response to demands from Elsevier, France is cutting the financing that generates the research locked up by academic publishers and increasing its contributions to a company that enjoys a 30-40% profit margin on documents it is often paid (by researchers) to resell.

This published research was mainly financed by public funds. Therefore in the end, we will have paid to Elsevier twice: once to publish, a second time to read.

When the Open Access Foundation says "we," it means French citizens. And despite being double-dipped by their government, a large majority of French citizens will still have no access to the research locked up by Elsevier. Publicly-funded research resides behind the publisher's paywall, limited to certain people within the 476 institutions included in the agreement. While Elsevier did offer the French government a "discount" of nearly 16 million EUR, this price cut is due to the withdrawal of over 150 institutions from Elsevier's licensing scheme.

That's a lot of money being spent to benefit only a small percentage of French citizens. And, as the article points out, it's only one of several similar agreements with other academic publishers. These closed markets provide for constantly increasing prices, even as digital storage and distribution continue to decrease costs. And let's not forget the fact that those creating these works are also paying to have them included in academic publishers' libraries, often giving up control of their copyright for an extended period of time.

Sooner or later, the system will collapse under its own weight. Slashing funding to universities negatively affects the creation of the very documents Elsevier needs to sustain its position in the marketplace. You can't continue to rob one to pay for the other, at least not forever. Publisher reaction to declining participation has generally been to increase rates -- another unsustainable pattern. But until it all falls apart, publishers will continue to do all they can to separate the public from research it already paid for once… and erect a paywall to ensure they still can't access it even after paying for it again.

Filed Under: france, open access, priorities, research

The Open Science Peer Review Oath

from the transparent,-reproducible-and-responsible dept

Open access is about making academic research more widely available, particularly when it is publicly funded. But there is a broader open science movement that seeks to make the entire scientific process -- from initial experiments to the final dissemination of results -- transparent, and thus reproducible. One crucial aspect of that complete process is peer review, whereby experts in a field provide advice about the quality of new research, either to editors prior to a paper being published in a journal, or more directly, by reviewing work publicly online. Recognizing the importance of this step for the integrity and validity of the scientific process, a group has drawn up what it calls the "Open Science Peer Review Oath":

We have formulated an oath that codifies the role of reviewers in helping to ensure that the science they review is sufficiently open and reproducible; it includes guidelines not just on how to review professionally, but also on how to support transparent, reproducible and responsible research, while optimising its societal impact and maximising its visibility.

The Oath's 17 components include commitments to act fairly and ethically, for example, the following:

While reviewing this manuscript:

i) I will sign my review in order to be able to have an open dialogue with you

ii) I will be honest at all times

v) I will not unduly delay the review process

vi) I will not scoop research that I had not planned to do before reading the manuscript

vii) I will be constructive in my criticism

x) I will try to assist in every way I ethically can to provide criticism and praise that is valid, relevant and cognisant of community norms

It also includes actions specifically designed to foster science that is truly open:

xi) I will encourage the application of any other open science best practices relevant to my field that would support transparency, reproducibility, re-use and integrity of your research

xiii) I will check that the data, software code and digital object identifiers are correct, and the models presented are archived, referenced, and accessible

xiv) I will comment on how well you have achieved transparency, in terms of materials and methodology, data and code access, versioning, algorithms, software parameters and standards, such that your experiments can be repeated independently

xv) I will encourage deposition with long-term unrestricted access to the data that underpin the published concept, towards transparency and re-use

xvi) I will encourage central long-term unrestricted access to any software code and support documentation that underpin the published concept, both for reproducibility of results and software availability

Although the framing of an "Oath" for open science peer review may sound rather over the top -- slightly pompous, even -- it rightly underlines the seriousness with which peer review ought to be conducted. It remains to be seen what kind of response it receives from the wider scientific community, and whether it becomes a fixed element of the open science movement.

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Filed Under: knowledge, open access, open sciencie, peer review, sharing

Open Licenses And Freedom Of Panorama Recognized In Russian Law

from the good-news-for-a-change dept

Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of dismal news coming out of Russia, chronicling its increasing clampdown on the Internet, so it's great to hear about something extremely positive happening there. The Wikimedia blog reports on some important changes to Russia's Civil Code, including the following:

Open licenses introduced.

The new law directly recognizes free licenses (which are fundamental for projects like Wikipedia or Linux). The authors of free content will be able to have legal protection from misuse of their works.

Freedom of panorama introduced.

