Today, the author of a paid-for, ‘hybrid’ open access article published in 2009, found that it was wrongly on sale at a Springer website:
Why is my Open Access paper http://t.co/z9civKYuCf for sale at @SpringerLink ($39.95)? http://t.co/tZLfn8eudQ
— Luis A. Apiolaza (@zentree) April 27, 2015
FWIW it’s still freely available at the original publisher website here.
To test if Springer really were just brazenly selling a copy of the exact same open access article, I paid Springer to access a copy myself (screenshot below) and found it was exactly the same:
I don’t actually care whether this is technically ‘legal’ any more. That doesn’t matter. This is scammy publishing. I want a refund and I will be contacting Springer shortly to ask for this. The author also hopes I get a refund – he wanted his article be open access, not available for a ransom:
@rmounce @noamross Should I expect some royalties from the sale of my Open Access paper? ;-) I hope you ask for & receive a refund!
— Luis A. Apiolaza (@zentree) April 27, 2015
Frankly, I’m getting tired of writing these blog posts, but it needs to be done to record what happened, because it keeps on happening.
I really think we need to setup a PaywallWatch.com c.f. RetractionWatch.com to monitor and report on these types of incidents. It’s clear the publishers don’t care about this issue themselves – they get extra money from readers by making these ‘mistakes’ and no financial penalty if anyone does spot these mistakes. Calculated indifference.
Are these known incidences just the tip of the iceberg? How do we know this isn’t happening at a greater scale, unobserved? There are more than 50 million research articles on sale at the moment. Perhaps in small part this explains the obscene profits of the legacy publishers?
It’s yet another nail in the coffin for hybrid OA – we simply can’t trust these publishers to keep this content open and paywall-free.
A recap of recent incidents of selling open access articles, without the publisher acknowledging to the reader/buyer that it is an open access article:
Springer (April, 2015) this post
Wiley (March, 2015) link
Elsevier (March, 2015) link
Elsevier (2014) link
