In 2015, Entomological Society of America [ESA] made Oxford University Press (OUP) the publisher of its four principal print journals. OUP quickly established a $39 paywall for one-day online access to a copy-protected PDF file of any article in these journals. ESA members and those with access through their libraries’ licenses were granted free access and the public could view articles for which authors had paid an OA fee.
Before lobbying ESA officers and members to ask ESA elected leaders to make access to all back file articles free, I seek information about OUP's business model for the journals it publishes under its Oxford Open initiative. ESA Back files I became a member of ESA in 1954 and published 31 items in its journals 1957-2009. In 2015, I discovered that ESA was the only publisher that denied the requests of the University of Florida's Institutional Repository to post PDF files of articles that recorded my research at the University. (Details are online at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/tjwbib.) This caused me to start an email conversation with ESA's Director of Publications as to why a scientific society would restrict access to articles by its members published five or more years ago when the dollar returns of doing so had to be tiny compared to the benefits that ESA authors would reap from greater and easier access by others to their research results. When the reply received did not address the issue raised, I sought to learn how the decision to go the route of paywalls to old articles had been made. That ended our conversation and I was told to bring my concerns to the attention of ESA's Executive Director. I did so and he soon advised that we would need to agree to disagree and suggested that I contact the elected leader of my ESA geographical branch and of my subject-matter section. (These two would have access to the 16 elected members of ESA’s Governing Board). That I plan to do (and more), but first it seemed prudent to try to understand what the OUP business plan is for ESA’s journals. In 2015, when ESA made OUP its publisher, (1) ESA ceased selling ESA authors "Open Access Reprints" which, since 1999, for a modest price, gave authors the distribution rights of the PDF files of their articles. [In 2014 that modest price was the price of 200 paper reprints--e.g., $217 for an 8-page article.] (2) After consulting OUP, ESA claimed copyright to articles published in 1967-1977 based on ESA establishing copyright to the table of contents of each issue of its journals. [GOAL and UF copyright experts later agreed that ESA did not have a valid claim to copyright of the articles in its journals until 1978, when it began requiring authors to sign a contract transferring copyright to ESA). (3) ESA turned over it electronic files to OUP, which put a $39 paywall at every article (1908-date) except for those for which authors had paid for OA reprints. ESA Going forward I have no current plan to lobby for changes in ESA/OUP publication policies going forward. However, having read what is on the ESA website about ESA Copyright and Permission Policies<http://www.entsoc.org/pubs/publish/copyright> and Charges, Licenses, and Self-Archiving<https://aesa.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/charges-licenses-and-self-archiving.html>, I developed a suspicion that OUP’s definition of open access might leave articles by ESA authors with less open access than they enjoyed with ESA’s OA reprints. In telling ESA members about the switch to OUP, ESA staff stressed that ESA members would no longer have page charges while nonmembers publishing in ESA journals would be charged $105 per page and that members who chose to make their articles OA would have copyright to their articles. In fact authors had to choose among three CC licenses. If their choice was CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND, the fee was $2000; but, if the choice was CC-BY, the fee was $2500. [Nonmember authors had to pay $500 more for each of these options.] The reason that I was not sure this was the whole story is that in the two links above, there was a statement indicating that authors would be required to accept a “license to publish” agreement. Link 1: “...ESA and its publisher Oxford University Press require authors to complete an exclusive license to publish form.” Link 2: “After your manuscript is accepted, the corresponding author will be required to accept a mandatory licence to publish agreement.” Nowhere was the text of that mandatory agreement available on the ESA web site. I asked ESA’s Publication Director for a copy and received this PDF file<http://entnemdept.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/OUP_Licence_to_Publish.pdf>. I am not sure what to make of the OUP license to publish agreement but it seems to grant ESA an “exclusive license” to publish the version of record for “the full period of copyright throughout the world.” For those who are interested in helping this ESA member understand what ESA authors should know about the agreement, the OUP document, “Author Self-Archiving Policy<http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/access-purchase/rights-and-permissions/self-archiving-policyb.html>” may be helpful. Question: Will the articles published as “Open Access” in ESA journals from 2015 forward be more, less, or equally accessible to the general public compared to the situation in in 1999-2014 (when ESA sold open access reprints)? Tom Walker ==================================== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu Phone: 352-273-3920 Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/ ====================================
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