Now it is allowed to take photos in any public territory. The photographers are no more formally offenders, as before when nobody was allowed to sell postcards with modern buildings without the permission of the architect or his successors (despite the fact that such situation was quite usual in practice). Unfortunately, monuments are still not covered by the introduced amendments.

As the Wikimedia blog post points out, the first of these is crucially important for Wikipedia and free software projects, both of which have existed in a kind of legal limbo until this latest move. That's probably meant that some Russian software companies have been unwilling to embrace licenses like the GNU GPL for their code for fear that it would be unprotected under local law. According to Wikimedia's Russian director, Vladimir Medeyko, the new provisions even go beyond what is found elsewhere:

The direct inclusion of the stipulations on the free licenses into the law is a progressive step not only for Russia, but worldwide. There are no specific articles on free licenses in other countries' laws, and hence these licenses are still in a grey area there. Actually, free licenses exploit the archaic tercentenary system of copyright, that always limited the readers' freedoms in order to allow the authors and the publishers to earn money, for the opposite goal -- to protect the readers' right to free access. Therefore, without direct regulation, there is too vast judicial discretion, and free licenses users are not protected perfectly. In the Russian law there are no uncertainties like that anymore.

Freedom of panorama refers to the right to take photos or videos of public spaces. As an interesting Wikipedia page indicates, this right is by no means universal, and so Russia is a welcome addition to the group of nations that do offer freedom of panorama in at least some form. The move is also a reminder that steady work by dedicated experts can achieve important results even against a retrogressive legal background.

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Filed Under: copyright, freedom of panorama, internet, licenses, open, open access, russia

Another Reason For Moving To Open Access: Encouraging Scientific Debates

from the it's-good-to-share dept

Techdirt has written often enough about how copyright is used to censor criticism. QuestionCopyright.org has an interesting post that offers a variation on that theme: copyright getting in the way of a scientific debate.

A band of researchers has been tirelessly trying to demonstrate that a body of scientific work which rests on a paper from over 10 years ago is completely wrong. The only problem is, their argument isn't being allowed to stand or fall on its merits -- instead, copyright restrictions are interfering with their ability to make their case at all.

The issue is that in order to make their case, the researchers need to re-use figures from one of the papers they are questioning. Unfortunately, fair use doesn't necessarily help here, because the journal publishing their new paper, Public Library of Science (PLOS) ONE, uses the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license for all its material. Fair use cannot be used to change the license under which the images are released -- only the copyright holders can do that, which means the latter are effectively able to block their republication in PLOS ONE:

[The publisher] Wiley has responded ... saying that while they'll allow re-use with no fee under standard copyright, they won't simply relicense the images to be compatible with PLOS ONE's non-restrictive distribution policy. (What Wiley actually says is that they are "unable to change [the images'] copyright status", which is simply false.) It isn't yet clear how this will be resolved. Offering the image at no fee for this one use is not a particularly helpful move on Wiley's part: the restrictions would still be quite onerous, because Wiley's one-off exception would not be passed along to PLOS ONE's readers — instead, they too would have to ask Wiley for permission if they wanted to use the figures in a scientific critique... and so on, ad infinitum.

But over on the Scholary Communications blog at Duke University, Kevin Smith doesn't think that's the case:

the claim that you cannot include material used as fair use in a CC-licensed article is bogus. In fact, it happens all the time. I simply do not believe that no one who publishes in PLoS journals ever quotes from the text of a prior publication; the ubiquitous academic quotation, of course, is the most common form of fair use, and I am sure PLoS publishes CC-licensed articles that rely on that form of fair use every day. The irony of this situation is that it points out that PLoS is applying a standard to imagery that it clearly does not apply to text. But that differential treatment is not called for by the law or by CC licenses; fair use is equally possible for figures, illustrations and text from prior work, and the CC licenses do not exclude reliance on such fair uses.

The solution, he suggests, is the following:

I think there is a way forward here, which is for PLoS to agree to publish the article with all of the borrowings under fair use or by permission clearly marked, just as they would do if those borrowings were all in the form of textual quotations.

Others -- including PLOS -- may disagree. In any case, what this episode highlights is that bridging the two worlds -- journals published under traditional licenses, and those using ones from Creative Commons -- is not straightforward. Relying on fair use as Smith suggests may not be an acceptable solution for some researchers wishing to publish in open access titles, since they might be unhappy about the lack of legal certainty. With open access, that's simply not an issue, since the license is explicitly designed to allow sharing -- and thus healthy scientific debate -- as a matter of course.

