As a follow-up to my post about predatory publishing, I contacted the editor of PLoS One (from which all the articles in the book were taken) and this was his response:
"The CC BY license under which we publish our content does allow reuse and repackaging content, also for commercial purposes. The license does however also provide the requirement for an attribution, see here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ "Some of the requirements appear to be met, as for example it appears as if PLOS ONE is mentioned in the book as origin of the material used (though it seems not on individual chapters), and author names and titles of the papers remain the same. I am no lawyer myself, and our legal department has been looking into the matter as well from our perspective. As authors of the works used you may possibly have different legal recourses, and an expert could confirm if that is the case. " The book includes a "Permissions" page which cites PLoS One, but the original citations have been stripped from each paper. The text also strongly implies that authors have "contributed" to the book, which obviously they have not. For me, the fact that they explicitly allow repackaging of content provides a pretty good reason not to publish in PLoS One. I am interested as to whether other journals' Open Access policies are similar to that of PLoS One, and I have enquired with the Royal Society of London (for which I was an Associate Editor for many years). The "Permissions" page of the book also gives great praise to the publishers, including noting that the "designing team" carefully scrutinized images to come up with the best cover for this marine mammal book - a cover which includes, front and center, a turtle. On a happier note, I've been deluged with requests for reprints of my dog's latest paper! -- Phillip J. Clapham, Ph.D. Leader, Cetacean Assessment and Ecology Program Marine Mammal Laboratory Alaska Fisheries Science Center 7600 Sand Point Way NE Seattle, WA 98115, USA tel 206 526 4037 email phillip.clap...@noaa.gov
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