Open access frustration more powerful than principles

I give up. No, Elsevier, I am not going to give you $3000. Principles be damned.

Dear Dr Redfield,

Thank you for your reply.

A purchase order is for your benefit only, Elsevier do not require one, please see below link:

http://epsupport.elsevier.com/article.aspx?article=1296&p=3

Elsevier accept 3 methods of payment, please see below link:

http://epsupport.elsevier.com/article.aspx?article=1718&p=3

As previously advised your article can be made available via open access, however you must cover the cost of USD$3,000.

Please confirm if you wish to proceed, I will update our system and send the forms for invoicing.

Elsevier Support Person

The saga continues...

Reply from the Elsevier Support Person:

Dear Dr Redfield,

Thank you for your reply and apologies for any confusion caused.

Elsevier has established agreements and developed policies to allow Authors who publish in Elsevier journals to comply with the manuscript archiving requirements of funding bodies, as specified as conditions of researcher grant awards, the below is a list of these:

Arthritis Research Campaign (UK)
British Heart Foundation (UK)
Cancer Research (UK)
Chief Scientist Office
Department of Health (UK)
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
Medical Research Council (UK)
National Institute of Health (US)
Wellcome Trust (UK)

As mentioned on the below link:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/sponsoredarticles

More than 40 journals published by Elsevier offer authors the option to sponsor non-subscriber access to individual articles. The charge for article sponsorship is $3,000. This charge is necessary to offset publishing costs.

The funding body you mention must agree to cover this cost with you, as the author you are liable for this payment, as Elsevier do not have an agreement with them.

I hope this now makes sense. The funding body you mention can cover the cost however the payment must come from you as the author of the article.

Sincerely,

Elsevier Support Person

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Dear Elsevier Support Person,

I still don't understand. Are you saying that, because Elsevier does not have an explicit agreement with CIHR, you will not accept a UBC purchase order based on a CIHR-funded grant?

My grant budget explicitly included a line item for open-access publication charges; this was not questioned when the application was approved. If I obtain written confirmation from CIHR that the charge is allowed, will you then accept the purchase order?

If not, what forms of payment will you accept? A bank draft drawn on my personal chequeing account? A charge to my personal MasterCard? A charge to my Institutional MasterCard?

Thank you,

Rosie

More Elsevier hassles about open access

Recent correspondence, beginning with the last of a series of emails about a form that had gone astray:

Hi Elsevier Support Person (I'll won't use this person's name),

I've attached pdfs of the signed sponsorship form and the purchase
order to this email. I'm also cc'ing the email to the Sponsored
articles address,

Thanks,

Rosie

--------------------------------------------------

Dear Dr Redfield,

Thank you for your reply.

The funding body listed on your sponsorship article form is not a
body Elsevier currently has a policy with, therefore we cannot
process this.

For more information and a full list of our Funding Bodies, please
see below link:

http://epsupport.elsevier.com/article.aspx?article=1261&p=3

Yours sincerely,

Elsevier Support Person

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Dear Elsevier Support Person,

Are you saying that, because Elsevier does not have an explicit
agreement with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, we do not
have the option of making our article available to non-subscribers?
That was not the impression I got from reading the posted information
on sponsored access (pasted below).

"Worldwide approximately 10 million scientists, faculty members and
graduate students can access Journal of Molecular Biology through
institutional subscriptions. In addition, Elsevier's ScienceDirect
licenses permit all public users who are permitted by the library to
walk in and use its resources to access all journals to which the
institution subscribes. In a few instances, authors have requested to
make their articles freely available online to all non-subscribers.
Journal of Molecular Biology offers authors the option to sponsor an
article and make it available online to non-subscribers via Elsevier's
electronic publishing platforms.

Authors can choose this option for all articles accepted after May
2006. Authors can only select this option after receiving
notification that their article has been accepted for publication.
This prevents a potential conflict of interest where Journal of
Molecular Biologywould have a financial incentive to accept an article.

The author charge for article sponsorship is $3,000. This charge is
necessary to offset publishing costs - from managing article
submission and peer review, to typesetting, tagging and indexing of
articles, hosting articles on dedicated servers, supporting sales and
marketing costs to ensure global dissemination via ScienceDirect, and
permanently preserving the published journal article. The fee
excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges
which are additional.