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Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, debate, fair use, open access, science

Respected Medical Journal Sold To Scammers Willing To Publish Anything... For A Fee

from the nice-business-if-you-can-find-it dept

We've talked in the past about the ridiculous nature of the academic publishing world these days, which involve a variety of questionable tactics mostly focused on (1) predatorily preying on those who "need" to be published, (2) enabling researchers (and sometimes large companies) to whitewash shoddy research by "publishing" it for a fee, and (3) making the "publishers" filthy stinking rich despite doing no actual work. The problem is that, while much of this is scammy, the line between fraudulent practices and more "legitimate" practices are pretty damn blurry. After all, when you have "legitimate" names like the American Psychological Association trying to charge $2,500 to "deposit" newly published papers with PubMed (as required to do for NIH funded papers) or publishing giant Elsevier having an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals paid for by giant pharmaceutical companies promoting their drugs, sometimes it's tough to tell who's legit and who's the out and out swindler.

But, there's definitely been a flood of "predatory" publishers lately, who will basically offer to publish absolutely anything for a fee. This has resulted in some amusing stories of purely gibberish papers getting published as "legit" (that link points to a paper that directly claimed in its own text that it was a fraud and also widely quoted My Cousin Vinny). There are reports of such gibberish papers flooding academia, sometimes in attempts to highlight how lax publishers are, and what a giant scam all of this is.

The Ottawa Citizen has a story highlighting yet another twist and turn in this ongoing battle of bogosity in academic research, involving sketchy people stepping in to buy a formerly respected journal and turning it into a pure pay-to-play publication willing to publish absolute gibberish (which the Ottawa Citizen tested and easily proved). The Ottawa Citizen was turned onto the story by Jeffrey Beall, author of Scholarly Open Access, a site that chronicles predatory publishing scams, and who was last mentioned on these pages after being threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit and "criminal charges" for outing a predatory publisher based in India.

In this case, the Experimental & Clinical Cardiology journal had been a widely respected publication covering research on (you guessed it) experimental and clinical cardiology. However, last year it got sold to some unknown folks who appear to have turned it into a pure gibberish publishing enterprise -- so long as you can pay the $1,200 fee. In other words, the new publishers are trading on the old reputation of the journal, now allowing it to publish junk science or nonsensical rantings. Here's how Tom Spears at the Ottawa Citizen tested it out:

To test the journal, the Citizen sent in an outrageously bad manuscript. The title is a hodgepodge of medical-sounding words adding up to nothing: “VEGF proliferation in cardiac cells contributes to vascular declension.”

For the rest we plagiarized a study on HIV but replaced “HIV” with the word “cardiac” throughout, to make it look (sort of) like cardiology. But it wouldn’t impress anyone who knows the subject.

We submitted detailed captions for graphs — but there are no graphs.

In case you're wondering, Spears notes that "declension" is not a medical word. "It means a group of nouns in Latin that behave the same way." And, it appears that other articles in the same journal have gone through a similar level of review (i.e., none, so long as the check clears):

This is paying off spectacularly. Experimental & Clinical Cardiology published 142 articles in July alone, worth a total of $170,000 U.S. for one month. It operates online only and doesn’t bother with editing, so it has almost no costs.

The result is sloppy, or worse. Some articles are called “Enter Paper Title” — the layout instructions instead of the intended title. One is filled with visible paragraph markers (¶). Some authors’ names are missing.

The academic publishing world is already massively profitable, and with that it appears that the scammers have jumped in and are abusing the system to make money. Of course, the "legit" publishers made this quite easy in the first place, and now it appears that there are opportunities to jump in by using previously respected journal brand reputations as part of furthering these kinds of predatory practices.

Filed Under: academic publishing, experimental & clinical cardiology, gibberish research, journals, open access, pay to publish, predatory publishing

Spain's Ill-Conceived 'Google Tax' Law Likely To Cause Immense Damage To Digital Commons And Open Access

from the digital-cluelessness dept

Techdirt recently wrote about Spain's imminent and almost unbelievably foolish new copyright law designed to prop up old and failing business models in the publishing sector. Mike mentioned that it was potentially disastrous for things like fair use, Creative Commons and public domain material -- so broad is the reach of this new law's "inalienable right" for publishers to be paid when snippets of works appear elsewhere. Now Paul Keller has put together a great post on Communia's blog exploring the details of this particular threat:

The law creates a right for 'electronic content aggregation providers' to use 'non-significant fragments of aggregated content which are disclosed in periodic publications or on websites which are regularly updated' without the permission of the rights holder. However such uses require payment of a 'fair remuneration' to the rights holder (via a collecting society). This is a right that content providers already have and can choose to license or waive assuming the non-significant fragments are copyrightable and absent an applicable exception or limitation. What this new legislation does is eliminate the ability of providers to choose how to exercise this right, and impose a mandatory royalty on reusers even for content that has been made available under a public license such as Creative Commons or that is otherwise available under an exception to copyright or in the public domain.