Authors who have had their article accepted and who wish to sponsor
their article to make it available to non-subscribers should complete
and submit the order form.

When calculating subscription prices we plan to only take into account
content published under the subscription model. We do not plan to
charge subscribers for author sponsored content."

Thanks,

Rosie

--------------------------------------------------

Dear Dr Redfield,

Thank you for your reply.

No you have not read this incorrectly, you can have your article available as "Open Access" as the "Journal of Molecular Biology" is one of the journals covered under this policy by Elsevier.

Please note however, that as Elsevier do not have a policy with the "Canadian Institutes of Health Research, you must agree to cover the cost of US$3000, this will not be refunded to you by the funding body

More information on the Open Access policy can be found below:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/sponsoredarticles

Before we arrange for this to be done, we need to make you aware of this procedure, therefore if you agree to cover the cost the article will be made available. Please confirm.

Elsevier Support Person

--------------------------------------------------

Dear Elsevier Support Person,

The web page you direct me to says nothing about the sponsored-access option being limited to specific funding agencies. Let us try again to clarify this policy. Would the following be a correct explanation of the policy?

Elsevier has explicit agreements with some funding agencies, stating that grant funds provided by these agencies may be used to cover the $3000 cost of sponsoring open-access publication in the Elsevier journals offering this option. These are the agencies listed on the Elsevier page that your previous email pointed me to.

Funding agencies with which Elsevier has no explicit agreement could refuse to authorize use of their funds in this way. If this should happen, Elsevier would hold the author of the article personally responsible for the $3000.

Your latest email says that, because Elsevier does not have an agreement with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), CIHR will not cover the cost of sponsored access publishing in Elsevier journals. Do you know that this is indeed the case, or is it only a possibility that I need to check for myself with CIHR? If you know that CIHR will refuse this expense, can you direct me to the source of this information?

Thank you,

Rosie

Other nucleases that might act on internalized DNA

I just discovered a 2008 paper in Mutation Research, about the phenotypes of H. influenzae exonuclease mutants, and I've emailed the senior author asking if they would be willing to send us chromosomal DNA of these mutants, so we could test a pet hypothesis of mine.

The hypothesis concerns the functions of the competence-induced genes comM and dprA. Phenotypes of mutants in other bacteria suggest that the products of these genes protect incoming DNA from nuclease degradation. But what nuclease? By testing the competence phenotypes of double mutants we've ruled out ExoV (recBCD). Using the new mutants would let us test the involvement of other nucleases. (The hypothesis is described more thoroughly in this blog post.)

A 2002 paper about Snyechocystis shows that knocking out recJ increases transformation frequencies 100-fold. Synechocycsis does have homologs of both comM and dprA, so I don't know what the increased transformation implies about their roles.

Open Access and other sliminess at Elsevier

Our latest paper on CRP sites has been accepted by the Journal of Molecular Biology. This is great, but now I'm dealing with the messy post-acceptance issues.

First, our page proofs have gone astray. The Elsevier manuscript-tracking page (yes, JMB is part of the evil empire of scientific publishing) says that page proofs were sent out on Aug. 27. They should have been sent by email, but I've seen no sign of them so far. Usually page proofs are supposed to be corrected and returned within 48 hrs; I've just emailed a person at JMB about them.

While looking for the proof email I discovered that I'd ignored other bureaucratic requirements. I needed to complete an on-line document assigning all copyright to Elsevier. This document made no mention of an open-access option, but I accepted it anyway. It did say that I am allowed to post the Elsevier-created pdf of the manuscript version on my own web page or on a public server, and that I can use the final Journal-quality pdf for teaching (but I can't post to any publicly available sites).

Then I dug around looking for the "authors-pay" open access option. I had been assuming that this would give me a creative-commons-type license to do anything I want with the final pdf and data it contains, but no. All that I get for paying Elsevier $3000 US is access to the paper on the JMB web site by people who don't have subscription access (who don't pay the ~$1000 for a personal JMB subscription or belong to institutions paying ~$8000 for a subscription).

So, should I give Elsevier the $3000? That way nobody will need to search around to find out if I've posted a free (unformatted) copy on my home page (or linked to this blog). But Elsevier will still hold the copyright.