It's that last fact -- that the mandatory royalty can't be turned off, even for works released under Creative Commons licenses that are explicitly designed to encourage payment-free sharing -- which is so disturbing. It threatens to undermine not only Creative Commons licenses by negating one of their key features, but also the central feature of a digital commons -- that anyone can draw upon it freely in order to create new works that are then returned to an enriched commons for the benefit of all.

I can't believe even the Spanish legislators who put together this misguided law really intended this attack on the Creative Commons world, but that simply suggests they are largely clueless about how the digital world and its commons operate. That's confirmed by another post on this topic, this time from Renata Avila, writing for Global Voices. She explores the likely impact of this new law on another uniquely-digital phenomenon -- open access publishing:

The current reform of Spain's copyright law incorporates a new levy on universities that is related to open access to publications. Under the policy, universities that want to share research or other content for free will be prohibited from doing so beyond the confines of their institution and personnel. In other words, if you are an author from a university and you want to share beyond the academic world and someone links to your journal article, that person must pay even if you do not even want the payment. A percentage of these fees will be collected by the Spanish agency CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos) and the virtual campuses of universities will be required to comply.

The new law's provisions thus negate the whole point of open access, which is to facilitate the free sharing of academic materials on a global scale so as to accelerate research and its benefits.

That's naturally a tragedy for the researchers who want to share their work so that others can build on it, but it's also a tragedy for Spanish society. If this law is passed, it means two of greatest benefits arising from the widespread use of the Internet -- the creation of a digital commons that can be shared by all, and the wider dissemination of knowledge thanks to open access -- will be seriously harmed. As a consequence, gifted entrepreneurs and academics in Spain are likely to move to other countries with a greater understanding of these matters, helping to drive innovation and intellectual discovery there instead, while Spain may well find itself turning into a digital backwater.

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Filed Under: copyright, digital commons, google news, google tax, inalienable right, open access, snippets, spain
Companies: google

Academic Publisher Fights Publication Of Paper Criticizing Publishers' Price Increases And Profits

from the the-first-rule-of-price-gouging... dept

The world of academic publishing is highly profitable -- and, apparently, highly sustainable. There's no shortage of content seeking publication as researchers, professors, etc. seek to have their work published and cited. Handing even more power over to publishers by linking publication with tenure, universities have sabotaged their own interests by giving academic publishers every reason to increase subscription rates.

It's not as though this has gone unnoticed. Backlash against exorbitant access fees withholding publicly-funded research from the public led to a boycott of Elsevier unless it withdrew its support of the Research Works Act, which sought to lock up even more academic works. Though more than 30,000 scientists joined the boycott (and Elsevier withdrew its support of the Act), little has changed in the academic publishing world.

A group of UK academics tried to bring this debate to the publishers last year via a proposition paper that criticized the steadily increasing prices of publications, only to have it stonewalled and censored by academic publisher Taylor & Francis.

A journal's editorial board has been left on the brink of resignation after an eight-month standoff with its publisher Taylor & Francis over the publication of a debate on academic publishing and the profits made by major firms.

The debate, in the journal Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, was due to appear last September, but was delayed by Taylor & Francis and published only at the end of last month.

Its “proposition” paper, “Publisher, be damned! from price gouging to the open road”, by four academics from the University of Leicester's School of Management, criticises the large profits made by commercial publishers on the back of academics' labours, and the failure of the Finch report on open access to address them.

The full paper is embedded below and, as you can see, Taylor & Francis have helpfully time-stamped it with my IP address.

The paper compares publishers with the music industry, noting that the latter saw surging sales once it began pricing its offerings more realistically. It also posits that less strenuous infringement countermeasures could help push prices down. But most damningly, it examines the rates charged by publishers, comparing those of for-profit entities with those of non-profits.

What has been characterised as rampant price inflation is one characteristic of the market in academic journals – or at least those journals published by commercial publishers – with several studies since 2000 indicating rapidly increasing prices charged by for-profit publishers (Bergstrom, 2001; Bergstrom and Bergstrom, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007; Harvie et al., 2012). Bergstrom and Bergstrom (2004) suggest that a journal page published by a for-profit publisher is between three and five times more expensive than one published by a not-for-profit publisher. One factor driving increasing prices is journal reputation (Bergstrom, 2001) – but this leads to increasing profit margins (McCabe, 2004). In short, widely-cited journals are perceived to be higher quality, which allows for-profit publishers to charge higher prices for such journals; if widely-cited and more highly-priced journals also enjoy higher circulation (because they are widely-cited), then publishers also benefit through lower average production costs (McCabe, 2004; Dewatripont et al., 2007).

The more widely-cited a journal is, the more likely it is to be published on a larger-scale (reducing costs) and the more desirable it is as a destination for submissions (lowering costs yet again). With this desirability comes the privilege of increasing prices, something for-profit publishers aren't exactly shy about doing.

But this generates expenses for other entities who aren't part of this self-sustaining feedback loop, often causing them to cannibalize related services to the detriment of the schools themselves.

Since 1999, spending on books has fallen by almost a fifth in real terms, and from almost 12 per cent of libraries' total spending to just over 8 per cent. Expenditure on serials, on the other hand, has increased sharply: from just under £70 million to over £130 million. In real terms this represents an increase of 63 per cent; journals' share of total library spending rose from 16 per cent to almost 20 per cent. (Harvie et al., 2012, p.910)

Needless to say, Taylor & Francis wasn't interested in publishing a critique of its business model. So, it stalled the publication of this article for several months. (It was originally due to be published September 2013.)

The journal's general editor, Stuart Macdonald, a visiting professor of economics at Aalto University in Finland, said the non-appearance of the journal in September was followed, two months later, by a letter from a senior manager at Taylor & Francis demanding that more than half of the proposition article be cut.

“They never said why. They just said they didn't want this debate to take place,” Professor Macdonald said. “They also said I should have got their approval before inviting debate papers, but I have never done that before and it seems quite improper.”

He said matters came to a head at a “very unpleasant” meeting in January, when the journal’s editorial board threatened to resign en masse unless Taylor & Francis backed down.

This threat forced a half-assed capitulation from Taylor & Francis. It agreed to publish the paper but imposed several limitations. First, it stripped publishers' names from the paper and the four responses. Then, when it finally cleared it to run, it appended this footnote to the first page.

Disclaimer: Opinions and views expressed in this article (the Proposition) are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the content of this article. Any opinions and views expressed in this article are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the article should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information.

An editorial published alongside the paper further highlights the questionable activity surrounding the (eventual) publication of the piece.

The academic publishing industry, as in the Prometheus debate on open access, has previously been happy to throw itself into the fray. Not so on this occasion. Many, many individuals working in the industry were invited to respond to the Proposition paper; not a one felt able to accept. It was made all too clear that the industry was in no mood for this debate. Indeed, at one time the editors were asked to excise the major part of the Proposition paper. Our refusal and ensuing negotiations explain why this debate was not published as intended in September 2013, and why no issue of Prometheus has appeared since.

The editorial, written by Professor Stuart Macdonald, also calls into question the publisher's decision to act as an editor.

But are academic publishers intruding in the editorial role? For example, without reference to any editor, the names of all academic publishers have been expunged from the Response papers in this issue. Institutional anonymity is already a custom in management studies, one that has done little for the standing of the subject. It would be unfortunate were it to spread throughout the social sciences, driving academic research from the empirical to the theoretical and abstract.

This isn't the first time an academic publisher has blocked publication because of subject matter, but this is usually due to outside forces, like the demands of corporations. In this case, however, it was an inside job. Not only did Taylor & Francis do all it could to prevent a discussion about its practices, but it also had a detrimental affect on other submissions. As MacDonald notes, he withheld other issues of the journal that were awaiting publication because he believed Taylor & Francis would give those preference over the problematic proposition paper. This has resulted in a backlog of papers awaiting publication, one that doesn't look to be eased any time soon.

With the trust between the publisher and the editors effectively destroyed by Taylor & Francis' actions, other options are being explored, including branching off into self-publishing. Unfortunately, any other routes taken will do very little to impact the publisher, or make it reconsider further transparently self-interested moves in the future.

Filed Under: academic publishing, copyright, open access, publishing
Companies: taylor and francis